Successful email campaign management requires a great deal of planning, patience and oversight to ensure that messages are effective and reach the right people. There are many things the marketer must do right.
Email marketers must avoid making critical mistakes when conducting their campaigns. Here are three of the most significant, avoidable errors that marketers should be aware of.
1. Waiting too long
Sundeep Kapur, writing for ClickZ, recently pointed out that waiting too long to contact subscribers can be a serious mistake for an email marketing campaign, greatly damaging its potential effectiveness. The problem, he explained, is that the subscriber could forget why he or she signed up for the campaign, or even that he or she signed up in the first place. If this occurs, the individual may see the the delayed email simply as unwanted spam to be ignored.
Kapur therefore recommended that organizations take pains to send out a welcome email immediately after a person signs up to receive emails. Additionally, businesses should send messages at regular intervals, to ensure they stay in the customers’ minds.
2. Pitching, not providing
One of the keys to successful email campaign management, as numerous industry experts have highlighted, is providing valuable content to subscribers. Unless the customer has a reason to believe that a given email will contain useful information, he or she will almost certainly ignore it. In order to convince subscribers that every message is worth reading, emails must go beyond sales pitches. Industry insight, best practices, tips, discounts and sales are all examples of useful information that marketers should consider including in their messages.
If marketers instead focus exclusively on making sales, they will lose readers and the campaign’s effectiveness will diminish.
3. Breaking the law
This is one of the biggest mistakes that an email marketing firm can make. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act requires organizations to provide an easy, clear means for subscribers to opt out of receiving future messages from the firm. Additionally, such requests must be honored quickly.
Failure to achieve CAN-SPAM compliance can lead to fines, as well as damage to the organization’s reputation.
To avoid such an outcome, firms should consider utilizing email list cleansing tools that can automatically process opt-out requests.