8 Deadly Email Marketing Sins

Online, November 23, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Email marketing, when executed correctly, is one of the most effective, not to mention, cost efficient ways of marketing. Most businesses and marketers know about virtues of email marketing

• email marketing is a proactive type of push marketing

• email marketing is measurable

• email marketing provides high return on investment

• email marketing is relatively simple to execute

Unfortunately, not all email marketing campaigns are created equal and as a result many campaigns fail to yield the desired results.

So are there email marketing pitfalls to avoid in order to create more successful email marketing campaigns?

in this article aoom - art of online marketing - consultancy outlines the 8 deadly email marketing sins, reviewing the critical email marketing basics as well as look at key email marketing areas to note in light of changing consumer behaviour and technology.

8 Email Marketing Sins Include:

1. Not Customising
In general, the more targeted the message or offer sent to the target audience, the more receptive the audience would be and the better the rate of business conversion. Keeping this in mind, the first sin is maintaining big email lists and not customising communication to different email users and target segments.

Do create a targeted distribution list with associated customised offers that will peak the audience's interest. Leverage on technology and consumer insights from your website so that you can understand your customers better and what services/products they are or will be in interested. Not customising the message and newsletter to the audience not only means poor results to your email marketing campaigns but could even tarnish your brand and relationship with your customers.

2. Not Using Analytics
Email marketing sin 2 relates to not using analytics to better email communication. With the available email marketing and CRM tools out there, there is no reasonable excuse for not measuring and improving your email marketing efforts. Measurement and analytics serves 2 purposes -

a) Relevance - In order to customise message and offering to the target audience, measurement is needed to understand how best to create a relevant email marketing message

b) Learning - To learn what works and what doesn't so that future email marketing campaigns can be improved.

3. Not Sending Emails at the right time
For any marketing messages to be properly received by the user base, the user based must be available and receptive to receive the messages. Not sending emails at the right time is a fatal mistake.

In the case of email marketing, the aim is to reach consumers when they are accessing their email inbox -and hopefully, most primed to make a purchase decision or take an action. It is challenging particularly given the number of emails every online user is bombarded with daily. Add to that, technology constraints that could hamper the delivery process.

Getting the timing right for email or newsletter delivery is crucial. Different products, services and websites would have different days where consumers are most receptive in receiving messages and making purchase decisions. Understanding customer behaviour and testing delivery days would improve performance of email marketing from increasing open rates, click throughs or conversion rates.

4. Not Getting Social
Social media provides another toolset for companies to communicate and reach out to potential and existing customers. Companies that segregate social media and email marketing efforts are missing out on opportunities to reach and engage customers across different channels and reinforce the same messages and offerings. Leveraging on social media is also important for email marketing efforts to ensure that service offerings and messages are consistent to users. It can become confusing for customers if they are receiving different messages from different marketing mediums.

5. Not Testing...multi-variante or otherwise
Not testing campaigns means every campaign created before was a waste! Email marketing sin 5 highlights the importance of testing.

Testing is an important part of creating successful email marketing campaigns. Testing all components of the email campaign from subject lines, creatives, landing pages, offer, timing of send out, response rates will provide businesses with opportunities to understand what works and what doesn't. It's mathematics and it's good practice.

6. Not changing up the formula
Email markeging sin 6 relates to the pitfalls of sticking to the same formula that works over and over again.

It's easy to stick to a formula that works. Once an email campaign has been proven effective, it is easy to stick to the same formula. After all, what worked before must work again?

Well, this is not quite true. In the case of email marketing, it's a cliche but familiarity breeds contempt...well, at least it breeds boredom and that translates to lower interests from consumers and poor results. It's important to continue to innovate and maintain that element of surprise to generate interests. Change up the subject line, change up the offer or even the landing pages to create interest and excite the customer.

7. Not having a permission-based email list
Email marketing sin 6 is about spamming users. Sending emails withou a permission based email list can be considered spam. It is a good practice to have permission from the consumers before sending them email messages, to clearly identify the business when sending the email and to provide users an option to unsubscribe. Failing that could mean annoying existing and potential customers and possibly even a fine or embargo on sending out future emails!

8. Not having a proper landing page
One of the first metric of success in an email campaign is click through rate. The battle is not over after a customer clicks through to the offer from the email. In fact, it has just started.

Email marketing sin 8 is about not having an appropriate landing page to the email campaign. It is a sure-fire way to alienate potential customers. A customised landing page that relates best to the email offering and have clear call to actions will improve customer response and ultimately conversion.