Emailing is a powerful marketing tool that grants you exposure to more than half of the global population. According to the report, there are almost four billion email users around the world, which means that you can reach almost every target consumer out there.
But it’s not a guarantee of quality performance. On the contrary, we can see underperforming email campaigns all the time and it’s important to understand what makes those attempts unsuccessful. Lots of details can turn a promising campaign into a failure, but some features proved to occur more often than others.
Our post will focus on 10 major reasons why your email marketing is not working well. Let’s take a look!
1. Outdated Database
How often do you check and filter through your email database? You might be satisfied with the number of subscribers at first, but think about the relevance of the database for a moment. Does it contain a lot of duplicate entries or malfunctioning email addresses? If yes, you have to refresh it, eliminate irrelevant entries, and start growing the list of subscribers once again. Use email appending services to keep your list clean and updated.
2. Subject Lines Are Not Appealing
Subject lines are critical to the success of your email campaigns. A subject line is the first thing users see when they receive your message, so it has to be very attractive and interesting.
Avoid boring generic statements that don’t mean anything. Instead, keep it concrete and straightforward and give users the reason to engage.
For instance, you can use numbers to grab the attention of your audience: How to earn $100 thousand in 6 months! People love numbers because they sound convincing and authoritative. Other interesting subject line options include humour, emojis, surprises, and so on.
3. A Poorly Written Copy
Poorly written copies are another reason why email messages underperform. You have to understand the preferences of the target audience in order to identify the right style of writing. Besides that, it is important to use the language that is clear and concise. Go straight to the point, avoid long formats, and don’t forget to make your message actionable by giving subscribers a task to complete after reading.
4. A Poorly Structured Copy
Even if you create an outstanding email copy, it might be useless if you don’t pay attention to the structure of the text. Users hate to see big bulks of text, which means that you need to write in shorter and clearly divided paragraphs. Use enough whitespace to separate different units of the copy and try to use a traditional content format:
- Introduction: Explain what your message is about.
- Body: Get to the point and tell people what they need to know.
- Conclusion: Summarize your statements and remind users to take action.
5. Content Is Not Relevant
This is another mistake that happens when marketers don’t understand their target group. You have to figure out your average fan – what they like, where they live, and all the other traits that might influence their interests. After all, creating content for high school girls is not the same as writing for retired male accountants.
6. No Personalization
Personalization is a major marketing principle that helps brands to break the ice and build a stronger relationship with their customers. But if you don’t personalize email campaigns, you cannot expect the audience to be excited about your messages.
What can you do to fix this issue? First of all, you can address subscribers by their names to express politeness and familiarity.
Secondly, you need to personalize the content so as to match the interests of each user individually. Modern email marketing platforms such as Constant Contact or MailChimp automate this process and help you personalize messages without a hassle.
7. No Segmentation
This email marketing blunder goes hand in hand with the previous one. A study shows that segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14% higher than their non-segmented counterparts.
If your mailing list contains thousands of entries, you cannot afford to send the same newsletter to all subscribers. Instead, you must segment the recipients and create several groups based on their current positions in the sales funnel. That way, your content will look more relevant and credible in the eyes of every single follower.
8. The Quantity Issue
A lot of marketers don’t know how many emails to send on a monthly basis. For this reason, some companies end up sending too many emails, while some send too few. The solution is to find the balance between the two options and keep your email marketing efforts consistent in the long run.
There is no universal formula here, but most people don’t mind receiving five to seven emails a month. This is just about enough to constantly remind subscribers of your existence without being too pushy and annoying.
9. No Trust Factors Included
Emails need to contain a few trust factors in order to appear more credible and convincing. There are many different features you can add to make a message trustworthy, but these are the most common options:
- A personalized address: Avoid sending emails from generic or ‘no reply’ addresses.
- Social icons: Let users explore your brand online through social media accounts.
- Unsubscribe button: Email recipients are not your hostages and you need to give them the chance to unsubscribe.
10. Forget to Test and Measure Campaigns
The last reason why email campaigns fail to deliver the planned results is very common: marketers don’t test and measure their activities. If you want to improve, you need to regularly conduct A/B tests and compare achievements with the targeted KPIs.
Conclusion
Launching and administering email campaigns may seem like a routine business, but it’s actually not so simple and effortless. A lot of email marketers fail to deliver the desired results because they make mistakes that can be prevented easily.
In this article, we discussed 10 major reasons why your email marketing strategy is not working. Keep our tips in mind and make sure to avoid the mistakes we mentioned above – it will make your email campaigns much better and more productive.
