Email marketing is one of the best tools for businesses when it comes to maintaining a customer base and nurturing new leads, and can be a valuable promotional channel. But as useful as email can be, your efforts are futile if none of your readers actually open your messages.
With so many emails flooding their inboxes on a daily basis, readers will use any excuse to disregard yours and send it directly to the trash. This is why it’s important to craft your marketing emails in such a way that engages and interests them, and keeps this from happening.
Below, we list four major email marketing pitfalls you’re likely to face at one point, as well as our creative solutions to get you back on the path to success:
Pitfall #1: Your contacts keep unsubscribing.
Solution: Marketers, know this: email list unsubscribes are inevitable. However, if you’re beginning to notice a trend, something could be seriously wrong. Your email audience consists of different people across different industries with different challenges, so segment contacts into email groups to whom you can send tailored content. This way, only new subscribers will receive content created with the early stages of the buying process in mind, and long-time contacts who only open emails occasionally won’t get bombarded with information they already know.
Pitfall #2: Your emails aren’t being opened on mobile devices.
Solution: Did you know over 80% of your target audience will use their smartphones to check your email? If your message isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t get opened or read. Optimize your emails to be responsive to any sized device, and make sure your buttons are clearly visible and large enough to accommodate any size finger. You want your readers to stay focused on your email, so keep it simple and stick with a single-column layout.
Pitfall #3: The majority of your emails are opened hours after they’re sent.
Solution: If you’re monitoring your email opens and notice that they are hours after your emails were sent, you may need to rethink when you’re sending them. Segmenting your audience into time zones gives you the chance to send emails at the optimal time for every one of your subscribers, no matter where they are. Studies have shown that click-through rates are highest at 6 a.m. and that Saturdays tend to be the best day of the week for reader engagement.
Pitfall #4: You keep leaving crucial items out of your emails.
Solution: There are many important elements that go into an effective marketing email, and leaving out even a single one can lead to disastrous results. To combat this problem, take a step back and create a checklist for your email marketing strategy of what you need to include in every email. While tedious, keeping this checklist around will help ensure you don’t forget anything again.
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