Email marketing is an effective strategy and valuable resource for
entrepreneurs to establish themselves as subject matter experts, and build
relationships with their clients, while staying connected.
However, many business owners aren’t getting the results they want because of these mistakes:
1. Not Building an Email List
It seems pretty obvious but there’s no email marketing if you don’t have a list!
Whether you’ve a strong online presence or not, maintaining an email list is a critical part in nurturing leads and customer relationships.
If you don’t have an email list yet, sign up with an email service provider and start getting subscribers.
2. Not Sending Newsletter
Sitting on an email list and not communicating with your subscribers is as good as not having a list.
Stop “planning” to send a newsletter and just do it already. You’ve a lot to gain by consistently providing value and communicating with your customers and readers.
If you don’t have the time or know-how to do it, you can easily outsource the task – there’s no excuse.
3. Not Offering a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is an incentive to get high quality leads to join your list.
Your incentive can be valuable content such as a special report, an audio course or video trainings; or a special offer, discount code or free shipping for your products.
Taking the time to plan your lead magnet can help you get the right subscribers on your list and increase your email marketing ROI significantly.
4. Buying Email From External Sources
Don’t take shortcut and purchase emails from list brokers. They’re at best low quality and at worst will get you marked as spammer, which can impact your deliverability in the future.
Grow your list organically with high quality subscribers who genuinely want to hear from you, instead of getting into trouble by buying email lists or false hopes.
5. Not Verifying Email Addresses
A two-step opt-in may seem like an extra step but it helps ensure the email addresses you collect are valid and of high quality.
By putting verification in place, you can eliminate inactive or invalid email addresses that lower the quality of your list and impact deliverability.
6. Not Following Email Marketing Best Practices
Adhering to email marketing best practices can save you from being marked as a spammer.
Here’re a few things to keep in mind:
Include your physical address as well as an unsubscribe link or button in all bulk emails.
Remind subscribers how they got onto your list.
Send out both text and HTML versions of your newsletter.
Be sure to stay up-to-date with the help of your email service provider to make sure you comply with all laws and regulations.
7. Not Using an Email Service Provider for Bulk Emails
It’s a huge mistake to send out your bulk emails with your personal email account such as Outlook or Gmail – even if you think you’ve a small list.
An email service provider has all the checks and balances in place to make sure your emails comply with laws and regulations so you don’t get into trouble.
Most email marketing companies offer free starter packages for smaller lists so cost is not an issue if you’re just starting out.
8. Not Running A/B Tests
The marketplace and your audience is always changing and evolving, so should your email marketing campaigns.
Besides monitoring the metrics, you can run email split tests to find out what email marketing campaigns produce the best results.
Here’re a few tests to perform:
Time to send email – which day of the week and what time of the day to send emails to get the highest open rate, click-through rate and conversion rate.
Position of sign up box – where on your website to place the sign up box to get the highest conversion rate.
Type of email – whether emails with text only or emails with text, headers and images get better results.
Subject line – which titles and what title length get higher open rates.
Images – whether the use of images lead to more clicks.
9. Not Asking Subscribers To Add You To Their Contact List
Remind your subscribers to add your email to their address book or whitelist your email address during the sign up process and in your welcome email.
This will ensure your email newsletters reach their inboxes instead of getting stuck in the spam folder, impacting your open rate and deliverability.
Conclusion
With 3.6 billion email accounts (as of 2013,) almost everyone online has an email address. It’s one of the most effective ways to connect with your customers.
It’s imperative that entrepreneurs have an email marketing strategy to reap the benefits of a well-designed campaign.
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