Why Email Marketing FAILS

If you asked the marketing director of any company what their most important and valued marketing channel is, the instant answer would be Email. According to a recent study, 72% of consumers say that email is their favored conduit of communication with the companies they do business with- MarketingSherpa.

Other statistics show that in the past year, B2B Companies in United States and Canada sent out over a million marketing emails each week. Companies therefore rely on email to generate leads, to nurture leads and turn them into actual sales.

However, many email campaigns have and continue to register poor results leading to waste of resources, time and a lot of frustration among marketing staff.

The following are the common blunders that many well-intentioned email marketing campaigns suffer from.

The email list

Email inbox is considered by many as a private space and therefore, uninvited guests are more often considered as intruders and irritants. With the increased unsolicited for emails being sent out every day, many people have integrated spam filters in their mailers to ensure that emails, especially from unknown sources never find their way into their inboxes.

Spam filters

keep unwanted

emails at bay

Despite the measures to ward off unwanted emails, many organizations, for lack of tact, continue to buy email lists and use the same for their email marketing campaigns with very little results to show for it. Sending bulk emails with the hope that a few people will open and be persuaded to buy is like shooting in the dark and hoping to hit your target.

Developing email list from subscribers as opposed to buying is likely to get the right kind of responses including actual buying.

Subject Line

The subject line determines if the email will be opened or not and by how many recipients (Open rates).

Studies show that if your subject line for email has more than 70 characters (including spaces), you are likely to get lower open rates. Besides the length, what constitutes the subject line may either elicit immediate interest or turn off.

Subject lines that lack clarity, motivation, focus and sometimes an element of intrigue may result to the email being discarded at best or filtered at worst before being read.

What’s more? Statistics show that emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates.

Relevance

Sending blast emails to all your email list is one of the best ways to lose your audience. Your email recipients have different interests and needs, therefore lumping them together makes your message look spammy.

Even when the blast email is being sent to a legitimate list, the result is usually an increased unsubscribe rate. 

Blast Email: The Best Way To Lose Your Audience!

A recent email study by Hubspot.com showed that click through rates in ongoing nurturing campaigns significantly decline after three emails or after ten days.

Length and Structure

An email subject line may tick all the boxes and even register 100% open rates. However, many end up being discarded at the first or second paragraph due to poor structure and vagueness. When the objective of the email is not clear right from the start, most targeted consumers end up deleting before reaching the call to action (CTA).

The other common reason for not reading emails is when they are found to be long winded. Short email writing with a compelling message has proved to be the strategy that yields results. This is especially if the buyer can quickly find the key features and benefits of the product on offer.

Call to Action

A Call to Action is a statement meant to get an immediate response from the target audience. The statement may implore the consumer to buy, sign up, subscribe etc. A CTA ought to be clear, unambiguous and precise to the prospect. Sending an email without a clear CTA is like taking a gun, aiming your target and shooting a blank shot.

A CTA may be in the form of a link that you would like your lead to click open especially for a sales email. The CTA may also be in the form of a hyperlinked text, a sort of a bread crumb trail that leads your target client to your website.

This works well with promotional or follow-up emails.

Language & Tone

Consumers tend to ignore pushy emails full of hype whose claims and promises cannot be substantiated. They prefer an email tone of voice that is conversational, persuasive, informative and interesting to read.

Emails full of flimflam hardly gets the desired response and many recipients consider them as an insult to their intelligence.

In Conclusion

Business buyers, no matter who they are, tend to be on “work mode” when they read emails. They are either at the office, at the airport or they could be at home working. This means that they may have very little concentration span while scanning through their inboxes and if your email does not stand out, it may very easily end up in the trash bin!

In case you don’t have the time, resources or expertise to sustain an email marketing campaign, you may want to consider outsourcing the service from an agency like  Sky Eagle who can craft various types of emails for different segments of your target audience.