Why Your Email Marketing Isn’t Working: 8 Fixes to Address Today
Dec 19 2017 | 07:15 PM | 5 Mins Read | Level - Intermediate | Read Mode
Abhinandan Ghosh Former Features Writer, MarTech Advisor
Connect with Author
Tech enthusiast Abhinandan has cumulated his experience in the writing field working across industry verticals that include HR, events management, and now martech. An Engineering graduate with specialization in Electronics and Instrumentation, this MBA chose to pursue his growing-up dreams of being a creative writer, and now adds his tech-synced understanding of marketing and business to simplify the knowhow of martech for easy grasp of marketers. When not dishing up definitive news and articles to MarTech Advisor’s global community of sales and marketing professionals, this EDM enthusiast loves to mix tracks and construct his own DJ sets.
Foodie, movie buff (only those films with a cinematic savoir-faire find favor he insists!), explorer, nature-lover, stargazer, dots-connector, and a firm believer in cosmic oneness.
8 SEO Pitfalls to Evade in 2018 3 years ago
Top 5 Shots from the B2B Cloud Bar Menu for 2018 3 years ago
Ways in which the CMO's Role will Evolve in 2018 and Beyond 3 years ago
It’s quite true that emails remain the most conventional, still the most effective medium of targeted campaigns for B2B marketers. Nowadays, auto spam filters’ usage and segregation of inbox folders by Gmail has resulted in a substantial reduction of the ‘delivery’, ‘seen’ or ‘read’ status of marketing emails. This has had significant implications on the efficacy of email campaigns. For B2B, the challenges have been persistent, but it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s curtains for email marketing.
CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) BUYERS’ GUIDE 2019
Welcome to the 2019 edition of CDP Buyers’ Guide. As customer data platforms are becoming increasingly necessary for enterprise marketers, it is also becoming more complex to choose the best fit CDP platform amongst the pool of new and old vendors.
DownloadEven the best-targeted email marketing campaign only sees a 20% open rate. A lot of marketers’ instinct would be to simply send more email or spent time optimizing subject line, segments or delivery time. This is a mistake. CRM teams and media teams need to work together to find solutions that allow them to reach more people in the email channel, all without sending another email. Technology solutions now exist to allow people-based marketing campaigns to extend to the most trusted channel: email.- Dave Helmreich, COO, LiveIntent
There's an email intelligence gap that's hurting marketers (and many don't realize it). It may sound overly simplistic, but even some of the biggest brand email marketing programs sacrifice ROI due to unnecessarily high spam placement or messages that fail to deliver. For other marketers that do dig in and monitor for deliverability and reputation issues, they often consume the wrong data set to guide decision-making. Optimized seedlist-based inbox monitoring shows you how global spam filters treat your messages, even at Gmail, and the ‘optimized’ factor means you only review performance at the ISPs you send to -- not the ones you don't. Additionally, a reporting system that accurately weights your list composition means you're finally cooking with grease. - Joe Montgomery, VP, Marketing – Email Analytics and Deliverability Platform, 250ok
One of the biggest is not technical or tactical, but in managing to the wrong KPIs. For example, open rate and click through rate are useful metrics to track, but what really measures program performance is total opens and total clicks. I've seen clients slash their lists and reduce email frequency in the name of optimization, and congratulate themselves on the improved open and click rates. However, when total opens and clicks go down your email program is worse off, from an economic standpoint. Email marketers should optimize carefully, ensuring that they are looking for improvements in the right metric.
- Keith Sibson, VP, Product & Marketing, PostUp
As a marketer, the way forward is to turn the roadblocks into roadmaps. And, it’s not rocket science and can be achieved, albeit with a bit of wit and will. It’s a myth that email marketing campaigns fail to deliver the desired outcomes because there’s too much of online noise to cut through. The reality is that they fail because often marketers are unable to create and execute a consolidated email strategy .
Let’s look at the 8 prime factors that are responsible for your email marketing campaigns not meeting the desired goals, ROIs, and expectations.
1. Poor or no insights on target audience
- 77% of marketing ROI is generated because of campaigns that are triggered, targeted, and segmented (DMA)
Did you just buy a list and send out emails, hoping for a response? Shooting in the dark is the worst place to commence your email strategy. Unable to determine your right target audience can unfold as a primary reason for the ineffectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Before devising the email strategy, a thorough study and analysis of your target audience based on an array of scales such as behavioral stats, psychographic and demographic attributions, preferences, needs, and other similar parameters is an absolute must. Only after this can you initiate the remainder of your campaign.
2. Lacking personalization
Bill Cunningham, VP, Sales, SiteSpect
Retailers commonly earn low open and response rates in email marketing campaigns for oversights in a few key areas: timing, user access point, and content. In today’s e-commerce market, consumers are flooded with a high volume of advertisements and marketing emails every day, leading many to simply ignore any messages coming from a brand. In fact, Google’s email service has a special folder for promotional materials, so consumers don’t have to sift through the surplus of advertisements to get to their personal correspondences. To breakout of this category, brands need to ensure that timing of their email campaigns is meaningful to the consumer.
This means not sending an email because it’s Wednesday, but because based on past purchases they typically come to your site once a month and haven’t been yet in November. It also means taking the time to understand where your customer looks to access your brand to create a holistic experience that extends through your email marketing campaigns. By integrating your inbound and outbound strategies, you reflex the mix of channels consumers chose to connect and engage with brands on.
Secondly, when it comes to content, personalization is key. In the age of Amazon, personal shopping services, and other e-commerce perks, consumers simply ignore any marketing materials that appear generalized or misaligned with their needs. If you are commonly known as a perpetrator for this, chances are your emails are trashed. Instead, brands need to take the time to review shopper data and understand the preferences of each customer - sending them relevant ads that are worth the click-through and relevant sales or deals that will drive them to make a purchase.
No matter how many times this gets repeated, the realistic impact of ‘personalization’ in any marketing campaign just can’t be ignored. It’s pretty much a given if you want to succeed through email campaigns.
- The open rates of emails containing personalized subject lines is 26% higher
Some of the above-mentioned insights about your target audience can be used to deliver personalized emails. On those metrics, you can establish different segments and then personalize your emails based on them. For instance, in terms of age, a millennial SaaS seeker from a startup will have completely different preferences than a middle-aged SaaS user at an enterprise.
Segmentation allows you to create and disperse personalized messages which are specific to the parameters set by you with respect to your target audience. This results in the stimulation of a positive trigger in the minds of your customers when they read your email.
Vivek Sharma, CEO, Movable Ink:
There's a lot of talk in the industry about subject line optimization and open rates. While I believe that good subject lines can certainly affect open rates, I also believe that brand trust and overall brand experience influence both open rates and engagement.
Email marketing has the benefit of being a first-party relationship between the customer and the brand and there's implicit trust built into the channel. However, customers are savvy and are able to scan their inbox and decide if they want to open or delete an email based on the brand it's from.
If the brand has made the effort over time to consistently provide personalized content that provides both value and a good experience, customers will naturally be more inclined to open emails from that brand -- and engage with the content once they do.
In short, one of the primary reasons for low open and response rates is too much focus on pushing out offers and promotions, and lack of a larger strategic focus on generating content that provides personalized experiences for every customer.
3. Archaic databases
What kind of database are you using to send out emails? How old is it? All databases are subject to ample amount of depreciation with time and yours can’t be any different. Outdated databases hinder your email campaign success as they have a direct negative impact on response rates . That leads to lower conversion rates which finally translates to lower ROIs. Compromising on the quality and timeliness of your email databases can be disastrous for your marketing efforts.
Regular maintenance and upgrades of your email database ensure that response rates don’t drop down drastically. It also enables sales teams to stay on top of their game with access to dependable data. Third-party data appending services can also be leveraged to keep your email database accurate, and trustworthy.
4. Banal subject lines
The amount of emails that people receive on a daily basis is quite mammoth. The probability of someone opening an email with a mundane subject line is thus extremely low. Majority of the emails get opened judging by the name of the sender and the subject line. Vague or misleading subject lines get overlooked and rightly so. For successful email campaigns, appealing subject lines are critical .
A subject line must be able to intrigue and attract your audience, and yet, needs to be concise. Too many punctuations, overuse of capital letters, and unnecessary phrases must be avoided at all cost, or it’s straight to the spam folder!
5. Meager design standards
Once opened, if your emails aren’t being read consistently, there’s something gone awry in your email design for sure. Smart marketers always possess a range of email templates depending on the kind of campaign and target audience with variations in elements like logo usage, fonts, pictures, color combinations/patterns, CTA buttons, and more. All of these elements need to be well-aligned and synchronized. Creativity and experimentation are important to ensure your audience don’t have a monotonous feel every time they see your email.
Vivek highlights:
For any email, a subject line, main content and call(s) to action should all provide a consistent brand experience. Main content should deliver on the "promise" of the subject line, which is often some kind of an offer.
One way to ensure that an email's content is never stale is through the use of APIs and webcrops that pull information directly from a brand's website or other data/content sources, so the email content is always up to date at the moment of open. This way, even if an offer is no longer available - new and relevant content can be shown with a new CTA.
Apart from this, within the subject line and the main body, your intended message needs to come through. Identify the number of times your emails are being opened on mobile devices and subsequently execute mobile optimization to improve readability.
- 56% of all emails sent are being opened on mobile devices (Litmus)
6. Sender ambiguity
Sometimes, the best answers to dilemmas lie in putting yourself in other’s shoes or situation. So, ask yourself, how many times do you open emails from ambiguous or unknown senders. Emails from addresses like customerdesk@abc.com, salesteam@abc.com, or info@abc.com are highly likely to get deleted straightaway (sometimes even without noticing the subject line). The reason being that such addresses never appear as genuine and very often end up getting marked as spam.
An email from an address that has a real person’s name in it increases its credibility and instills an amount of faith and authenticity in the minds of the recipients. Genuine sender names and addresses are almost guaranteed to improve your open and read rates which will reflect in better response and conversion rates.
Vivek ascertains:
Open and click-through rates are certainly important KPIs that factor into ROI. Unsubscribe rates are also an important metric. Increasingly, however, ROI is being measured by conversions.
Traditionally this tends to mean a sale, especially in retail/ecommerce. However, it could also mean any activity based on the desired call to action such as a newsletter subscription, mobile app download, content download (e.g. ebook or whitepaper), or a poll or survey completion.
These types of conversions help marketers determine ROI as they're based on a tangible outcome besides an open or click.
7. Losing the relevancy plot
A very simple, yet major factor for your emails not getting the desired attention lies in its relevancy or value-add it offers. This is all linked directly to how efficient you were in insightful targeting and segmenting of your audience. Relevance or value addition is an offshoot of insights and personalization. If your emails are not relevant or informative to what your audience is seeking, chances of unsubscription, lower open and response rates, and last but never the least, poor conversion rates remain at an all-time high. Identify the content that resonates with your target audience and develop your email relevancy model around that. Another point to take notice of here is the timing. Carry in-depth and precise research on when your target audience or segment is most likely to open/read emails . This enhances response and conversion as well.
Bill adds:
This all comes down to taking the time to test and review data regarding what drives consumers to respond to each element of an email marketing campaign. For subject lines, it’s not just what content got the best response, but what time was that content sent? Are consumers more responsive to deals/coupons in the morning and recommended purchases in the afternoon? This then ties to the main content of the email. Whether or not the full email is in regard to a sale or new product line - engagement hinges on how that content is presented. Are the new items aligned with what the consumer commonly purchases?
Finally, the call to action also needs to be personalized to how each consumer commonly shops/engages with the brand. For example, the shopper who only seems to make purchases during a sale may read the email on the new products that align to her past purchases, but if there isn’t an incentive her engagement will stop there. However, if a 25% off one item coupon is included in the email, that customer is more likely to then go to the brand’s website, browse the new items and make a purchase.
8. Overlooking interactive content
Interactive content is the future of all things digital. If you’ve overlooked it and are yet to incorporate it into your email campaigns, you’ll already behind the eight ball. There’re plenty of ways you can leverage interactive content such as quizzes, knowledge/personal assessment tests, games, surveys/polls, interactive infographics, ebooks, white papers, brochures, and many more. With interactive content within your emails, the probability of response increases because people tend to engage more when there’s an element of fun and play in the content.
According to Bill:
As noted above, for optimizing the ROI of an email campaign, all comes down to understanding how your customers choose to engage with the brand. Aligning the content of the email with the needs of a consumer and then reflecting how they shop in incentives or sales will help to change how a customer chooses to interact with the brand and if they’ll open it to begin with.
Email marketing requires honest efforts coupled with meticulous detailing and campaign execution. Conduct simulation tests on a small sample size to examine the response to subject lines, email body, design template, CTAs, and others before you go big and large. Such tests allow you to get the right mix of ingredients for a delectable email campaign. Don’t wait anymore. Gear up and execute an email campaign in a manner that all your recipients get delighted when the system reads – you’ve got mail!
