As Smallbizbee.com has grown over the past 10 months, so has the number of emails in my inbox.
A good number of those emails are forms of marketing, and almost all of them miss the mark with me.
Email marketing can be an extremely powerful and effective way to reach your customers - if done correctly.
Reasons Your Email Marketing Isn't Working
Now, while I'm not claiming to be an email marketing expert, I can tell you why those who have marketed to me have nothing to show for their efforts. Here are the top five mistakes I see them making
1. No Relationship Built
Email marketing works best when the person recieving the email feels like they know you, trust you, and you have a relationship built with them to some degree
We read email from people we know, and skim or delete email from people we don't. Simple as that.
Business is built around relationships, with relationships come trust, and with trust comes sales. For some reason email marketers, and business using email to communicate with their target market forget this.
2. No "Pull"
There has to be a reason to keep reading, a pull for the reader to continue.
Unless you are sending me an email at the exact moment I am looking to buy what you're selling, just saying "Hey you - buy my stuff", isn't going to work. There's no pull.
The worst offenders will not only be lacking a pull, but will go on for 1000 words without one, essentially repeating over and over again why I should buy their stuff.
Give me a reason to keep reading, tell me a story, give me value, show me how you'll solve my problems, keep me interested in what you have to say.
3. Unclear Call to Action
Okay, I'm still reading but have no idea what you want me to do. Maybe you don't want me to do anything, possibly this is only an informational, trust building email, and that's okay. But, if you want me to "buy your stuff", there better be a clear signal as to what you want me to do next, or I will take the easiest route possible and do nothing.
4. Poorly Written
It doesn't have to be Hemingway, but it does have to be spelled correctly and use decent grammar. I cannot count how many times I've received a poorly written, mistake filled email where the person was asking me to buy their $299 info product. Why would I spend $299 on an info product that will be as poorly written/designed/produced as your email?
5. Low Correlation
For email marketing to work their needs to be a high correlation between why I signed up to receive information from you, and what you send me.
If I'm on your "Wine of the Month" newsletter list, your emails to me should be mostly, more or less, related to wine. If I signed up for your "Become a Better Blogger" emails, don't try to sell me on Hawaii vacations. I may be interested, but when I signed up with you I had no intention of buying a Hawaii vacation. Keep it on point, and relevant to see the most success.
Conclusion
You don't have much time in an email to grab the reader, and any of the above mistakes will have them clicking the delete button without thinking twice. Use this as a checklist the next time your business begins an email marketing campaign. If done correctly it will be a very efficient and cost effective way to reach your target market.
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Amen! And… apply the same guidelines to ALL marketing initiatives. These are the exact reasons too much marketing of any kind is wasted time and money.
@BBlackwood
Unfortunately the internet has not improved marketing. I think we see so many bad email marketing letters because it is so easy to hit “send” without thinking it all the way through. Most people look at email marketing as a numbers game, but I would much rather have a list of 500 people where 100% of them buy when I mail them, than a list of 50,000 people where .0001 buy when I mail them. Somehow these numbers are lost on many email marketers though.
Matt
Oh yeah, Matt.
If folks would only pay attention to these. It’s not rocket surgery, right?
Folks are very busy these days and generally don’t have the time or the patience to tolerate a drive-by email solicitation.
This is why we should hold near and dear our email lists and only send those wonderful things when the 5 criteria you list exist.
Cheers,
George
It is actually amazing how poor some call to actions are – or that some people leave them off. I have been getting a fair bit of mail recently that has not been written to be scanned – which falls in the poorly written section – and we know that most people don’t read email word for word, only scan to see if it is worth a full read.
The best email I had was written with section heads, and if you only read those big, bold words you had an idea of the overall letter. That is what I tell people to do now. That or give the subheads really short and descriptive benefit-titles like ‘why buying this will help you’.
i try to send only relevant emails .
Good tips. I really, really need to get into e-mail marketing. The reason why my e-mail marketing is not working is because I have put sufficient effort into actually building a list. As marketers I think we look at these e-mail offers a lot differently than normal people. While we are critical of them, I’m sure there are a lot of gullible people falling for them.
@Tumblemoose
Not rocket science at all. Marketers need to quit thinking of their email list as a list, and start thinking of it as people, and they’d be a lot better off.
Matt
@McLaughlin
Sounds like we are getting the same email. Big blocks of text that there is no way I am going to read (unless it’s to get ideas for a blog post). And even if I do slog through it, I can’t figure out what they want me to do. It’s wasting everyone’s time.
The section heading method is the same way sales pages are written, becuase it works. You can scan nothing but the section headings of most sales pages and get 90% of the what the offer and call to action is.
Matt
@MGL
How do you ensure they are relevant?
Matt
@Jeremy
Regardless of what business you are in, building an email list is an extremely important and powerful sales tool.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions recently about ways you can build an email list, and will be putting a couple posts together about it next week. Check back, I think they will help you get your list building efforts kicked into high gear.
Matt
Matt, keep up the good work. Your articles are concise and to the point. These are great tips and I find myself seeing the same thing in the emails I get. Stumbled.
@Stephen
Thanks for the kind words. Appreciate you coming by and being an active member of the Smallbizbee community!
Matt
Excellent advice! I think this bit is key ‘Give me a reason to keep reading, tell me a story, give me value, show me how you’ll solve my problems, keep me interested in what you have to say.’ If you can’t do this most recipients simply hit the delete button. And now the good stuff to do!
http://smallbizbee.com/index/2009/07/28/email-marketing-for-business-summer-school/