Thomas Griffin March 10, 2021 Email marketing is the keystone to driving sales in any business with an online presence. It isn’t enough to have a website because 70% of people leave your site and never return.
And social media is also a chancy platform to use. There’s no predicting how its algorithm will change and impact whether your audience will see your content or not. If you get blocked for an avoidable reason or have your account removed, it can be overwhelmingly challenging to reinstate your account and make up for the time lost.
In the end, you need to have a direct way to communicate with your audience and email marketing does just that.
But what happens when you’re sending out emails but you aren’t seeing sales? Email marketing is known to create the most number of sales out of any marketing tools. If your conversion rates are down, then it’s time to make some changes and figure out what’s wrong.
Here are some critical issues to look at; improve these aspects and you’ll grow your conversions via email marketing.
Uninspiring subject lines
The first thing that catches a user’s eye is your subject line. If your subject line doesn’t give people a good reason to open your email, they’ll just send your content to the trash bin.
Unfortunately, there are still many businesses that send emails with poor subject lines. For example, they put the issue number of their newsletter and date of publication in the subject field instead of an interesting topic.
Crafting an effective subject line is possible with a subject line analyzer tool. Enter your tentative subject line in the given field and click ‘Analyze’ to see how your subject line scores.
Adding ‘unusual words’, emotional words, or ‘power words’ will boost your score. Reducing the length of your subject line is also good.
Once users open your emails, they’ll read your content which automatically increases the chances of them buying from you.
Bonus tip! Right after the subject line, email marketing companies show a preview of the body of the email.
Don’t waste this space with a generic ‘Dear Customer’ opening. Instead, get to the heart of the matter and make the opening lines of your email copy compelling.
- You can see the first few words of the email body copy after the subject line
Lack of personalization
An email subject line that addresses a person by name is far more appealing than one that’s generic.
Personalization in your email tells users, ‘This is for you.’ It also creates a strong brand image. A business that can address a user by name or offer a special discount on a product that the user was looking at is very impressive.
Your email marketing service provider will have options that let you add your user’s name to the subject line. Likewise, CRM integrations will show you how your users have interacted with your brand.
If a group of people has spent time checking out a specific product page, you can drop them an email with a discount just for that product. This type of personalization skyrockets sales and will also build trust in your business.
You haven’t segmented your email list
Building an email list is an activity that businesses should perform from the get-go. But you can’t just stop there. You also need to segment your email list from the very beginning.
Segmentation is grouping your subscribers based on aspects like demographics, purchasing behavior, and other factors relevant to you.
There’s no limit to the number of segments you can create. You can combine different factors like professions, pages visited, and how frequently a person buys from you. There’s no end to the kind of email marketing experiments you can run to see how people respond to your personalized content.
Segmented email lists will help you make more personalized content that’s relevant to that group.
For example, a business that specializes in resume building would send different emails to senior C-level executives than they would to new graduates entering the workforce.
Add a name field to your subscription form or automatically store the name of your buyers when they complete a purchase. As you get more information, you’ll create relevant emails that win users over fast.
Your email copy is too long
You want to give your users as much information and convince them to buy from you, so you jam your email copy with several paragraphs of text.
But when was the last time you went through a long email during a busy workday?
People check their emails several times a day, and because sorting and reading emails is a task that demands mental effort, people will dismiss emails that don’t get to the point fast.
Keep your emails as short as possible. Use headlines, images, and links to longer posts instead of trying to give all the information you can now.
Bonus tip again! Create interesting content formats like giveaways. People love to get things for free and giveaways generate excitement and other emotions easily. By varying your email content and adding emotion to it, you’ll get more responses to your content.
Your emails are going to spam
The first rule of marketing (that I just made up) is to never send emails to someone who hasn’t explicitly signed up for your content. And when you do send emails, make sure the content sounds natural and doesn’t consist of any spam trigger words that immediately get your email sent to spam.
Email providers’ spam filters are extremely smart and they can detect spammy messages easily. Create natural-sounding phrases that are focused on helping users rather than trying to compel them to buy with hyped-up content.
Also, if you’re sending emails from your WordPress site, it’s important to authenticate your address. Set up your SMTP to show email service providers like Gmail and others that your email address is trustworthy and not harmful.
If this step isn’t done, there’s a good chance your content will get blocked or will land in the spam folder. If you’re not comfortable with doing this kind of technical work on your own, then use a plugin like WP Mail SMPT to automate the task for you.
Over to you
Have you made any of the email marketing errors mentioned so far? If so, then make changes and experiment with your content to drive conversions via your email content. In the end, your business is different from any other one out there. And your audience’s preferences and make-up will be unique too.
With these suggestions, you can find ways to improve your content and your email marketing strategies to find methods that fit you well.
Send test emails to small groups and take a look at the open rates, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates. Scale-up what works and remove what doesn’t. You won’t just see higher conversions, you’ll also ge unique insights that transform how you grow your business.
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