According to a study by Econsultancy, 74 per cent of businesses view their email as instrumental to their company’s ROI.
However, there are still a handful of frequently made mistakes which, if unaddressed, can make customers unsubscribe. Read these five most common mistakes and the remedies you can use to solve them.
1. Burying the lead
You may be achieving a 100 per cent open rate but if your opening message doesn’t pull readers into your copy and get them interested, it’s worthless. To fix this, imagine someone is asking you what your email is about and you only have 15 seconds to explain. Your answer is what your lead should be.
2. Producing scattershot content
Some marketers can get ‘trigger happy’, attempting to cram as much content into their email as possible. Unfortunately, by presenting more than one message at a time, you can easily confuse your customers and lose their attention. Instead, focus on one idea at a time.
According to AWAI, a leading educational provider in copywriting, any piece of content that’s effective will focus on one message in order to avoid multiple ideas competing for attention.
3. Not asking users to whitelist your email
Most marketers have a ‘high five’ moment with their bosses when a new customer opts into their email list. Unfortunately, your emails could still end up in their junk unless you do something about it.
To solve this problem, create a page that instructs your customers to white label your email address. Probably the most appropriate and effective time to send this is in your ‘thank you for subscribing’ page.
4. Broadcast blasts
Few marketers segment well, if at all. They send thousands of emails to their entire database asking them to buy. Instead, a more effective strategy is segmenting by customer interests when they first join your list.
For example, imagine a scenario where you sell a range of clothing and you’re promoting skiwear. You could setup a welcome email that asks users what type of clothing promotions they want to receive. Using this technique, you can send emails tailored to your customers’ interests, and avoid upsetting them with irrelevant material.
5. Failing to follow up
Extremely expensive in the long-term, some marketers fall victim to the bad habit of sending emails on an ad-hoc basis, when they ‘have time.’ But what’s the point of investing in lead generation if you don’t do anything with the information? When you hand someone a flyer, you don’t assume that’s enough to drive a purchase, you follow up. Similarly, if someone visits your website for the first time, you can’t always assume they will buy. Instead, it’s your job to follow up. You can do this with email automation such as cart abandonments, upsell recommendations or customer surveys.
Email marketing is a powerful medium that can generate sky high ROI when used to its full potential. It’s the responsibility of marketers to ensure that the quality of emails is monitored on an on-going basis. It doesn’t matter how good your products are if your customers unsubscribe.
