Email marketing is one of the most effective weapons in your business’s digital marketing arsenal – if you do it right.
Here are a few reasons your emails might not be performing as well as they should, and what you can do about it.
You’re not optimising your emails for mobile
According to emarketer, 55 per cent of emails are opened on mobile. If your emails aren’t formatted to be appealing and easily readable on a mobile device, you’re severely hampering your email marketing efforts.
What to do about it: Ensure your emails are fully optimised to appear in a visually compelling way across all devices. Preview your emails before sending them to see how they’ll appear on different devices and platforms, and fix something if it isn’t right.
- Keep text to a minimum. Use short paragraphs and concise headings.
- Use a responsive design. Select pre-designed templates that render well on all devices, or enlist the help of an expert to code your email for mobile.
- Don’t forget about your images. Use small image files that will load quickly and resize them to fit on a mobile screen.
- Make your calls to action obvious. Big, bold and colourful calls to action are more likely to tapped by someone scrolling on their phone.
“To give your readers a truly positive user experience, you need to personalise your emails.”
You’re sending the same thing to everyone in your mailing list
A high number of unsubscribes is generally a good indication that your email content isn’t engaging, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that people aren’t interested in your offering. It could be that the information you’re providing in the emails you send isn’t quite right for them.
What to do about it: Use marketing automation tools like HubSpot or Marketo to segment your audience and ensure you’re providing information that fits where they’re at in the buyer’s journey. Are you bombarding your entire email list with offers and discounts? Save these for those at the bottom of the funnel, or those who’ve purchased from you before. Those still weighing up their options may be more open to being nurtured with helpful advice and tips before being pushed to buy from you.
You’re analysing the results of your email marketing too late
Email marketing requires ongoing testing to optimise campaigns for recipients. If you run a drip campaign over a period of six months and only look at the results once the six months is up, you’ll miss valuable opportunities to improve engagement during that time.
What to do about it: A/B test right from the start. Test different subject lines to see which one gives you higher open rates. Test the time of day you send your emails. Once you have data the shows what’s working better, implement the necessary changes to improve your results.
You’re forgetting to be human
It’s now possible to automate a great deal of our email marketing. However, while marketing automation platforms help you save time and increase the amount of activity you can perform, if you’re not careful too much automation can have a detrimental effect. If you’re not treating every email as though it’s being personally delivered to each recipient, your readers will notice, and they might stop reading your emails altogether.
“To give your readers a truly positive user experience, you need to personalise your emails.”
What to do about it: To give your readers the best user experience, you need to personalise your emails. It’s not difficult to do this. Firstly, greet the people on your mailing list by their name. A “Hi Sarah” or “Kia ora Ryan” is far more inviting than a generic “Hi there!”. Secondly, only send out relevant content. This is where segmentation comes in. Marketing automation platforms can help you create dynamic content (content which changes depending on who you’re targeting) specific to actions the reader has taken, what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at, where in New Zealand they’re located, or what products they’ve expressed interest in.
The team at NZ Digital can work with you to optimise your email marketing strategy, or to develop one from scratch. Reach out to us today to find out how we can help you get results from email.
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