You’re not alone. Countless business owners have spent hours upon hours working on email campaigns only to have them fall on deaf ears.
Does this mean the email is dead? Quite the contrary! Email marketing is still considered one of the best returns on investment in the digital marketing world. So, where are you going wrong and how do you fix it?
Chances are, you’re making one of several common mistakes in your emails. Lucky for you, we know how to fix it. Instead of chunking your campaign entirely, let’s look at ways to make it work for you so your leads start flooding in faster than you can say, “You’ve got mail!”
A Quick Overview of Email Marketing
Before we dive into the common mistakes we see, let’s first make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to email marketing. The whole point of email marketing is to generate leads that will then generate sales.
Email leads come from people who willingly give you their name and email address, typically from some kind of opt-in form. Now, some people try to take a shortcut and buy their email leads, but that can violate privacy laws and also be severely ineffective since the goal is to have warm leads.
Once you build your email list with leads, the next step is to nurture those leads by getting them on an email campaign that will educate them about you, your company, and your offerings. Sounds fairly simple, right? Well, it’s not quite that easy otherwise there’d be no point in this article. So, let’s keep going and look into some of the common mistakes we see with email marketing.
Mistake #1: Lack of Lead Generation Strategy
To have a successful email campaign, you need a healthy email list to send those carefully crafted messages. That’s where your lead generation strategy comes into play. If you’re scratching your head right now, chances are you lack one entirely or you haven’t put much thought into it. Let’s fix that.
Lead generation strategy is crucial to a successful email marketing campaign if you’re going to continue to reach and engage customers and, ultimately, grow your profit. Your strategy should help you connect with your potential customers, let them get to know you (brand awareness), and increase your sales.
Mistake #2: Your Audience Isn’t Clearly Defined
Before you can start crafting your campaign, you have to spend some time defining your target audience so you know who you’re trying to reach, what they want from you, and how you need to communicate to them.
The best way to do this is by creating a buyer persona that you fully flesh out on paper. Give them a name and write out details such as where they live, work, eat, and play. Most importantly, what are their pain points — specifically, the ones that you’re hoping to solve with your product.
Mistake #3: Your Emails Are Boring
When you’re trying to engage your customers, you must come across as, well, engaging. If your emails are long bodies of text that put the reader to sleep, you’re doing it wrong. You want your readers to look forward to getting your emails which means they need to be to the point but still exciting.
Tips for email formatting:
Leave plenty of white space so you’re not overwhelming the eye.
Skip the hard-to-read fonts and keep it simple.
Leave the business jargon for the experts, speak to them like you would a friend.
Make sure you include a call-to-action in every message.
Mistake #4: Your Subject Line Sucks
Sorry to be so blunt, but if your subject line isn’t on-point, the rest of your message is wasted because it probably won’t even get opened. That’s why we say it’s one of the most important things for you to get right so don’t skip over this one!
Your subject line needs to get the reader’s attention so don’t be afraid of italics, bold fonts, and emojis — they all draw the eye. Try to come up with a line that makes the reader want to learn more. This could be an open-ended question that piques their curiosity or it could be a customized line with their name in it.
Mistake #5: You’re Not Offering Any Value
This is one of our top secrets for email campaigns because it works: offer value to the reader! Don’t send out emails that are full of information about your business without ever giving anything back to the reader! Instead, include something of value every now and then.
This is typically done with a free download but it could even be a free 1:1 phone call with you or a free gym session. Anything that makes your lead feel as if they were just given a gift for free, works.
Mistake #5: You're Not Proofing Your Emails
If you automatically corrected that typo in your mind, this mistake may not apply to you. However, if you’re like many others, you may write emails and messages faster than you should, and then you don’t take the time to proofread them. That’s a big no-no because typos can make your readers feel as though you don’t care enough to hit the “proofread” button before sending. Take the extra step and check your message for blunders before it goes out to the masses.
Mistake #6: You Don’t Have a Clear Call-to-Action
Every email should have a clear call-to-action (CTA) where the reader gets clued in to what their next step is. Do you want them to schedule an appointment? Reserve their seat? Try your product? Whatever it is, tell them with clear language and show them exactly how to do it with a button or link. Without this, you’re likely losing tons of sales because people just aren’t being prompted.
Final Bonus Round
While there are many other mistakes that you could be making with your emails, these are the top six that we see daily. Beyond these six tips, we’ll leave you a final bonus: automate it, baby! If you’re still relying on yourself to write individual emails, you’re wasting your productivity. Instead, write an email campaign that can be automatically sent to new leads, current customers, and more.
Follow these six (plus a bonus!) tips and we guarantee that you’ll start seeing results from your email marketing campaign with more leads and higher revenues. Who doesn’t like the sound of that?
Over the past decade, Liz has worked as a copywriter and digital marketing executive for a multitude of companies from startups to mid-sized businesses to working as the VP of marketing for award-winning, platinum-selling artists. Leveraging an understanding of the nuance of language in marketing, Liz founded Amplihigher, a content marketing, and copywriting agency, designed to connect consumers to companies in a way that results in next-level brand expansion.
Liz Slyman