Email marketing is still as relevant as ever. However, many business owners simply don’t know common email marketing mistakes they make that kills its effectiveness. This quote by E. Harbison has it all right:
“Email marketing, although often underestimated as a strategy, is actually a powerful one.”
There’s debate on the relevance of email marketing, but it remains a valuable tool for businesses. It allows for personalized communication with customers, offering a unique touch. Avoiding common mistakes is crucial for maximizing the benefits of email marketing.
“If social media is the cocktail party, then email marketing is the ‘meet up for coffee’. The original 1 to 1 channel“.
A Case Study of Email Marketing Mistakes
Research by The Radicati Group shows that 196 billion emails are sent daily, with 109 billion being business emails. Despite the rise of social media, email marketing remains an effective strategy for increasing customers and sales.
Email marketing accounts for over 7% of all e-commerce transactions, making it the second most effective e-commerce marketing channel after search. Surprisingly, a whopping 72% of US adults actually prefer to receive emails from companies and online shops over any other form of communication, including social media, text messages, and phone calls combined.
Email marketing is a truly great way to attract more customers and reach your target audience while delivering actual quality and adding more value to the overall process of business-customer communication.
Email marketing has evolved over the past 20 years, allowing for segmentation and personalization on a large scale. This strategy can greatly benefit businesses when utilized effectively.
We’ve put together a cheat sheet outlining key points of every email marketing strategy to help you be sure you’re implementing it right and using the email channel of your choice to its full potential. However, there are some common mistakes that should be avoided in order to reach the highest efficiency level via email marketing.
#1: The One-fits-all Approach
Personalized communication is vital for revenue and business growth. However, with so many unique customers in e-commerce, it’s impossible for human managers to reach out to each one individually. Companies use chatbots and digital tools to simulate personal interaction, making customers feel valued.
The key to successful email marketing is creating a personalized template that can be adjusted for each campaign. This way, customers will feel like the emails are coming from you, not an AI. Let the AI handle the task of sending out the emails to multiple customers.
And with that, here comes the biggest and nevertheless the most common of all email marketing mistakes by those who are implementing it. The idea that one newsletter will work for all of the customers and will bring each of them to place the purchase.
Business-Customer Relationship Is The Basis of A Successful Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategies focus on building customer relationships, but the challenge lies in catering to diverse audiences. Segmented lists help target consumers based on behavior and key factors, ultimately leading to conversions, which is the primary goal for any business.
Market segmentation can occur based on factors like psychographics, demographics, niche, and customer behavior. This includes age, gender, interests, purchasing habits, generations, location, education, finances, and social class.
They can help marketers determine pre, during and post production details can appeal to different groups of customers. Promotional campaigns, collaborations and partnerships, event planning and social media activity depends on the market segmentation as well. And it’s widely used in email marketing.
Consider personalizing your email marketing messages as much as possible.
Most consumers get 500+ marketing messages monthly but only open 1 in 15. Many marketers struggle to utilize customer data effectively. Segmented emails based on demographics, behavior, and preferences lead to personalized messages, increasing engagement.
For instance, if the majority of your customers belong to a sexual minority, there’s a 90% chance of them opening an email offering special deals during June, the Pride Month. In fact, not sending out an email during such occasions will negatively affect your business.
#2: Automation Equals Offering a Discount
Offering a discount a couple of hours later after user abandoned cart to revert him to the purchase – that’s mainly how most of the online retailers use email marketing automation.
But in the end, giving away 30 to 80% discounts to all users not only reduces the margin of the store but it also does not generate repeated purchases. Which are essential for every online store growth especially at an early stage of operation.
Creating personalized marketing campaigns is crucial for converting potential customers into loyal ones. Focus on delivering engaging content that resonates with your audience, rather than just pushing sales. Emotionally driven strategies can be more effective than discounts in building customer loyalty through email marketing.
The solution?
To avoid discount fatigue, consider more subtle ways to offer promotions through email. Ensure discounts don’t harm your profit margins. For example, offer limited-time discounts for new product launches or for the last few items before they sell out.
Birthday discounts can be tricky, especially for beginners. Instead of offering discounts all year, focus on offering a big discount on YOUR birthday. Tell customers you are rewarding them on your special day, and loyal customers are likely to make a purchase as a thank you and congratulations. This can be a great marketing tactic.
You can consider offering exclusive discounts for specific groups of consumers — students, senior citizens, etc. This strategy actually allows retailers to leverage discounts without hurting their margins. As well as attract new customers without coming off as a needy brand that just wants to sell their products in any possible way.
#3: Emails Don’t Follow Customer Behavior
You see a lot of promotional emails, lots of newsletters, etc. That’s the easiest place to start with email marketing so people focus on it. Then, you get lots of content around optimizing subject lines, writing better copy, when to send emails, etc. We’re missing the point!
Email campaigns should be based on data and user behavior. Inactive users should be prompted to return, while active users should receive emails about new features or inspiration. Data-driven lifecycle emails are crucial for successful campaigns, yet many businesses overlook this strategy. The key is to combine all these elements for an effective email marketing campaign.
Segmentation is the key to data-driven email.
To track behavior, use email marketing software if not available on app or store. Irrelevant content leads to customer disinterest and unsubscribing. This lack of engagement often results in online stores failing within 3 months due to lack of repeat purchases.
Without generating repeated purchases, without converting abandoned carts into orders, with thousands of abandoned browses and just a couple of newsletters your online store will be dead very soon.
Obviously reaching this level of personalization manually is impossible. Even a top marketing expert can’t ever analyze such a crushing amount of data to create so many individual campaigns. And the solution is an intelligent email marketing automation with Artificial Intelligence engine built in.
So basically how that works:
After analyzing tons of data, the AI engine identifies individual customer portraits and brings them the most relevant email sequence which is unique for each and every separate customer to bring them to the purchase and move to the next level of loyalty.
What’s the greatest benefit in all of this?
The automated email marketing solution is that – completely automated – all that is left from the manual job is to integrate to let the system receive and analyze the data from your store. Just like a personal assistant that knows your customers’ specifics and gives them the most relevant personal offers at the right moment.
Not sure how all of the above performs when implemented? Let the numbers talk. And by the way, you significantly reduce making mistakes you’d otherwise make using manual labor. Monitoring is still necessary though.
How to boost sales without making mistakes:
Building an e-commerce store (in fact, any business) is a culmination of multiple small decisions. Make those decisions fast and push forward. This approach helped clothing store Alkaram Studio to boost their revenue significantly in only 24 days.
What they did to succeed?
Alkaram Studio discovered that a significant number of their store’s visitors return multiple times before actually buying an item. They decided that these group of visitors were the opportunity to help increase their sales.
They implemented Abandoned Cart and Browse Abandoned email campaigns, resulting in a significant decrease in abandonment rate and increase in conversions. These two campaigns alone generated an extra $641k in revenue, showcasing the missed potential.
Key Takeaway
Optimize customer touchpoints to personalize emails and automate the process for sales improvement. Create a template with relevant info, links, and professional formatting to avoid mistakes.
