Whilst email marketing has huge advantages for businesses if it is done incorrectly it can cause more harm than good if done incorrectly. In this article, we will highlight the basic and sometimes costly mistakes to avoid when marketing using email.
The first, and critical error is to think that your email marketing is there purely for you to bombard your subscribers with sales messages. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sending sales pitch after sales pitch will very quickly turn your subscribers interest in your business to resentment which is no way to turn them into customers.
The other thing that is likely to happen is people will start marking your emails as spam. A common misconception is spam only applies to an email if it has been sent without permission. Whilst your emails might be going out to people who have opted in, continuous sales pitches will soon annoy them enough to mark them as spam. If this happens, you’ll very quickly have your autoresponder service asking you some difficult questions and if they consider that you are abusing the service they will ban you from using it.
This leads to another mistake which is to forget that the key to using email marketing is to build a relationship with your subscribers. Sending useful and interesting information, offering freebies, giving updates on your business or products and telling the occasional personal story are all great ways to build that relationship. Only when you built the relationship, is it the time to send emails selling products and services, and not before.
One point of note here is to make sure you are tailoring your email messages so they speak directly or are relevant to the subscribers you have. One big error is to keep sending a sales message about a product to someone that has already purchased it. To address this, use the function within your autoresponder service to segment your subscribers into subgroups.
By doing this you will get much better results as every email you send will relate to and be of interest to the subsection of people you are sending to. This works well when you email people who have already bought from you as you can use different sales copy when writing to than you might to a subscriber who has never bought from you before.
Continuing with sales emails, another big mistake is failing to prepare for an increase in sales and customers following promotional messages being sent. Depending on the product you sell you need to check that you have everything in place in terms of stock, logistics, card processors, customer service and even the bandwidth requirements for a large influx of visitors to your website.
By failing to prepare you are in danger of turning a very successful email sales campaign into a poor experience for your customers if they face delivery delays due to lack of stock or if they cannot access your website because it is overwhelmed with traffic.