Email Marketing Lessons for Startups

Own a startup or starting-up? Getting started with email marketing? How successful have you been?

Getting your email marketing campaigns right the first time around is incredibly hard. It takes time to understand your audience and how the process works. You’ll surely make mistakes, however, the key is to learn from those mistakes and keep optimizing your process.

That said, if you think email marketing is not worth the effort after the first few attempts failed, it’s your loss!

Let’s look at some stats that prove my point:

• The average return for every dollar spent on email marketing is $44.25.
• 91% of consumers use email at least once a day.
• Email is 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter.
• 44% of consumers made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email they received.
• When asked which medium consumers would like to receive updates from, 90% preferred an email newsletter, while only 10% chose Facebook.
• 60% of marketers say that email marketing is producing an ROI for their organization.
• 48% of consumers say that they prefer to communicate with brands via email.

The first step to addressing a problem is to understand where you went wrong. Let’s help with that. Below is a list of items that you should avoid doing if wish to succeed in email marketing.

1. Sending the same email to everybody on your list

Do you think everybody on your list has the same taste and preference? Then why are you sending everyone the same email?

If your email doesn't carry anything of value to a large section of your recipients, your open and click through rates (CTRs) will suffer. It can easily create a bad image about your brand and your recipients will probably end up unsubscribing or not engaging.

Tip - You should ensure that each recipient will find the content of your email relevant and useful. Without segmentation, you will not able to deliver personalized messages that your subscribers so make time to segment.

Here is a list of ways you can segment your email list.

2. Using generic ‘from’ and ‘reply-to’ addresses

It doesn’t make any sense to keep role based usernames like admin or support. People often feel like they’re talking to bots when they see such addresses.

Using noreply is even worse - in fact stop here, it makes the recipient feel like the company doesn’t care to hear from them.

Which one would you like to see - brucewayne@wayneenterprises.com or admin@wayneenterprises.com!

Send it with an actual name, or at least mention the name of sender in the signature if you are insistent on role based usernames. It certainly gives you a better chance to connect with the recipient.

Here are more reasons why you should follow these practices.

3. Crammed navigation bar in your email

Navigation bars can occupy some of the most valuable real estate in your email - at the very top.

It doesn’t make sense to waste the space by cramming it in. Don’t use your website navigation bar in email if you can help it. With 53% of the emails being opened on mobile, where does one press? And when you present them with too many options - they can easily get confused.

Tip - Keep it easy on the eye and make it easily clickable on mobile. Keep testing, optimize the items that need to be placed in nav bar; a heatmap can certainly help you there.

Here are some useful tips and examples for you to check out.

4. Making it difficult to unsubscribe

First of all, sending email without permission is a big no no. Read this to know more about the importance of permission.

Recipients may choose to unsubscribe you for many reasons. However, know that when they’re trying to unsubscribe, they’re already frustrated; so you should make it easy.

If they can’t find an unsubscribe button, you could get marked as spam. If a lot of people take the same action, your email deliverability will suffer.

Tip - Make it easy for your contacts to unsubscribe and keep an unsubscribe button in the footer. Do not take them to your website, where they will be made to enter login credentials to unsubscribe. That’s like poking a wounded bear! Make the exit easy and help them finish the whole process in just two clicks.

Read this to know more about handling the unsubscription process smoothly.

5. Sending out too many emails or inconsistently

No one likes to get a marketing email from a particular company every day, it looks forceful. Recipients will get irritated and they will probably unsubscribe. The same goes for sending emails at random intervals of time without any particular trigger. It may not be relevant or add any sort of value to the recipient.

Tip - Be consistent, if they have subscribed for a weekly newsletter, send it on a particular day every week. It will be weird if you send one on Friday and the next one on Monday, don’t be erratic. Have a calendar, fix the schedule beforehand. Additionally, ask subscribers when they prefer to receive email, morning, mid-day and evening which helps to create a more personalized experience.

The point is - be disciplined, establish rules and don’t send emails at random will.

At Hiver, after a sales outreach email, we always wait 48 hours before reaching out to a prospect again. In the case of influencer outreach emails, it’s 4 days. This disciplined practice has actually led to an increase in our follow-up reply rate in both cases by 43% and 55% respectively.

Triggered email can also help you here, which ensures that your email is relevant and useful for the user at that precise moment.

Here are some examples of how you can use triggered emails to have a meaningful effect.

6. Try to market yourself in every email you send

Many a times, companies just keep talking about themselves - droning on about how good your product is, how they’re better than their competitors or about their new features.

Truth be told, very few recipients will be interested in all that. They merely want to know how your product will benefit them or how it will solve their problems, etc. The focus should be on the customer and their issues, and how your product will address it. You may have to put a lot of hard work to come up with the offering, but that does not give you a license to bombard customers with unnecessary info.

Another cause of confusion is forgetfulness and unfamiliarity. You could always tell them what you do in 1-2 sentences.

Tip - Always ensure that there is a call-to-action (CTA) in the body and keep it visible. Otherwise you won’t get anything out of it.

7. Considering it as a one-way communication tool

A lot of marketers think email is a broadcast tool for marketing messages. On the contrary, the reality is that it’s more than just a medium to push newsletters, coupons, and offers.

Tip - Encourage your readers to give feedback, it will dramatically improve your engagement. Provide links to your social media profiles, so that they can continue the interaction there. This will help you gain more followers on social platforms.

Nobody likes one-sided communications, it’ll never take you anywhere. Whereas an engaged list will provide you with greater open rates and CTRs.

8. Displaying discrepancies in communication

If a subject line is “Free 30 day trial– today only”, but the body says the trial period is only 14 days, readers will probably feel cheated or tricked.

If there’s a visible discrepancy between your subject line and body, rest assured, readers will stop trusting you. The same goes for email and landing page discrepancies.

Readers will consider you dishonest and you will lose that potential customer forever.

Here’s some added tips:

• Never add an image without using alternative text. Here is why.
• Use pre-header text. Here is why.
• Always test the email on different devices and browsers.
• Consistently A/B test. Here is why you should.
• Make data-driven decisions - Don’t neglect email campaign reports.
• Build your own list.
• Make sure you don’t have bad or incorrect links.
• Don’t send emails from personal or general email addresses.
• Double check to make sure no mistakes are in your email body.
• Long emails - Keep them short and simple.

Conclusion

The list is not exhaustive by any means, but most of these mistakes are easily avoidable. Spend a bit of time and effort on sorting out these issues. See how email-marketing-nicely-done will help your startup grow at a brisk pace.

Image Source:
http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/images/i/000/006/797/original/email-marketing-mistakes.jpg

Niraj Ranjan Rout

Niraj is the founder of Hiver (formerly GrexIt), an app the lets you share Gmail labels with other Gmail users. Niraj works on programming, customer support and sales, and also contributes to design and UI. He's a fusion music aficionado, loves to play the guitar when he can.