Despite its age, email is still the top performing channel in online sales. Only email marketing has the technology to drive and maintain customer engagement, track metrics for optimization, and foster market research all in one. But, a hastily set up email marketing newsletter can negate all these benefits.
It would take a full length book to cover all of the mistakes online marketers make attempting to improve their metrics. For the sake of brevity, I’ve focused on three basic mistakes that marketers make sending out newsletters.
Mistake 1 – Making Assumptions About Your Customer Preferences
In 1974, Burger King launched the “Have it your way” ad campaign; a campaign that communicated to the consumer that Burger King was there to provide a service as special and unique as each individual customer. Email marketing newsletters should have the same goal.
While you have the choice to set the content and frequency of your newsletters, my advice is to implement a preference center, which allows subscribers to define the type of content they wish to see and how often they wish to see it.
Another mistake marketers make is requiring subscribers to fill out scrolls and scrolls of form fields. Instead, implement a progressive profiling strategy.
Progressive profiling is a way to capture your subscriber’s information over time, without overwhelming them at the beginning. For example, if a new subscriber comes to your home page to sign up for your newsletter, you can ask them the basics for their name and email. Once you send them the confirmation email, you can drive them to a preference center or another landing page that will collect further data to help you provide relevant content to them.
Mistake 2 – Lacking Relevancy
Whether you are just starting to build your database or you have a legacy list filled with subscriber information, the quickest thing you can do to have a large impact on your newsletter is to segment your content and your data.
If you’re not sure how to segment your newsletter content, take a look at your website for help. Offer company news for subscribers signing up on the homepage and product recommendations or discounts for people signing up through the shopping cart.
Now that the days of batch and blast are behind us, personalization is key. Deliver timely and relevant emails by planning the content of your newsletters based on user provided data or purchase history data.
The last tip for increasing relevancy in your email marketing newsletter is to segment by time and place. Sending triggered emails based on user behavior is the one tactic that produces the greatest results.
Utilizing these strategic tactics is empowering and visionary. According to a recent Marketing Sherpa study, the #1 challenge facing email marketers in 2012 is data integration and only 52% of marketers have the ability to segment their database off of purchase history.
Mistake 3 – Not Building Long-Term Relationships
Emails are personal. To the majority of the population, email is the first thing people check in the morning. Subsequently, newsletters are a part of people’s daily routine. A newsletter builds trust between brand and subscriber, because permissions were set from the beginning. Violating a subscriber’s trust through improper use of their personal information or by sending them too many emails is dangerous. You risk losing a customer and the subscriber can report back to the ISP which negatively impacts your reputation as a sender.
As we move forward into the age of digital marketing, it will be more difficult to win back subscribers. If you are that daily deals website that spends $3-$10 per email acquisition, it will take that much more money to rebuild that relationship if it is severed.
A few questions to help manage the trust of your subscriber are:
- Is the process from opened email to conversion clear?
- Is the content relevant, timely, and personalized?
- What is the ease of use to subscribe, unsubscribe, and manage your preferences?
Setting up a series of newsletters that target the subscriber with relevant, timely, personalized emails can boost sales in every channel by encouraging engagement with the subscribers. There are three main types of email newsletters you can easily implement to get a performance boost:
- Welcome messages that help new subscribers engage with the website and online presence.
- Feedback surveys that gather market research about your newsletter
- Trigger campaigns based on behavior and subscriber data that educate your customers about your product.
Keystone
Your email marketing newsletter is the driving force behind creating an online experience for your subscribers throughout every stage of the buyer life cycle. The functionality, content and relevancy need to be the main points of focus for your program.
You are indeed correct that writing about all the mistakes you can make in email marketing would require a large book – but these are three poignant ones.
Jim,
Glad you enjoyed the post. There’s definitely more depth that we will be getting into in the coming months about these specific areas and email marketing best practices. It’s great to have your feedback in order to keep the content relevant.
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As always a very informative Friday read Craig.
Amazed at the over 50% comment of folks not able to segment lists by purchases…an amazing stat and one we are solving for small businesses today @cazoomi.
Look forward to catching up soon.
~ Clint
@cazoomi
Just saw the small print of blog writer’s name on my Android ~ Good read Caitlin:)
Haha thanks Clint. The metrics behind database segmentation for marketers is pretty surprising, because it’s something that just makes sense. It’s awesome to have tools out there like the combination Cazoomi and RapLeaf, for example, to really be able get that type of subscriber data to deliver relevant content, and doing so in a transparent format so that subscribers feel secure with the information that is being shared.
Thanks for reading the post and sharing your thoughts. We’re glad you’re enjoying the articles!
For sure Caitlin and succinct write-up so sharing with our network today for some thoughtful Sunday night reading:)
We think the combination of using Rapleaf, Data.com inside our simple framework to help get the things customers want delivered to their “inbox” is key to cultivating those clients and prospects wanting to solve a problem your solution provides them.
Happy Sunday:)
~Clint
@cazoomi
Is there a part 2 to this article?