by J.M. Pressley
You’ve worked hard to build a customer base and earn their trust. They’ve made their purchase. Maybe they’re a repeat customer. If you’re very fortunate, they may have even left you a positive review online. And then they respond to your latest email by clicking “Unsubscribe.” Or worse, they report you as spam.
What went wrong?
A cursory web search on “email marketing tips” will return nearly a trillion results. There are plenty of things that can go wrong with your emails. As a baseline, however, consider that nearly all of those tips fall into three very broad categories.
- Make it relevant.
- Make it timely.
- Make it easy to manage subscription options.
Make it relevant
It’s estimated that more than 347 billion emails are sent each day around the globe (Statista). The average user receives approximately 121 emails daily. Nearly half of that is spam. That still leaves the other half fighting for your attention.
Relevancy matters.
Every tip you find about personalizing, targeting, segmenting or otherwise engaging your customer is providing you with the means to make that email relevant. Keeping your email lists clean and up to date reinforces this. Double opt-in subscriptions help ensure that only the customers who truly want your marketing emails will get them.
You want customers to open and read that email because they trust that you aren’t wasting their time. Getting an email from a roofing company a few days after they’ve redone your home’s shingles? Relevant. Getting an email from that same roofing company when you’re renting an apartment? Not only irrelevant but sloppy.
That all sounds like common sense, but companies that don’t put enough thought into their email marketing do that sort of thing all the time. Don’t mistake quantity for quality. Take the time to plan your campaign and define the customers you’re trying to reach.
Make it timely
Timing is everything in email marketing. Want to annoy your customers? Keep sending them an email every day. Upping the stakes, send them an email every day in May for a Black Friday sale in November. Cap that campaign by sending an email on Monday for an offer that expired over that weekend.
An email can be relevant to a customer and still come at the wrong time. Sometimes that’s unavoidable. But the technology now provides loads of data about open, click, and conversion rates to give marketers the best chance at reaching their audiences. You have the ability to know what day of the week is best to send your emails, which day most people open your emails, and what times your emails get read.
Avoidable mistakes? By definition, you can do something about them. Use your data to determine when to send. Make sure you’re scheduling for maximum efficiency. Make a communications calendar to coordinate with your website and social media channels.
Pace your emails to engage, not enrage.
Make it easy to manage subscription options
This should not be controversial. Even with the best intentions, you may overwhelm some of your subscribers with email frequency or volume. Don’t make it hard on them to change their preferences or unsubscribe altogether. Also, since 2004, the CAN-SPAM Act has defined what constitutes commercial email and the legal standards senders have to follow.
In a nutshell, you must have a subscriber’s consent to send them marketing email messages. That means providing them with the ability to opt out of marketing emails at any time. And that’s required to be plainly displayed in every marketing message you send.
You might also have preferences that users can set. For instance, do they want to receive emails daily, weekly or monthly? Do they want some emails but not others? Make it their decision, not yours.
And don’t bring the users to a page that asks them to type in their email address just to unsubscribe. It’s a bad look. At best, your users will wonder why you need it when you emailed them in the first place. At worst, they’ll think it’s a scam and filter anything else you send into their junk folder.
Don’t stop there
Effective email marketing only starts there. You’ll have to consider many other factors before you send anything. Getting the reader’s attention is just the first hurdle. Keeping it is even harder. Messaging, visual design, calls to action—you need compelling content to make an email worthwhile.
You get out of email marketing what you put into it. If it’s worth sending, it’s worth taking the time to care about it. The proof will be in your response rates.
You’ve earned their trust. Don’t lose it