One thing we constantly find is that clients view email marketing as just another task on their marketing checklist. It’s low on their priorities because it’s a challenge to come up with content, it’s a challenge to find the time and it’s a challenge to do it well.
You don’t need to send an email every day, every week or every month but so often we see people sending one or two campaigns and abandoning it without much to show for their efforts. A lot of the appeal of social media is in it’s ease of use and instant feedback. However, social media interactions and metrics can be upended by public (and private) changes to their algorithms.
Even without staying on top of the latest display options in Facebook or optimising content for Instagram, you’re constantly pushing a message onto an audience you can’t always be 100% sure is going to receive it. The successes of your email campaigns rely almost solely on your ability to engage with your subscribers and the quality and timeliness of your content. Your email list says a lot about your subscribers but it says more about how your business engages with those subscribers.
Frustration with email as a communication channel is borne out of sending emails that don’t make a difference to your bottom line. When the campaigns you send don’t make a difference to your business, they don’t make it to the top of your priorities.
Much of the success of email marketing is tied up in persistence and experimentation. If something doesn’t work, it’s important not to give up, but to ask why. Email is a tool that can make a significant difference for many businesses but without considering all the options that are available in fine tuning your approach you could be missing opportunities to engage more of your subscribers.
When you draft your emails, do you consider how your audience is segmented, how it responsively displays across various mobile devices or how effective your subject line is at getting people to open the campaign? Do you live and breathe the art of the subject line and long lament the failings of the native Android email app?
What time is your audience best poised to engage with your subject matter? Is it on their daily commute, their lunch break or on Sunday night? Do emails sent before 6am exist to people who work 9 to 5? Are you prepared to send a campaign at a “bad” time for you in order to find out the best time for your audience?
Where are you going to place your time and energy next financial year? It’s the little details that make the biggest differences. If you could double your opens or improve the amount of people clicking on your campaigns, what would that mean for your business? Driving more traffic to your website, exposing your product or pushing your message directly to your clients and consumers.
Without careful consideration of those details, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice and that’s contributing to the fact that your emails aren’t making a difference to your business. Next time you sit down to write your next email, consider the little details.
If this sounds like you, we want to help make that difference to your business. Get in touch today!