If you’re currently doing email marketing— – kudos! Rock-on with your email marketing, and we wish you the absolute best of luck. To keep you in kind graces with clients, use this list of 7 common email marketing mistakes (that could be hurting your business) as a what-not-to-do checklist of things to avoid like the virtual plague:
1. Not Analyzing the Heck out of your Results
Email marketing is like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. If you just keep throwing your virtual pasta out into cyber space you’ll never know what actually ‘sticks’. The only way to succeed in email marketing, without a genie, is to proactively measure your open rates and click-through rates—to find out what ‘sticks’. If you aren’t using analytics to determine your successes—and failures (which are just as important!)—then you’re just throwing your content out, randomly, into cyberspace.
Give email-marketing analytics a try—it is surprisingly easy to find out what works, and what doesn’t.
2. Failure to Segment
Segmenting your lists into groups of potential customers who are like-minded is critical. Without knowing what to send to who, and when, you’re still just throwing spaghetti at the virtual wall.
3. Discontinuing Testing
Far too many companies have one successful email-marketing campaign and then stop analyzing the results. The problem with this is that just because you got lucky once with content or a headline, it doesn’t create an entire email strategy. Keep testing, over and over and over and over and over again.
4. Testing Without Analyzing
Testing your email marketing is great—but if you don’t actually sift through the data with a fine-toothed comb then all your testing means nothing. You also can’t test too often, because you need at least two email marketing send-outs to compare against each other (and don’t try to test this too quickly and risk scaring off users—you’ve worked too hard for that).
5. Testing Only Email Additions
You can’t analyze the success of a strategy by only measuring the success of the new additions—you also need to check out the success of subtracting elements.
6. Failing to Ask Sales and Customer Service
Nobody knows your customers like your sales and customer service departments—so be sure to get their input on your email marketing campaigns to ensure that you’re sending out information that your customers actually want.
7. You Suck at Headlines
Headlines need to steal your attention, immediately. Without great headlines nobody will read your content (no matter how fantastically phenomenal it is).
If you’ve been nodding your head at the above email-marketing faux pas, then give ReferLinks a shout-out today, because ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’–and you may be missing out on some great opportunities.