A couple of things happened tonight which compelled me to write this post on the top three email marketing problems that businesses encounter. If you need to know it is 1:21 AM, Thursday. I often act impulsively when it comes to a new idea, like a new post or article. As a musician and song writer… back when I used to write songs, an idea may come any time of the day.. or night, and you got to be ready for it, maybe that’s the reason for that habit.. I need to act on it immediately for if I don’t, I would end up forgetting about it… the idea would slip my mind.
So what are those two things… I had recently completed a brief for a client which involved organizing and sorting out their huge mailing list of confirmed customers, which they have been unable to either maintain a relationship with nor leverage on it. The second thing was, I got an email from Megan Fox.
So we know for fact that a mailing list is an asset that any business or individual can leverage on, and that a business has a better chance of surviving with their own mailing list. If you have a mailing list, you can simply send out an email about a sale or promo, or about some product you are promoting; they get that email, the product appeals to them, they buy it, you make money… badda bing badda boom!
But what problems can you expect to encounter with email marketing?
Let us take a look at the processes that take place; first you got to send those emails out, then hope that people open and even read your email, and then click the link in that email that sends them to a web page with information on what it is you are promoting.
Email Delivery Issues
First problem here is something to do with your system or web infrastructure. I know some people who actually did this manually, mailing out to maybe a handful of people. Things start to get a little crazy when you actually have to mail out to hundreds or even thousands. But those who sent these en masse often found that the system they were using did not send out those emails to all recipients. Even if you try sending manually to multiple addresses, some email services will flag your activity as a spam attempt. So the remedy here is to actually use an email marketing system from a service provider, that is reliable, and by reliable I mean the highest delivery percentage possible.
Email Open Rate
Alright, so you are certain your automated email messages plugged into a reliable autoresponder service that you use to deliver your messages is indeed sending out your message, but “are your recipients even opening and reading your email”? They might be getting your messages but are they actually reading them? There are a couple of tricks a lot of marketers use to get people to notice their emails, but the bottom line is to catch attention. A catchy “subject” line can make it stand above all the other emails people get, or a catchy name.
Yes, I did get an email from Megan Fox… but well, not from actress that every man in America probably fantasizes over. Actually I got this email on my Entourage email client and the sender name was “Megan Fox”, of course I opened the email. It turned out it was a direct message notification from someone on my LinkedIn network. Do you see how that worked?
Click Through Rate
So your emails are getting received and getting opened and read, but are the readers clicking on the links that send them to a web page with the information you are trying to promote? If they aren’t then, your mail out, despite getting sent, received, opened and read.. is still a failure.
Remember that you mail out with the purpose of getting the reader to an offer, and readers not clicking on the links in your email can be attributed to either non-relevance of the email to the reader, or simply a poorly crafted email.
A poorly crafted email is self explanatory, so let me expound on non relevance. If you are a wedding cake creator with a mailing list of brides to be preparing for their wedding, if you send them an email with a story about bicycles and a link to an offer for bicycles, is that email going to appeal to them at all? However, if you send them an email about the top honeymoon vacations, that has a link to a travel agency that offers a big discount on honeymoon packages, this email would likely not only get a higher click through on your links to the offer, but even decent conversions/sales.
If you have questions or comments about Email Marketing, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.