3 Email Marketing Mistakes That Lose Leads Fast

For more than a decade, email marketing has been the marketing channel with the single greatest return on investment. According to research done by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing has an average ROI of 3800%, or $38 for every $1 spent.

Regardless of where you stand on this scale, your campaigns might not generate the results you’d like to see based on a few simple mistakes. We’ve compiled a list of possible mistakes you’re making and a few examples of how to avoid them, just for you.

Lack Of Value

While it is important to develop customer loyalty and create sales through your emails, it is crucial that you provide customers with value above all else. If the entirety of your email is a sales pitch, you will limit the number of people that look to engage with you and thus crush your ROI. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Here is a list of things you can do to provide your customers with massive amounts of value.

• Provide free content: Offering your email list certain content such as blog posts, videos and whitepapers can create of sense of authority with your brand, thus increasing loyalty.
• Establish consistency: Sending three emails in one week and then nothing for a month will make leads lose interest. Instead, deploy a strategy of one to two emails. Take a look at the best time to send an email!
• Tell a story about yourself or something relevant to your industry
• Interacting with customers: Customers are giving you their time when they engage with you, and time is the most valuable asset. A simple ‘thank you’ goes a long way, and expressing gratitude towards customers is an easy way to increase interaction.

Personality Shortage

Any time I call a company’s customer service line and receive a scripted and automated greeting, I’m pierced by a hint of frustration. Automation is great, but not when it can affect customer leads. If scripted phone calls are frustrating, why would emails be any different? Adding a different voice and tone to your emails will give them a human aspect, giving customers something they can relate to. Here are a few great ways to add diverse personalities to your emails.

• Different writers: A great approach is to adopt the Red Branch philosophy by allowing every employee to write copy with their own style. This ensures that while the content may be similar, the voice and tone will remain fresh.
• Be Personal: Writing copy can be tough, but it doesn’t have to be. If you treat writing copy the same way you treat interacting with people face to face, the end reader will notice and relate to the message.
• Send From: Receiving an email from a ‘no reply’ address is as impersonal as the automated script I mentioned at the beginning of this section. Customers want to feel like the can contact or engage with you easily, and including a reply to email is a great way to achieve that. For example, all of extraordinary weekly newsletters come from our very own CEO, so feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Ignoring Segmentation

Week after week you create emails using familiar layouts while injecting new content and then shotgun blast these emails to your entire list. The problem with this is that not all customers are similar. While one customer may be a die-hard fan of your brand, another may be questioning why they signed up for your emails in the first place. That’s where segmenting email lists can be helpful. You can please most of the people most of the time, so here are three stupid-simple segments for you to implement into your workflow.

• Viewing experience
• Demographic: Information such as age, gender, company position, and income level are all factors that should be considered when creating your emails. Tailoring your emails will increase your chance of resonating with customers, leading to an increase in effectiveness as well.
• Transactions: Repeat customers are responsible for 40% of a company’s revenue. This makes it imperative that you tailor your message differently for returning customers than you do for those that have just recently subscribed to your content.

Mistakes happen, and nothing will be perfect. With the tools provided today, you can now create an email marketing workflow that will create an undeniable return on investment. Find out just how you can make these email workflows work for you by checking out our other email related articles!

The Branchers

We build the best damn marketing campaigns on the planet. And we do it for industries and companies you might not identify as easy to market (right away). Working here takes a very special kind of person.