Marketing in the digital landscape wasn’t always as saturated as it is now. It has surely changed a lot since the early days of the internet. But, email marketing has been one of the most effective marketing strategies since the dawn of the internet.
Despite being a timeless marketing channel, email marketing has its fair share of obstacles.
However, marketers always find a solution, no matter what the challenges they face. The first step to overcoming your email marketing hurdles is properly understanding your audience and identifying these challenges accurately.
But we need to clear the air about something first...
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The answer is, yes. Email marketing is still very much relevant and worth your time and effort to drive results. It is considered one of the best ways to drive up ROI (Return On Investment) and to connect with customers.
Email marketing has evolved a lot with time and now targets high-value customers to boost all-around revenue, grow traffic, and reduce acquisition costs.
But with new ideas come new challenges. We’ve compiled 7 of the most common email marketing challenges for you, and how you can solve each of them.
This is one of the most common objections of customers in terms of email marketing. The issue of deliverability is a matter of maintaining and acquiring accurate information for contacts.
Email deliverability is the ratio of how many messages you have sent to how many landed on your recipients’ inboxes. You might think all the sent emails end up in the recipients’ inbox. Well, that is not the case a lot of the time.
Sent emails can also end up in the receiver's spam. When an email does not end up in someone’s inbox, it is called a bounce. Two types of bounces are present:
Bounces are a huge challenge in email marketing. these are two of the major issues:
Moreover, another major issue affecting deliverability is the accuracy of your email list. If your email database is full of outdated and inaccurate information, you’re likely to waste your time by sending emails to addresses that don’t even exist!
Adding an extra step or two to your email opt-in process can result in increasing your deliverability. Such as using an emailed confirmation, entering email information twice, or both.
What these steps do is eliminate the honest mistakes that are likely to happen with any form of data entry. Sometimes the reason for your email entering into spam is not because you provided the wrong data, but because you missed a character in your 30-character long email address.
Update And Verify Your Email List Regularly:
Track metrics related to email deliverability, such as, who is opening your emails regularly and who never open them. This way, you could easily remove receivers that have been inactive for a long time.
You can also use an email verification service like VerifyBee. It allows you to connect your mailing list platform, CRM, or even upload your list manually through a CSV. You can easily discover catch-all emails, invalid emails as well as safe-to-send emails.
Give Contacts The Ability To Update Their Information:
A lot of the time, customers change their email addresses either because they need to switch addresses or they lose access to an old work email. In such cases, your prime priority is to keep their contact info up to date.
If you make it easy for them, they are much more likely to report an address change. You can also ask them to self-report their preferences for email communication. This can be the content or frequency of their emails. This allows you to specially personalize emails according to every customer.
One of the things that every marketer wants is to access as much data as they can get for being able to create the perfect marketing strategy that will draw a maximum number of customers.
The advantage of integrating data from multiple sources is that it allows marketers to optimize the content of their emails. This helps in providing customers a positive buying experience and creating better sales leads.
Experiment With Segmentation:
Compile all of your marketing databases to make the experimentation process smooth. This allows you to create content that is specifically catered to their needs by identifying different consumer segments.
Create buyer personas to identify every one of your customer segments to help you create the ideal marketing message for every single customer.
Acquire Useful Data Integration Tools:
Easily collect and collate your results data from your blog posts, email marketing, lead management efforts, and a lot more by having the right data integration tool. This helps you in creating successful future marketing decisions by giving you an understandable and clear report.
Develop Impactful Content:
The reason for integrating and compiling all your marketing data is to create better content. By segmenting and acquiring useful data integration tools will help you understand what your customers are looking for.
So once you know what your customers want you can make new content to cater to their needs which in turn will lead to incredible sakes success with these very customers in the future.
Another common challenge that email marketing poses is measuring the ROI(return on investment). Numerous businesses do not evaluate the performance of each of their email campaigns and as a result, their sales never improved.
When you do not collect information and analyze each of the results of your campaigns, you affect your overall business. To understand what is going on it is very important to study the metrics. Below is a figure that outlines some of the most challenging problems for email marketers:
The solution for this is to set up a closed-loop reporting system. What this does is help you to place an accurate track on a customer from the very first point of contact. By the very first point of contact, we mean when they first engage with your email or they visit your website, to their final interaction.
Setting it up correctly will allow you to seamlessly track the ROI. You can also track it from other marketing efforts such as social media marketing, website optimization, and blog.
Often when people open your email, it doesn't mean they will interact with it. To convert your consumers into paying customers and making them visit your website further, you have to place the call to action in the right place.
So, one of our email marketing challenges is low click-through rates. Overcoming this challenge will allow marketers to drive up sales and help in customer retention and engagement.
As we always say, personalization is key when it comes to marketing. Good for you, the present technology-based world and artificial intelligence have allowed brands to provide such a high degree of personalization that has never been seen before.
Another solution to increasing click-through rates would be to observe the frequency of sending your email campaigns. Sending a ton of emails in a short period would likely mean your recipients will not open every one of them.
Moreover, you should optimize your emails for smartphones. Now is the age of mobile phones and so most of your receivers are reading your campaign on a smartphone and not on computers.
Lack of content optimization in your emails will result in photos taking longer to load and the content being difficult to read. As a result, send your campaign to yourself first to check if everything is alright before sending it to others.
Effective engagement pushes brand advocacy and removes purchase decisions along with culminating loyalty. Building and maintaining long-term relations with your clients can only be possible through creating a position of trust within your customers.
Knowing the right way to engage with your target contact list is the only way to gain the trust of your customers. And gaining the trust of your customers will take you a long way in the journey of email marketing.
The first step to achieving a great customer engagement rate is by creating the right email list and segmenting your contacts according to the customer life cycle stage. The next thing you need to do is to understand how your customers desire to engage and to meet their expectations.
Make sure that your content is relevant to the assigned segment of customers. However, customer engagement through email marketing can be challenging because it is planned for all stages of the customer lifecycle. Having a strategy for a future stream of emails is crucial for increasing customer engagement.
For creating personalized emails, modern marketers need to create rich, relevant, automated emails.
To get your customers engaged the right way, you have to gather the right set of information through your existing CRM or forms to create targeted emails that will achieve better engagement and customer retention. Moreover, delivering the right message at the right time increases engagement.
The increase in customer acquisition is the prime goal of an email marketing campaign. But the biggest challenges when obtaining new clients is identifying the target customer segment and curating the best strategies to build a customer base in that target segment.
Acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining and engaging the existing ones. But the good news is, marketers can now acquire new customers at a lesser cost with modern marketing automation suits and their lead nurturing capabilities.
What this also does is help to avoid risks of errors by allowing users to automate their campaigns with their desired content. This also allows them to schedule the campaigns well ahead of time.
Retaining old customers is way more important to be focused on than acquiring new ones. You can achieve higher revenue generation at a lower cost through customer retention.
What a lot of marketers forget is the ability of old customers to bring new contacts and customers. Customers’ attention spans are gradually decreasing because of having an overwhelming range of choices.
The only thing that can retain existing customers is an effective and integrated marketing strategy. Automation platforms will help you in this aspect by delivering scalable relevant content and solutions to existing customers.
Each marketing channel presents marketers with a unique set of challenges, and email marketing is no different. The good news is, all the common challenges and the ones mentioned here are relatively easy to overcome.
Once you address all these challenges, you'll be able to leverage the channel of email marketing to its full potential.
If you are concerned about the accuracy of your email list, VerifyBee is a perfect solution for you. It offers an intuitive, feature-rich email verification platform at an affordable rate, combined with brilliant customer support.
Get started for free today and never worry again about the validity of your email list!
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