For any business one of the most effective ways to build a relationship with your customers and to communicate with them is email marketing. Whether your business is large, small or just starting, using email must be part of your marketing toolkit.
When a business fails to see any return from their email marketing efforts it is likely down to one of 3 basic errors. These will not only fail to produce any positive results, they can cause some harm.
#1: Emailing messages without any clear objectives
Failing to have an end goal in sight is one of the most fundamental mistakes not just for email marketing but for any form of marketing. When you write an email that you are going to send to your subscribers you must first have a reason to send it in the first place.
The reasons for sending an email could be to further build the relationship by providing useful advice. another might be to get the reader to complete a survey or questionnaire. How about letting them know about a Facebook post you have made and asking them to share it amongst their friends?
Whether it is any of these or a good old sales promotion, ensure you have a goal in mind for your email, and make it clear what, if any, action your subscriber needs to take once they have read it.
#2 Leaving big time gaps between emails
Unless you are a huge company with an instantly recognisable brand it is important that you keep your business in the minds of your subscribers. This will not be achieved if you only send out an email once every other month.
Many people online receive emails from literally hundreds of sources every month, and as a result they are likely to have forgotten that they subscribed to your email service regardless of the reason they did so. If the next time they hear from you is several weeks down the line and then again two months after that one of two things will happen.
Firstly, you will have failed to build any kind of relationship with them and they will see no reason why they should stay subscribed to your email list. Result…they will unsubscribe. The second and worse scenario is they could forget they ever subscribed to you in the first place and then flag your email as spam.
#3 Sending one sales pitch after another
If you had someone knock on your door every day and try to sell you something, you’d soon get more than a little annoyed with them, wouldn’t you? Why is it then, that so many businesses think this is the right way to use email marketing? Of course, it isn’t and is the quickest way to completely lose any value that your subscriber list has for your business.
They’ll either unsubscribe in droves or completely ignore everything you send if all you do is pitch them something on every email. Email marketing can be a very effective way to promote products but only if it is done in conjunction with building a relationship with your subscribers by sending advice, tips, latest developments, or industry news as well.
