Email is a prime linchpin for modern digital marketing campaigns.
It's so effective, and there's such a wide body of evidence that demonstrates that efficacy, that you're clearly leaving a lot of money on the table if you're not investing in email marketing for your business.
But there's a lot of strategy involved, meaning there are a bunch of common rookie mistakes that are all too easy to make.
These missteps could end up blowing a big chunk of your budget, preventing the conversions you need for a suitable ROI.
To continually refine your campaign over time, doubling down on what works while getting rid of what doesn't work, you need the right approach.
In a recent article, Razor Social explains some of the most common mistakes that new marketers make with email.
Not knowing your email conversion rates
In order to improve your conversion rate you must first be familiar with the current and historical state of things.
This may seem obvious to you, but there are surprisingly many marketers and business owners who ignore this simple fact – unless you measure something you don’t know if it is working or not.
You’ll get your email conversion rates by looking at the various optins on your website and dividing the number of unique visitors by the number of conversions for that optin.
For example, you might have a list that looks like this:
Popup – 2.5%
Right hand panel of blog – 1.7%
Footer – 1%
If you don’t already have these statistics, then this should be your first action!
After you build your subscribers you can start tracking their activity.
For example, you can use the analytics provided by your email service provider to analyze link clicks and other relevant actions your recipients take after an initial optin, or leverage a tool such as ClickMeter that allows you to track conversions by placing a pixel in the Thank You page.
Another, more technically complex way to track your email conversions is by setting Goals in Google Analytics. To learn how to do this, read my article on how to setup Google Analytics goals.
[image source: Razor Social]
Not doing any split testing
If you’re not split testing your emails, you won’t be able to understand how different factors affect your email conversions and if you’re getting the best results possible from your emails.
Split testing can be used to test almost any element of your email marketing campaign, from optin forms to the subject lines and CTAs – anything that can directly or indirectly affect your conversion rate.
Split tests provide the most relevant results if you test one element of your campaign at a time.
It’s all about getting a better idea of what your subscribers will respond to or what version of the campaign will drive the highest percentage of people to complete the desired action.
There are a range of split test tools and specialist Conversion Rate Optimization toolsthat you can use to test different elements of your email campaigns.
Building email subscribers but not having a good lead nurturing system
Growing your email subscriber base is great, but your goal isn’t just to have an email list.
You want to have a list of engaged subscribers and the most effective way to get there is through lead nurturing – a process of building meaningful relationships with your leads.
Even if they fall into qualified leads category, at least half of your leads aren’t ready to buy from you.
You need to build trust in you and your brand by creating lead nurturing campaigns that are well-timed, offer something relevant, and written to educate your leads or help them solve a specific pain point.
Most email marketing solutions offer lead nurturing tools that allow you automate your emails based on specific actions your leads take, helping you send the right email at the right time with information that is relevant to them. With some smart automated lead nurturing campaigns, you’ll increase your email subscriber conversions.
Not adjusting the optins based on traffic source
Showing the same optin to people coming from different places e.g. social media sites, websites, blogs, etc. will negatively impact your conversion rates.
Visitors landing to your optin offer from different traffic sources will have different mindsets and you should target them with different messaging.
Use a tool that has advanced targeting features which allows you to customize your optins for visitors from specific traffic sources (e.g. Optionmonster).
You can learn more about email marketing mistakes over at Razor Social.
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