In terms of digital marketing channels, email marketing is one of the oldest. Sadly, some brands have misconceptions about email marketing.
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about what works and what doesn’t with email marketing. Here are five common misunderstandings and myths about email marketing.
1. The More Extensive Your Email List, the Better
This is a common email marketing myth, especially with companies that are new to email marketing. But gone are the days when brands grow a massive email list and blast messages to their subscribers. Technology has advanced, and your focus should be on having a targeted email list. So looking at the size of your competitor’s list and saying, “mine is bigger than yours”, is not the way to go with email marketing.
The more focused and personalised your email is, the more relevant it will be. This niche focus makes your email marketing look professional.
With email campaigns, the important thing is for your recipients to engage with your message and take the action you intend for them. For email marketing, it is better to have an email list of 1,000 people who engage with your message than 100,000 who don’t! So, in this case, less is more!
The more extensive your email list, the better! This is a common email marketing myth, especially with companies that are new to email marketing. Click To TweetFor optimum results in your campaign, you’re first going to need an email list size of about 1,000 people, as it’s a good sample size you can extract some data from. After you’ve had the list for a while and you’ve sold to them, add up how much money you’ve made from your own products and affiliate products.
Are you tempted to buy an email list to grow your audience fast? Doing so will not only damage your deliverability and brand reputation; it can also put your email account at risk. Email clients like Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook frown on accounts that recipients repeatedly flag as spam. So don’t gamble with your brand reputation. It’s not worth the risk.
Building your list genuinely and organically is crucial to your email marketing strategy because it’s the best way to build a strong business relationship with potential customers. Doing so means that your brand is not just a status update that’s there and gone! Your brand has earned the right to enter a person’s inbox alongside other important communication from their work, family, and friends. This is a privilege that you should not take lightly.
Though it is not illegal for someone to buy and sell email addresses, it is illegal to send bulk unsolicited commercial emails. Any unsolicited commercial e-mail messages or a series of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages or large attachments sent to one person is SPAM. Is this the reputation you want to build for your brand? The same principle applies to messages you sent via SMS, WhatsApp, etc. You need to get the permission of the person before you send them your marketing message.
2. Your Email Subject Line Is Not Important
This is a blatant lie! Look at your most recent email campaign. Does the subject line make you want to read the content? If you’re not excited to open your own email, then nobody will either. The truth is your email subject line often determines whether anyone will read your message. You must make sure your subject line accurately reflects the content of the email you are sending. It would be best, to tell the truth in your email subject line. Please do not use it to make false promises about your products or services.
So the text of your email is as relevant as the image that accompanies it. Click To TweetThe subject line is far more important than your email. It is the most important part of your email. Keep it brief. Subject lines need to grab your recipient’s attention as fast as possible and excite them to read your message. A good email subject line is brief and not sales-dominated. Do not use spammy language.
Subject lines with 50 characters or fewer result in higher open rates and higher click-through rates than emails with longer subject lines. Do not write an email and slap a subject line on it without giving much thought to the subject line. You need to craft the subject line of your email newsletter.
The best subject lines communicate the promise of value. Your subject line has to convince the recipient that your email contains vital information to improve their lives and/or their businesses.
3. The More Images in Your Email, the Better
A picture is worth a thousand words! This means that images allow you to strengthen your message and include information that you can’t communicate through text. So, images are essential for making messages easy to understand immediately and more professional. We can enhance even the best email marketing copy with powerful photos. Images can lead to better email performance. To design your email for accessibility, informative images (e.g. those containing images of products or text) must have alt-text that conveys what the image is about.
But this does not mean that you should go overboard with images in your newsletter. By default, most ISP block images in emails. So the text of your email is as relevant as the image that accompanies it. Use the 80:20 rule, with 80% of your email content being text while the remaining 20% are images.
When sending emails with images, turn off the images on your email, even if it’s on by default in your email client. There are two common reasons. One is to keep your email private from spammers. If you do not click on any links, the only way a sender can know that you’ve seen their email is if you load the images. The second reason is speed. Having images turned off will enable your email to load faster on the recipient’s device. This is one reason some companies prefer plain text email.
4. Readers Unsubscribing from Your List Is Bad
Are people unsubscribing from your list? In email marketing, to unsubscribe means to remove your email address from a company’s mailing list, not to receive any further emails or communications. Every email campaign you launch must include an unsubscribe link to provide subscribers with an option to remove themselves. As counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s not always a bad thing to lose a subscriber!
Sometimes if a reader unsubscribes from your mailing list, it can be a good thing. For example, if a reader finds your content is no longer relevant, he will unsubscribe. It means you ended up adding the wrong readers to a list that is not relevant to them at all. It’s like sending a dog owner details on where to buy fish food! This is the reason HubSpot manually unsubscribed 250,000 people from their marketing blog and started sending fewer emails.
Use the 80:20 rule, with 80% of your email content being text while the remaining 20% are images. Click To TweetBut before you purge your list, it is advisable to be patient with your “inactive” subscribers. Study your email marketing metrics and unsubscribe rate. Then give them at least over 6 months before purging your list.
This ability to unsubscribe will help to trim down and cleanse your mailing list. If you keep a mailing list of only those to whom your email marketing campaigns has value, it will be better for you.
5. Consumers Are Drowning in Emails from Brands
The truth is consumers receive fewer than six brand emails per day. The key is to keep proactive and consider the consumer first. That email marketing is effective is not a license for you to go overboard with it. Don’t drown your customers in marketing emails. Email isn’t free when the price is the loss of a customer relationship.
Consumers are drowning in emails from brands daily. But for your brand to cut through the noise and stay relevant in a world drowning in data, it must provide value. If your email provides value, people will read it and share it with their friends. So your brand needs to deliver valuable content in every email you send to subscribers.
Final Words
These are just a few of the misconceptions about email marketing. If you’re using email marketing, you already know it’s a valuable tool to stay connected with your customers and generate new opportunities for your business. It is one of the cheapest and most profitable marketing channels.
According to a McKinsey study, email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Twitter and Facebook combined.
Doing email marketing right is challenging in the best of circumstances. But it’s made more difficult by all the outdated advice and myths out there that lead business owners astray.
Email marketing works differently for different brands and like. So, like all things digital marketing, do your research. Conduct your research to find out how email marketing affects your own particular business. Let me know if these common misconceptions about email marketing are true in your case or not.
Do you need help with your digital and social media marketing? Get in touch on Twitter @ademolaabimbola or @mauconline.
Related Article(s)
- How to Collect Email Addresses for Email Marketing
- How to Create an Effective Email Marketing Campaign
- How to Tell If Your Email Newsletter is Effective
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