There are a lot of things that go into making a successful email marketing campaign. And sometimes, in spite of all the planning and hard work, email marketing campaigns still fail. It might be difficult to catch on at first, but if you’re starting to sense that something’s not right, here are some of the warning signs that your strategy isn’t working out as planned.
Five Email Marketing Campaign Warnings
If there’s a problem with your strategy or execution, odds are that it will show up as one of the five warning signs below.
1. Open and Click-Through Rates Are Falling
This is the most basic metric you can look at to determine if your email marketing campaign strategy is working or not. Of course, there are many other metrics a marketer should keep an eye on. Rising open rates and click-through rates are the most direct result of an efficient campaign. If you notice these numbers dwindling, it means something is not right.
You may want to try to personalize your emails more before sending them out. A few A/B tests should help you figure out what titles and content work best. Segmenting your audience is also a good idea, to aid you reach out to each specific group, and really send them emails that appeal to them.
2. Site Traffic Isn’t Budging
Opening emails and reading them is one thing, but after that, the point of an email marketing campaign is to get your subscribers onto to your website. Open and click-through rates might be doing just fine, but if they don’t convince your customers to visit your page, they’re not really worth much by themselves.
Again, you can try to segment your audience and make your emails more personal. You need to understand what problems your customers have. By understanding this, you can then frame your solution in such a way as to appeal to their needs. Avoid baiting them to your website. Attention-grabbing subject lines, or leaving unresolved questions in the body of your email might end up just annoying your customers. Remember that you are the one reaching out to them. Your emails should be as helpful as possible, and not take up too much of their time if they’re going to be efficient.
3. Brand Awareness Is Low
An email marketing campaign is not just about sealing the deal immediately. It should also help raise brand awareness. Because only by raising brand awareness can you hope to attract new leads, and maintain a powerful relationship with your current active customers.
Raising your brand awareness can actually help you make your marketing strategy even more efficient, so you should consider approaching it from a different direction. Maybe try to invest more in the content of your website and social media pages. You could also try sending your customers survey, to find out straight from the source what they would like to see.
And you can take this as an opportunity to provide your customers with a little bit of background info on your company as well. For example, restaurant surveys do this all the time. It’s a really quick way to catch two birds with one stone, getting that all-important customer feedback, and create greater brand awareness in a highly competitive field, where there are many of businesses with a long tradition and fiercely loyal customers.
4. Leads Are Unsubscribing
This is a major red flag that something is not right with your strategy. Of course, it’s perfectly normal if you see some people unsubscribe from time to time, and there are many reasons why they do it. But if you start noticing that the number of people subscribing is far lower than that of people unsubscribing, you’ve got a problem. Eventually, you may reach a point in which your campaign might be brilliant, but you have no one to show it to.
If your customers are unsubscribing at an alarming rate, you may want to try going down a somewhat counterintuitive route, and maybe tone down your email marketing campaign. Many users are put off by overly-aggressive campaigns that send tens of emails a week.
5. Subscribers Deem Your Emails Spam
This is another metric you’re going to have to keep an eye out when assessing how efficient your email marketing campaign. If your customers mark your emails as spam, they’re still going to receive them, but they’re never going to open them. You’re probably going to notice a correlation between the fall in open rates and this. You shouldn’t feel too bad if this happens. Even large companies can sometimes go overboard and spam their customers.
It might be difficult to get your customers back on board after they’ve already labeled your emails spam. But there a number of things you can do to avoid this happening in the future. First, you should time your emails right, and send them only when you know your customers are going to see them, but not interfere with their work schedule. You should also add a human touch to every email you send, even if the process is automated. They shouldn’t feel like they were written by robots.
Email marketing campaigns are as much an art as they are a science. Often times, it’s very hard to tell what exactly isn’t working right. And the solutions need to be adapted to the specific makeup of the target audience and the brand you’re trying to promote.
Which of the 5 warning signs have you experienced? How did you solve it?
