12 Common Mistakes in Email Marketing
1. The desire for instant gratification
Launching an email campaign is like trying get your car rolling from a dead stop. You think you’re going to manage it all in one push? It takes time to work up some momentum. And before you achieve a decent speed, you’re gonna start wondering if you are even up to the task. Bepatient!
2. Attempting to reach more people than the budget will allow
This is the reach versus frequency issue. Let’s say you are going to buy inventory or place an adin an email newsletter. You can afford to make 100,000 impressions. Do you go for 10 placements in one newsletter that goes out to 10,000 people, or do you opt for one placement that goes out to 100,000 people? Same number of impressions, but the first option exposes fewer viewers to multiple impressions.
3. Assuming the business owner knows best
When it comes to stuff in which you have a huge personal investment (your kids, your homes, your businesses), you risk losing your objectivity. Hey, it’s a human thing. Too much knowledge about your company and what you offer leads you to answer questions nobody is asking. When you’re inside the bottle, it’s hard to read the label. But that’s also when you risk pushing your own interests at the expense of your customers’ interests. Sometimes it helps to bring in an objective outsider to give you some perspective.
4. Unsubstantiated claims
Folks make claims all the time that miss targeting their customers’ needs and simply wind up turning them off. Specifics about yourself, your way of doing business and your products are far more persuasive and cut to the chase far more effectively than generalities. So get credibly specific!!
5. Improper use of passive media
Passive media are sight-based media - newspapers, magazines, billboards, direct mail, and yes, even email - that require the user to sustain focused attention in order to process the message. Intrusive media are sound-based - radio and television. Sound is heads above sight in its ability to get your message lodged into your customers’ brains. The best use of passive media is as a follow-up to intrusive media.
6. Creating individual emails instead of campaigns.
Remember the hammer analogy from last time? Good. Now add this: No single ad constitutes a campaign, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and friendship isn’t a first-sight phenomenon. You have more to say and more to accomplish than can be said and accomplished in a single email. A very important thing to do as you develop your campaign is build upon your previous (successful) efforts. Your individual emails have to be interconnected, with a logical flow and a united presentation - after all, they are all pieces of that big �puzzle� that is your company.
7. Obedience to unwritten rules.
Do you really want to be like everyone else? Do you want to communicate the same message as your competitors? No, of course not. You want to be unique, you want to stand out from the crowd. So don’t follow it! Dare to be different in a believable way. That’s how you get noticed. I’m not suggesting you go overboard (commercial relationship-building requires tact and tends toward the conservative end of the spectrum), but if your emails sound, act and look like everybody else’s emails, what’s the value in doing business with you rather than them?
8. Ignoring timing.
Your goal is to give your customers the right message and send it when they are apt to take the time to read it. This isn’t the same as suggesting you should time your message to exactly when you think your customer is going to act on it. Seasonal situations aside, an important tenet of advertising is this: “Tell the customer WHY and wait for WHEN. Quit trying to predict the moment of need.”
9. Overtargeting
Be careful to avoid over-segmenting your data base in your efforts to reach your target audience. It’s a myth that you only need to get your message to the decision-makers. Truth is, decisions are seldom made in a vacuum. Don’t neglect the influencers!
10. Event-driven marketing
It’s best to steer clear of designing an email campaign around a single event (unless it’s a major, well-branded event that strengthens your Unique Selling Proposition). When an event is over, folks will immediately forget the marketing pitch behind it, and besides, 99.5% of the people you’ve spent the effort to reach won’t be coming to The Do anyway. Where does your message go when this happens? Up in tendrils of smoke.
11. Great production without great copy
“Slick, clever, funny, creative and different are very poor substitutes for informative, believable, memorable and persuasive.” The name of the ebusiness game is persuasion; getting people to take the action you want them to take. Don’t even dream of neglecting those magical words that are going to help you craft your brilliant, perfect message.
12. Confusing “response” with “results”
“Slick, clever, funny, creative and different ads are most likely to generate comment, or response.” Buzz doesn’t feed the bulldog and excitement alone won’t bring in the cash. See the problem?
Source: Email Marketing
