Marketing professionals are drawn to email marketing for a number of reasons. It’s a low cost, high return marketing channel that can be deployed quickly and efficiently with limited technical knowledge.
Email marketing is also a very forgiving medium, resulting in less than optimized campaigns often yielding fairly respectable returns.
The fact that email marketing works so well straight out of the box means that marketers often neglect it and as a result never fully realize its true potential.
Imagine what a little additional strategy would do for your email campaigns.
Learning to recognize your mistakes is the first step towards creating optimized campaigns.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting my 7 Rookie Email Marketing Mistakes here on the Business 2 Community website (follow me on twitter for a heads-up when each post goes live).
If you recognize any of these mistakes in your own campaigns, it’s time to step up your game and start seeing what real email marketing success looks like.
Rookie Mistake #1: The Monthly Newsletter
Too many marketers rely exclusively on the monthly newsletter approach to email marketing. This means they publish a newsletter at a fixed date every month regardless of whether they have anything to say or not. When this happens, this forces them to compile content to suit the deadline and not the subscribers.
Problems with Monthly Newsletters
- Too Much Content: Email marketing works at its best when it is kept short and to the point. Subscribers are highly unlikely to scroll through multiple articles and links in the hope of finding something useful. When pushed out as part of a lengthy communication, great content has the potential of being lost and returning little value.
- Not Enough Quality Content: A lack of focus on quality content creation can force desperate marketers to publish irrelevant, un-newsworthy material that will not only fail to engage your subscribers but may also damage your reputation and have a negative impact on your future campaigns.
- Bad Timing: By holding content back for your monthly newsletter could mean you are missing opportunities to convert. This is especially relevant if you work in a competitive marketplace or have time sensitive offers.
- No Captive Audience: No matter how good you think your monthly newsletter is, it is highly unlikely that your subscribers are sitting at home with baited breath waiting for your monthly missive.
- One Chance to Convert: With a single monthly newsletter hitting your subscribers you have just one chance to convert. If you are lucky and attract sales from your newsletter they will be clustered around the time of publication meaning orders or requests for information will need to be fulfilled or handled around the time of publishing which may cause logistic or customer support problems.
The monthly newsletter is not a strategy, it is an afterthought. If you have nothing to say – don’t say it. Conversely, when you do have something to say, don’t sit on it. Get your message out there and start seeing a return straight away. If you do publish a monthly newsletter make sure you compliment it with more regular, targeted campaigns throughout the month.
Stop Making Rookie Mistakes – Download iContact’s 10 Rules for Successful Email Marketing GuideToday.
