Email marketing appears to be a simple task, doesn’t it? Perhaps sending a large number of emails to a large number of individuals will work, and you can sit back and watch the magic unfold.
Regrettably, it does not. Email marketing is an excellent approach to promote with high returns, but it does provide its own set of difficulties.
These difficulties are readily addressed if you understand your audience and take the required steps to address the difficulties you encounter through analysis, testing, and other approaches.
How Email Marketing Influences Results
You may be wondering if email marketing is still relevant and worthwhile. The short answer is that it is still highly important for a variety of reasons.
It is still one of the finest ways to connect with customers and deliver an outstanding return on investment (ROI). Here are some more advantages of email marketing:
It has an impact on people’s purchasing decisions.
Email marketing generates results through increasing sales.
Your email content has the ability to affect how customers decide whether or not to purchase a product or service. According to a recent poll performed by HubSpot, 59 percent of respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions.
This is due to the fact that email marketing campaigns can introduce items and services, provide unique deals, and persuade customers to return to your site to purchase something they left in the basket.
It drives visitors to your website.
Make sure to include connections to other content on your site and CTAs that direct users to a specific landing page in your email content.
This assists you in increasing visitors to your website. Click-throughs from your targeted audience are usually warranted by visually engaging and interesting contents.
Even if customers do not make a purchase the first time, they are more likely to remember your brand in the future. The more emails you send them via drip campaigns, the more likely they are to make a purchase in the future.
You can determine the best-performing content by using email marketing solutions to measure metrics like click-through rate and open rate. In this manner, you may develop an effective email marketing approach that yields even better results.
It’s low cost while yielding a high return.
Who wouldn’t want to save money while also increasing revenue? Email marketing achieves the desired marketing effects without using too much of your time or money.
You don’t have to spend on expensive photo or video shoots, location costs, placement, or postage with email marketing. You only need a copywriter and a graphic designer, or you may use stock photographs. You should use email marketing solutions to help you streamline your emailing process.
Because of the low cost of email marketing, you have a good chance of achieving a high ROI %. For example, HubSpot recently performed a survey in which 59 percent of marketers stated that email marketing is their top-performing channel with the highest ROI.
It Increases Leads.
In addition to increasing sales and achieving a high return on investment from email marketing, you can also generate leads by utilizing inbound marketing strategies. These approaches assist you in nurturing leads in order to increase conversions.
Email marketing can also assist you in qualifying leads so that your sales team members aren’t wasting time on bad leads.
If you want to gain all of the benefits of email marketing, you must first overcome some of the usual problems involved with email marketing.
Here are the top 7 email marketing difficulties you may face, along with ways to tackle them.
1. Integrating Email Data with Other Data Systems
Every marketer wants to have access to as much data as possible in order to generate the greatest marketing message that will attract more clients to their firm. Integrating data from several sources enables marketers to optimize the content of their emails in order to generate more sales leads and deliver a great purchase experience to their clients.
There are various steps involved in correctly integrating your data systems, which include:
Purchase Beneficial Data-Integration Tools.
With the correct data integration technology, you can effortlessly collect and combine data from your email marketing, blog postings, lead management activities, and other initiatives.
These solutions provide you with a clear, intelligible report on which to base your future marketing selections.
Play Around With Segmentation.
By compiling all of your marketing databases, you may identify different consumer categories and produce content that speaks directly to them.
Creating buyer personas for each of your customer segments can assist you in crafting the ideal marketing message for each individual, making them feel understood.
Create Insightful Content
The purpose of gathering all of your marketing results data is to produce better content.
Once you understand what your clients are searching for, you can create fresh content to meet that demand, which will lead to increased sales success with those consumers in the future.
Read Also: 7 Solid Evidences Why You Should Leverage Email Marketing
2. Enhancing Deliverability
The issue of deliverability is one of getting and retaining reliable contact information.
Essentially, your deliverability rate is the ratio of emails sent to the number of messages that actually make it into the inboxes of your intended receivers. While it is common to believe that each email sent will be sent to the recipient’s inbox, this is not always the case.
When an email fails to reach an inbox, this is referred to as a bounce. Bounces are classified into two types:
- Hard bounces: These are caused by a more permanent problem, such as the email address in question not existing.
- Soft bounces: These are frequently the result of an overflowing inbox.
Bounces are a nuisance for two reasons. One, if you have a particularly poor deliverability rate, internet service providers may block you. Two, an extremely low deliverability rate implies squandered time, money, and effort spent attempting to contact nonexistent contacts.
What is the solution to this problem? Adopting the following excellent email hygiene tips:
Regularly Update and Maintain Your Email List.
Is there anyone on your email list who never opens or clicks on your emails or visits your website?
Your marketing software should have metrics for this type of data. Remove a contact from the email list if they have been inactive for an extended period of time.
Rethink Your Email Opt-In Method.
Try including an additional step or two in your email opt-in method, such as entering email information again, using an emailed confirmation, or both. This helps to eliminate honest errors that can occur with any type of data entering.
Sometimes a customer does not give your company incorrect information on purpose but just misses a digit in their 26+ character long email address.
Give Contacts the Permission to Update Their Information.
A customer’s email address may need to be changed from time to time. They either lose access to an old work email or just need to change addresses to lessen the amount of spam they get.
In any event, if you make it simple for people to update their contact information, they are much more likely to self-report an address change.
Consider also asking them to self-report their email communication preferences, such as frequency and topic. This enables you to provide them with more relevant content as frequently as they like.
Another advantage is that it will help with the next problem.
3. Increasing and Retaining Subscriptions
This can be a difficult procedure for many email marketers, which explains why it is one of the 7 email marketing difficulties.
While it is beneficial to prune inactive subscribers in order to reduce your undeliverable email rate, it is also critical to attract and keep as many active subscribers as possible in order to ensure that your marketing reaches enough individuals to create revenue.
To that aim, many marketers will buy email lists and use them to send unwanted messages (commonly known as “spam”) to people who may not be interested in the things that their company offers.
At best, this is a difficult behavior, and at worst, it is a savagely self-destructive one. Even if the addresses you buy are valid, it is doubtful that these random people will interact with your company’s marketing message, forcing them to unsubscribe or classify your emails as spam.
Instead of purchasing email subscribers, a preferable option is to employ strong inbound marketing strategies to gain them.
You can get subscribers by doing a few things, such as:
When they opt-in, provide a clear value proposition.
You should have a clear explanation when a buyer asks, “Why should I subscribe to your email?” What will they get from being on your email list?
Create a value proposition that addresses the needs of your core buyer personas, whether it’s tips and guidance for frequent challenges in your sector, significant product updates, or even exclusive offers they can’t get anywhere else.
If the consumer does not see a cause to open your emails, they will be disregarded.
Match your email content to your buyer personas.
Create emails that provide customers with a message that resolves their concerns.
Segmenting your email lists based on facts about them, such as where they are in the sales funnel and their interests, can help you generate a customized message that appeals to them.
Repeat the process of testing, optimizing, and iterating.
The process of optimizing content to gain subscribers is a continual activity.
Check your stats, understand which messages are effective and which are not, and constantly evolve and tweak your process to improve it and respond to new trends.
4. Obtaining Measurable ROI
This particular task is closely tied to the first task on this list. Knowing your marketing ROI is dependent on your capacity to collect and compile all of your data from email marketing.
You will never know how valuable your email marketing efforts are unless you know how they influence your sales process, how many website visits they produce, and how many sales they result in.
You will need to put up a closed-loop marketing system if you want to know what your ROI is from email marketing.
This entails having a system in place to track a contact from the time they first visit your site and become a contact, through all of their interactions with your website and email marketing, and finally to their conversion into a client.
It is critical that your marketing and sales teams are also on the same page with their objectives. Create a service level agreement (SLA), which is a document that outlines required lead qualifications, to get everyone on the same page.
A strong closed-loop marketing system will not only assist you in tracking your ROI from email marketing, but it will also provide you with an idea of the ROI from all of your other marketing initiatives, such as blogs, website optimization, and even social media marketing.
This may even aid your efforts to combine your email data with your other marketing data platforms.
Read Also: 3 Cost-Effective Ways To Promote Your Product
5. Increasing Open Rates
Low open rates can be caused by a variety of factors, but the most common are your subject line, preview text, and sender name. Your customers will not open your email if the subject line and preview text are not interesting or relevant to them.
To correct this, try other subject lines and preview text. Send an email to half of your email list using your regular subject line. Send an email to the other half with a clever or fascinating subject line. Determine how many open rates you get from each section, and then adjust your approaches accordingly.
You can also experiment with other “from” names. Using a persona for your firm or attaching the president’s name to each email is a good idea. Trello, for example, use “Taco,” the Trello dog, as a persona. When they send emails, the sender is Taco from Trello.
This can have a significant impact because it appears more individualized and enjoyable, rather than corporate.
6. Improving Click-Through Rates
Your email’s links aren’t generating enough clicks. This suggests that the emails aren’t assisting you in meeting your objectives because your target audience isn’t visiting your website.
You succeeded in persuading them to open the email, but now you must overcome the difficulty of convincing them to purchase your products or services.
The most effective approach to accomplish this is to evaluate your call to action (CTA) buttons. Do you have an excessive number of CTAs? Are your CTAs visible? Is it possible to get to your website by clicking your logo in an email?
Make it clear to your recipients what they should do with this email. You must direct them rather than allowing them to find your website on their own.
7. Gaining Mobile Optimization
The majority of individuals check their email on their mobile devices. This means that in order for your email marketing to be successful, your emails must be optimized for mobile devices.
Every image in the email, as well as proper text formatting and working links, should be visible to your readers.
Here are some suggestions for making your emails mobile-friendly:
- Keep an eye on the length of your topic line.
- Keep your copy brief and to the point.
- Leave clicking room.
- Keep CTAs at the top of the page.
- Make use of pre-header text.
- Test your emails on a variety of devices.
The capacity to acquire trustworthy data on your consumers, their buyer’s journey, and your sales process is critical to executing efficient email marketing campaigns.
The more you understand about your target audience, the better equipped you will be to improve the quality of your leads, shorten your sales cycle, and quickly win new clients.