If you have been considering, or better still implementing, an online marketing campaign, it is highly likely that email marketing plays a role. If it does then digital marketing experts would caution that they see many companies make mistakes when they are email marketing, so we want to make sure you are aware of them, and thus avoid making them.
The first mistake that many businesses make with email marketing is that they think it is a green light to go ahead and simply blast sales message after sales message to their email subscribers. This is a huge error and akin to having a door-to-door salesperson knocking on your door every day asking if you want to buy their wares.
We imagine you would get fed up with that pretty quickly, and it is exactly how your email subscribers will feel if all your emails are blatant promotions. They will start resenting your emails and will either unsubscribe, or worse, they will unsubscribe after first marking your email as spam.
If your email gets marked as spam on too many occasions you will find that many of your subsequent emails end up in your subscribers’ spam folders, and thus do not get read. Ultimately your autoresponder service, such as Aweber or Get Response could close your account meaning you can no longer market via email.
Let us be clear, you can send promotions to your subscribers, but it do it tactically, and proportionally. In other words, mix up the sort of email you send so that some are informational, some entertaining, some offer tips and some have the latest news within your industry. Now, when you send an email that is promoting your day spa, it is less likely to be flagged as spam, and there is more chance of it being read.
The next mistake, which follows from only sending promotional emails, is failing to build a relationship with your subscribers. Bear in mind, the fast world of the internet means that people tend to scan through social media, websites, and their email. If you have not done enough to gain the trust of your subscribers, or given them enough reason to open your emails, the effect of your email marketing will be minimal.
You want as much as possible to have your subscribers anticipating your emails and delighted to see that you have sent one. The way you do this is by building that relationship by ensuring your emails give value. By value, we mean useful tips and hints, entertaining stories, the latest news, asking for their views, and inviting them to respond to any email you send them.
The final point might seem a bit more advanced, especially if you have only recently started using email as part of your digital marketing efforts, but it is one you should be thinking about even now. That is, that as your subscriber numbers grow, do not simply keep them all as part of one single list that receives each and every email you send.
What you must do is manage your subscriber list by segmenting them into smaller sub-lists. A basic example is a sub-list of subscribers who have become paying clients. There seems little point in sending them a promotional email to join your day spa if they already have so when you do send that sort of email, you exclude that sub-list. This makes your emails more targeted and more effective.
