- June 9, 2022
- Posted by: Christina Milian
- Category: blog
Email is a powerful way to reach your target audience and expand your customer base. There were about 4 billion email users worldwide in 2020, and expected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025. An email marketing strategy is designed to attract leads, stay in touch with existing customers, provide information, and drive sales. Effective email marketing works well in conjunction with your other marketing tactics.
Nearly 60% of users say sales emails influence their purchases. Since the average person receives hundreds of emails a day and has ever-changing tastes and interests, it can be challenging to design an email marketing approach that builds excitement and inspires customers to action. Even if you write quality copy and send it to a wide range of potential and existing customers, your email might not capture their attention.
You could be missing the mark in several areas, and improving will definitely encourage more clicks and sales. Email marketing is always effective and is one of the most profitable channels when done right.
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches—at scale.” – David Newman.
Why Are Your Emails Not Converting?
Here are a few areas to consider where your email marketing strategy might fall short:
1. Inability to Reach your Target Market
Whether your email reaches your target audience depends on the nature of your email list. Bulk emails sometimes work, but targeting your customers based on their demographics, wants, or needs is better. For example, if you are designing a campaign targeting women and your mailing list includes a large number of men, those men will likely delete the email immediately. That’s not to say that men are never on the lookout for gifts for the women in their lives, but overall this marketing approach will likely need some polishing.
At the same time, it’s important not to make your mailing list too narrow. Creating a message that targets too narrow or specific an audience will likely be ineffective. Instead, broaden your message to cover a wider audience. Focus on sending emails to those who have already expressed interest through mailing list forms on your website. Offer sign-up incentives, such as one-time discounts.
It is essential to determine the wants and needs of your customers by studying how they react to your posts. Once you find the strategy that works, develop it!
2. Only Concerned With Selling
The ultimate goal of almost any email marketing campaign is to persuade your subscribers to purchase a product or service. Of course, we all know that, but that doesn’t mean you have to sell them all the time. If you are, you are wasting your time. The best email campaigns strike a balance and guide their readers through the sales process.
Tell stories, provide value, and interact with readers to warm up potential customers. Then, when it’s time to buy, your reader’s decision is a done deal.
“I want to do a business with a company that treats emailing me as a privilege, not a transaction.” – Andrea Mignolo.
3. Unable to Access the Inbox
Some general rules help you create emails that won’t go straight to the spam folder. Keep your mailing list up to date and avoid ‘undeliverables’ to the wrong addresses. Pay special attention to your subject line. Make sure it’s engaging and grabs attention. Be careful not to overuse capital letters, emoticons, or punctuation marks, as these can trigger spam rules.
Spam emails accounted for 88.88 billion of the 105.67 billion emails sent worldwide in September 2021. Make sure your return address is personal by using a real person’s name instead of the more general ADMIN@Yourcompany.com or INFO@Yourcompany.com address. Give your customers the option to reply to your email. Email personalization is also another way to avoid your emails going to spam.
“Quality over quantity – Emails may be cost-efficient, but it’s no excuse to not produce quality content to give to a targeted audience.” – Benjamin Murray
4. Wrong Email Structure
The way you structure an email can have a big impact on your click-through rate and, therefore, your conversion rate. The purpose of email marketing is to drive your subscribers to your website or your commercial offers. Of course, the format of your email will depend on your industry and what you are looking to promote. However, most marketers agree that single-column email formats are more effective.
In addition to the one-column format, your text should be concise and easy to scan. Do not hesitate to make your text more readable by separating it into several paragraphs. Finally, don’t forget to include a visible and obvious call to action button to click!
5. Failure to Monitor Results
Your email marketing automation software is a great tool for letting you know what’s working and what’s wasting your time. Monitor the percentage of clicks or conversions, and note the time of day or week that shows engagement, customer demographics, which product is driving sales, or which approach is connecting with the most customers.
Always be on the lookout for ways to improve your campaigns. Be open to a myriad of options, whether it’s changing the color, font, or graphics or crafting an entirely new message. If a customer unsubscribes from your mailing list, ask them why. Find out if it’s the product, the message, the approach, or just a lack of interest.
6. Wrong Links
Sending out an email with the wrong link is one of the most prevalent email marketing blunders. Although this may appear to be a minor issue, it could cost you a fortune if the problem is not identified and corrected.
This is why it’s critical to send a test email before launching your campaign. It allows you to test all aspects of your email, including the subject line, CTA buttons, and, of course, your links. To guarantee that your links go where you want them to, make it a practice to click on every link in your test email.
7. Not Mobile Friendly
Many people make the mistake of forgetting about mobile users. 70% of people read emails on their mobile phones. Thus, you’re making a significant error if you don’t optimize your email for mobile consumers.
If your email isn’t mobile-friendly, you miss out on potential customers and risk high unsubscription rates. So, by all means, make your emails mobile-friendly.
“It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” ― J.K. Rowling.
Wrapping Up
Email marketing offers incredible opportunities to reach your customers and, when done right, can be one of the best returns on your digital strategy investment. Be sure to pay attention to the specifics of what works and what doesn’t when defining your initial email marketing strategy. Take this information seriously and modify your approach as needed to convert emails into bigger sales and revenue.
