Pause, rethink and fix these before you send out an email campaign

Does the idea of scheduling a campaign anticipating an unfavorable response make you cringe?

Do you feel clueless about how to improve the open rates and engagement with your campaigns?

We’ve all been there.

Sometimes it so happens that your campaigns are thoroughly scheduled and your email pitches are interesting, yet the engagement is discouraging.

40 percent of B2B marketers say email newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success (Content Marketing Institute6 Reasons your email campaigns are failing.
).

Email marketing is, in fact, one of the best ways to connect with your target audience. All marketers heavily rely upon this medium for their inbound marketing strategies. But, there are times when they are not able to reap the desired ROI for their email campaign efforts.

Let’s take a look at the reasons behind an unsuccessful campaign and what can be done to improve your engagement metrics.

Every recipient is unique. Email campaigns are an effort to reach a large segment of the audience. A generic pitch will not really hook the prospect and leave them intrigued about what you’ve got to say. For most of your marketing efforts to be successful, you need to move on from what you’ve got to say about youself to saying something about the customer.

You will be able to ring a bell by addressing their challenges and by saying that you understand their pain points. When you come across as someone who has real solutions to their problem, there is a possibility that the recipient may even consider checking you out. So, you may want to write emails that make them feel like you know them. Of course, for a mass campaign, this could be too much effort. But, for further engagements and follow-ups when the prospect becomes a warm lead, you can use the personalization tactic to make them hot leads.

You may want to start by using the recipient’s first name in the subject line and then move on to the body of the email and talk about their business, their pain points backed by the research you do about them on the website and social media handles.

This makes them feel like you know them and you want to genuinely help them out. Although, you may want to refrain from getting too personal as there is a fine line between appreciating the effort to know them and using crooked ways to creep them out.

The most crucial part of your campaign success is how recent, relevant, fresh, and updated your contacts are. Just imagine the waste in efforts that go into writing the pitch, investing in scheduling software, and creating the marketing collaterals if your contacts are messed.

The accuracy in the contact data is the primitive factor to email marketing success. So, what is considered as lack of list hygiene?

• Obsolete information
• Retaining unsubscribers in the master list
• Non-validated email ids
• Not updating information
• Mixing up lists
• Irrelevant target audience

To avoid campaign failure you must periodically refresh your master data and ensure your list is clean.

3. Make A/B testing a priority

Let’s say you’ve come up with multiple creative and catchy subject lines. If you think you can’t pick one, then, you may want to test it out. A/B testing helps in determining the best subject lines and opening lines that resonate with your audiences and elevate the chances for higher CTRs and engagements.

You may want to pick contacts randomly send sample campaigns for up to 3 batches. The campaign results will help you track the content that has performed well with the help of campaign metrics. You can use this data to conclude the content that works best and implement it for the rest of your contacts.

Experimentation is key to understand your audience as at the end of the day, they are the consumers of your content and if you want them to act upon it, you have to do A/B testing.

4. Follow-up consistently

If a prospect acts upon your emails, let me tell you, that’s not something to be taken lightly. If there is an open, it means your subject line was compelling. If there are clicks, it means your email copy was convincing and if there is a conversion, your web copies were enforcing.

So, every metric is crucial and at every stage from opens to clicks and conversions, you have to follow-up consistently and achieve your end goal. In this process, it is very important to differentiate between opens and clicks as they mean different things. While you follow-up with eamil opens you want to convince them better and share more useful articles to build the rapport. But, for clicks, you are a bit closer. SO you may want to try pitching your product.

You should also be careful about the number of times you follow-up as you don’t want to be too pushy. Keep the frequency between 2–3–5 days between the follow-ups. For the contacts that don’t engage at the third follow-up, you may want to pause and retarget in one month.

5. Make it aesthetically pleasing

Email bodies loaded with texts and gifs are so unpleasent and are such a turn off.

When you plan the visuals of the email, you should keep it minimalistic with simple images and good font styles and legible font sizes.

Visuals give the first impression and understanding of what the content is about. To improve the interaction with your brand you really need to be thoughtful in choosing the colors and contrasts.

This example is for how you should not be stuffing too much content and links in your newsletters and make it visually shabby.

In order to achieve efficiency, minimize errors, and save a ton of time you should automate the entire process right from first emails to consecutive follow-ups. Not just that, you should automate the process to be able to target big numbers and cover a huge set of the contact database.

Tools like Zoho campaigns, MailChimp, and getresponse will help you automate the process, measure results, and make the entire process painless which otherwise gets too hectic.

Hope you found this article useful and if you have any other insights, feel free to add them in the comments below. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Originally published at http://digitaldyno.in on June 29, 2019.