5 Cold Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2018
According to statistics, email marketing has a higher ROI than any other promotional channel — each dollar spent, can earn back $44! However not all campaigns are as effective as that, and that might be due to common mistakes. Here is a list of 5 of them, that you should stop making in 2018.
Using an unverified list
Email bounce rates and spam scores are really important metrics when it comes to email marketing. If you’re sending an email that never gets to the inbox it is bad no matter the reason — it could be a typo in the email address or something else.
Email service providers analyze bounce rates and if yours is high, then your emails are more likely to be filtered to a spam folder.
To avoid this you should verify your email list to ensure there it includes only active addresses. This verification is a process of ensuring that a sent email won’t bounce and harm the company’s reputation with email service providers.
There are a number of email verifiers, such as SNOVio, a lead generating platform with a built-in tool which can be used for checking emails (even in bulk).
Lacking personalization
Personalization is the crucial part of emails of any kind, including the cold ones. According to open stats, personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14%
and conversions by 10%. Also, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Personalization here means that the message should contain something relevant to the recipient. The person should be able to understand why he or she got your email. To achieve this, you should try to find something that you have in common. This could be a person you both know or a company you’ve worked for, a conference you both attended or a media publication to which you were contributing.
All such information should be used for the email. After mentioning the name of the person, it is good to describe this common thing you’ve found. This tactic will help to go from an email that looks like “Hello, I don’t know your name, but please buy my stuff” to a more personalized and hence, more effective format:
“I was impressed by your talk about %Subject% at %Conference%. Your work is highly relevant to what we’re doing at %Company% so I thought you might be interested %offer here%”.
Sending image-only based emails
Many email clients automatically block images by default to protect users from spam and save their bandwidth. According to statistics, 43% of Gmail users always have images blocked. That is why you should think of not relying on images too much in your email marketing. Here is some good research on which email and web clients block images.
If there is no room for creating text-only email, than at least every image should be followed with description text so that the recipient could understand the content even with images blocked by email client software.
Not thinking about conversion
The main purpose of the commercial email is to get it opened. And the most powerful tool to solve this task is a subject line. According to statistics, 33% of email users open emails based on the subject line alone and 69% of them report messages based solely on the subject line.
It needs to be really compelling to force the recipient to go deeper and open your message. The best approach to making your subject line really effective is to use public data. There are a number of researchers who have proven that the subject should not be very long — 30 or fewer characters drive an above average open rate and personalized (they are 22.2% more likely to be opened). Don’t forget that nowadays lots of emails are opened on mobiles.
After you’ve got the recipient to open your message the final goal is still not accomplished. To raise your email conversion, the body of the email should be optimized too. It is a good idea to use the so-called email formula and, of course, personalization.
For example, after you have used the name of your recipient, you can use the Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) approach when you state the problem that this person might be facing and offer your solution, or use a referral approach mentioning some common contacts or big companies you’ve worked with and only then move on to describe your offer.
Sending from no-reply address
Many brands use no-reply addresses when sending out a newsletter. It is a mistake. Users should have an opportunity to get in touch with a company, or they will feel that their opinion is not important.
Moreover, numbers tell us that such addresses negatively impact deliverability. It is very simple — so that subscribers can’t interact with the brand, there is a higher probability of its emails marked as spam. If lots of subscribers will do it, the following emails will more likely be sent to spam by the email service providers.
Thanks for reading The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication
Follow us on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Get our best stories in your inbox by following us below.
