Why your email marketing fails
Click here to visit another article I wrote on the topic which outlines the 5 best practices concerning email marketing and continues the discussion on whether it's an effective medium anymore.
Topic Area
Ok let's have a look at the topic area shall we? Email marketing is where your broadcast your goods or services to prospective users/customers (including current ones) via the medium of email. Most companies seem to outsource their email marketing to "specialists" who will perform the work for you; broadcasting to your chosen/provided/purchased mailing list and providing the relevant statistics back to you. I'm fairly certain that most broadcasting houses can arrange for an email template to be designed for you if you are without one.
It's nice and simple, you pay someone to send several thousand emails to your customers (or whoever), no? Well, the problem is that you're probably not going to get a decent ROI (return over investment) because of a number of contributing factors.
Firstly, the world is becoming increasingly weary of spam, phishing and any number of email-based attacks - therefore there's an
inherent distrust of information provided via email. People aren't confident about "special offers" advertised to them in their inbox and
therefore are unlikely to click through, let alone open. Clearly you're more likely to have people open your email if they registered
specifically to receive it but that doesn't translate to 100% open rates. Just as a note, even when people have signed up for your newsletter, you should expect open rates no better than 25% - meaning that if you broadcast to 10,000 people, you're already down to 2,500 before anyone has actually read anything. As far as click-throughs are concerned, you'll be looking at a further 25% if you're lucky, meaning you're down to 500 actually landing on your website.
Logistically 500 customers browsing your site through a targeted campaign doesn't sound too bad but at what cost? You could be looking at ?2,000 for the campaign (obviously for the more in-depth ones) but it still impacts on your profit margin.
But why is it so low?
Beyond the concerns of spam and phishing, there are numerous other reasons why specific email campaigns fail. One of the key reasons at the moment is because the emails are just too complicated - they often result in being full webpages which have too much going on for people to bother with. You have a matter of seconds to capture the user's imagination before they reach for the close button. A full webpage takes too long, ideally you need a simple page with bold blue links and the message you're delivering nice and clear. So, if you're advertising a Laptop for only ?320 you'd need an image of the item, the price and a bold blue link advertising to "click here" to visit the site for maximum response rates. An over-complicated design is going to result in very poor response rate and ultimately take you in the wrong direction.
Is it dead?
Absolutely not, email marketing is still a fantastic way of supplying your customers with new offers, products or just news but you need to keep it simple and personal wherever possible - saying "Hi John" rather than "Greetings, check out our offers" apparently increases open rates by around 600%. It's a less desirable marketing method (everyone loves a bit of viral) but it is fairly easy to organise - many companies are willing take on the contract and it does get fairly predictable results.
The mailing list
The only thing to consider is where you are going to get the mailing list from if you don't already have one. The best way is to offer people browsing your site the option to register to receive the newsletter, but this may take a long time to gather a list of any use. You can "rent" mailing lists for a price, which allows you to get a targeted list of people who will receive your broadcast - without having subscribed for it. Everything comes for a price and while nothing about the entire process is ideal, it's still the best way to get word out to your customers - RSS/Atom is still a bit too techie for average people to deal with.
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