Mistakes You Need To Watch Out For
If you are new to email marketing, I wish I could say that your email marketing business would be smooth sailing, but unfortunately, it will not. If I would say that I would be misleading you.
This is because you first have to understand that most of the people who are new to email marketing will not succeed because they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
The sad thing about email marketing is that oftentimes, the people who are new to email marketing don’t know how to do email marketing correctly. They only find out that something is very wrong when they already fail when they already have put a lot of time, effort, and money into their email marketing campaigns.
If you don’t want to join the rest of them who are new to email marketing and also fail, you should continue to read.
In this blog article, I will teach you how you will succeed with email marketing. The mistakes you not should and so on.
The 5 Most Common Mistakes
If you don’t want to join the others who are new to email marketing and failing, you should pay attention to what I am about to say now. Make sure you don’t commit these errors.
Most importantly, make sure that you do things in such a way that you prevent yourself from making the mistakes most people who are new to email marketing do.
- Send Irrelevant Updates – The easiest way for you to torpedo the commercial value of the list that you worked so hard to build is to send irrelevant updates. These are off-topic content updates, which don’t have anything to do with the reason why people joined your list in the first place. For example, if you are giving away a free eBook on how to make money online and the updates you send are about Keto Diet, you should not be surprised if people don’t open your email. Donät be shocked if they don’t click your links. In fact, you should not even be that surprised if people start reporting your emails as spam and then unsubscribe.
Send relevant, on-topic updates. Otherwise, don’t send any updates at all. You would be breaking the trust the people have in your list. Remember, when they signed up to your mailing list by giving their email address, it was the understanding they you would give them content that fits the context of the stuff they are interested in. They could not care less about anything else. - Sen Irrelevant Offers – A lot of list marketers try to play a quick and dirty game with list members. On its face, when you look at their updates on a superficial level, it seems that the list owner is sending relevant information. For example, if you sign up for a mailing list that is all about making money online. When you look at the headlines, everything is related to this amazing offer, and when you read the emails, everything is about making money online.
However, when you look at the actual links where you are being called to action to buy something or sign up for another list, it is talking about Keto Diet and other Weight Loss Methods. Do you think people on that list will be motivated to click? This is not as offensive as sending straight-up irrelevant updates but believe me, it is probably going to get under people’s skin eventually. Do yourself a big favor and send only relevant offers. - Fail To Understand How To Do Audience Needs Profiling – A lot of list marketers think that since they recruited their list members regarding one specific need they are stuck with that concern. They feel that they really have no business talking about something else. They feel that it does not make any sense for them to talk about other topics regardless of how closely related they are to the main topic of their list.
Since they feel that their hands are tied, they might not be able to send the right offers because those offers may not be all that abundant. They may be few and far between. As a result, the list does not make as much money as it could. It flounders. Eventually, it fails.
This is a very common mistake, and it all involves the list marketer’s inability to profile people based on their needs. Let’s put it this way: People who share one need usually share other interests. For example, if you have a mailing list for couples who just married, you may be thinking that they need they share involves wedding-related stuff. Well, after they got married and the wedding is over, the need for your list is actually quite low.
You need to start thinking outside the box. If you look at the profile of those people, they have many shared interests. For example, people who just got married are usually looking for a new place to stay. They don’t want to live with their parents. Most Americans don’t want to depend on their parents. We are independent, so we want to strike out on our own. Whether we buy a house or an apartment, it does not matter. We are seeking to start our own home.
Not surprisingly, newlyweds also tend to be interested in big-screen TVs, houseware, certain types of insurance products, you name it. This is how effective audience needs profiling works. You can’t just focus on the specific need tath animated people to join your list in the first place. You need to look at their shared interests. This way, when you send updates and properly explain these updates, they won’t come across as spam. Instead, your audience members will start to believe that you are able to read their minds. Do you see how this works? - Fail To Educate With Informative Updates – If you want to sell people a product or service, you need to educate them. You need to understand that when a person signs up for your mailing list, they may do so not because they completely trust your brand 100%. They might just want to know more about a particular problem. Maybe they already liked your particular spin on the problem and your range of solutions. but they are still unsure whether they want to buy from you.
If you were to just send calls to action to your list to buy stuff and that’s all your update consists of, you probably could not convert too many people. In fact, your emails might have the opposite effect. Instead of getting them to buy, the only thing you might convince them to do is to report your email for spam.
You have to educate people on your email updates. You basically have to hold them by hand and shepherd them through each stage of the buying process. Get them to feel that you know what you are talking about. Look credible in their eyes because you keep sending them information that proves that you are some sort of authority.
Next, get them to like the specific implementations you offer. They are not ready to buy, but bet them to like because you give them details and they fit their needs.
Finally, through enough exposure as well as explanation and education, they are likely to trust what you have to say. You might be thinking that this is impossible because it takes so long. Well, guess what, your competitors don’t have the same advantage as you because they have not been talking to your prospects as long as your brand has been talking to them. That is the biggest advantage you have. Don’t blow that advantage. Educate your prospects with informative updates and you would be surprised as to how many of them would convert. - Unclear Value-Add – I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I have signed up to a mailing list only to ask myself at some point in time in the future why I signed up in the first place. The reason I get that impression from time to time is that the updates that I get are unclear as to what value they bring to my life. Do you think I would be excited to convert? Do you think I would be falling over myself to click that link that leads me to a sales page? Absolutely not. To avoid this problem, stop beating around the bush. Don’t waste people’s time with bland or lifeless headlines. There has to be a direct fit between the emotional urgency of the headlines, the value of the content, and the needs of the recipient. Otherwise, you are playing the game wrong.
If you want your email marketing business to succeed, pay close attention to these 5 most common mistakes I outlined above. They can go a long way in ensuring the success of your business or guaranteeing its failure. The choice is yours.
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Values That Will Ensure Your List’s Success
If you are an email marketer, you know that email marketing, as exciting as it can be, is not a slam dunk. If that were the case, then the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people trying their hand at email marketing would be overnight millionaires. That, obviously, is not the reality.
Most people who are new to email marketing fail because they are not operating with key values. Don’t get me wrong. These people know what to do. They know how to find the right market, they know how to set up their mailing list, and they might even know online marketing like the back of their hand.
Regardless of their knowledge, however, their actions are informed by and motivated by the wrong core values and they fail again and again. If you want to achieve breakout results with your email marketing efforts, listen up. Not only should you know what to do, but you should also understand the right motivation. You should be pushed by the right values. Otherwise, things are not going to work out for you. Chances are, you probably would just quit ahead of time.
That is how a lot of otherwise intelligent, driven, and motivated people fail in this game. It is not a question of knowledge. It is not a question of having access to the right resources. It is not even a question of having the right skills. In other words, it is not a question of what but why.
If you have to be motivated by the right values for you to succeed because let me tell you, email marketing can be hard on your nerves. It really can be. You are putting in the effort day after day and regardless of how intense your efforts are, things don’t pan out. Nobody is immune to this. All of us suffer those down days. If you are motivated by the wrong values, those days will get the better of you until eventually, you quit.
So, what are these three core values that I have been talking about?
- Build Your Business Around Existing Demand – The first thing that you need to do is to avoid the mindset of ‘build it and they will come’. Usually, people who think along these lines think that they are geniuses. These are people who think that whatever ideas they come up with are so new, so revolutionary and so earth-shattering that nobody has thug about these ideas. Talk about presumptuous.
Regardless of your idea, chances are, somebody has thought about it before you. If the problem exists, you can bet that somebody has tried to solve that problem. Their implementation or specific idea may not be identical to yours but I can guarantee that it comes close.
You have to understand that what makes a business successful or not turns less on the novelty of the idea and on how that idea fits people’s needs. In other words, how are these ideas implemented and executed?
For success to happen, your target customers’ needs and demands must be met. Otherwise, your business is dead in the water. Unfortunately, too many people, regardless of how intelligent they are, regardless the amount of business experience they have under their belt, flat-out fail because they build their business around the hot idea instead of existing demand.
If you are an email marketer, you have to go out there, figure out where your customers are, rub digital shoulders with them, and pay attention to what is going on on the ground. Once you have that information, you then have access to the data points you need to build a business system that speaks to existing demands. You are no longer dealing with theory. You are no longer dealing with ‘that would be great’ types of ideas.
Instead, you are several inches closer to the kind of implementation that would actually make an impact on people’s everyday waking reality. Build your business around existing demand. Doing it any other way will either be too expensive, take too much time, or is too uncertain. - Zero In And Meet Your Audience’s Needs – Understand that the essence of excellent salesmanship has not changed. If you ask an old-school veteran salesperson who is extremely successful, they will tell you that the secret to sales is classic. What is the classic formula? Very simple, To help yourself, you must first help others. See, I told you it was simple.
In fact, it is so basic that it seems like common sense. But most people are unable to grasp this. Instead, they focus on what they need. They focus on how awesome their product is. They obsess about how many features their product brings to the table but let me tell you, the cold hard truth is people don’t care about your features, about what you know, until they know that you care about their needs.
This should be obvious because you are always asking yourself ‘What is in it for me?’ Now, if you ask yourself that question, don’t you think everybody else is asking that question? If you were to zero in on that psychology and make sure that you position your product to speak directly to that question, then you have a competitive advantage.
Other than that, you will just basically be committing the same mistakes that everybody else is committing. Everybody’s talking about how great their product is. Everybody’s talking about how revolutionary their stuff is. But nobody is talking about the needs of the audience. That is what puts food on your table. That is what makes sure the lights stay on. That is what pays your rent. So, focus on that. Put your customers’ needs first before your need to get paid. - Always Include KLT In All Your Updates – When you are sending out updates to your mailing list, understand that you are in the act of seduction. That is what you are doing. Basically, you are telling the prospect that they should pick you not another company, not another smooth-talking mailing list, but you.
To make this happen, you must first get the person to feel that they know enough about your solution and the problem they have. Next, get them to like your particular solution and then eventually, if you do this right, they start trusting your particular solution.
Your messages must be set up to reflect this. All our messages must lead to trust. Otherwise, you are playing the game wrong and you are going to fail.
Keep the three core values listed above at the top of your mind. If these core values are not motivating your company and how your deal with your list members, chances are you will eventually fail. Master these core values and make them your mantra and they would lead you to one victory after another.
5 Common Signs Of Failing With Email Marketing
The saddest thing about mailing list campaigns is that oftentimes, the people who run them are the last to know. They only find out that something is very wrong when they have already sund sunk in a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money into their campaign. In other words, they are a day late and a buck short.
Thankfully, a lot of those people are actually backed up by big money. They either have investors with deep pockets or they themselves are well-funded or have access to a lot of cash. Unfortunately, not all entrepreneurs are like that. Chances are quite good that you don’t have such access. It is very likely that you only have so much money to work with as far as your email list campaign budget is concerned.
You need to get it done right the first time around. This is why I am sharing with you the five common danger signs of failing email marketing campaigns. Keep your eyes peeled for these danger signs because they can go a long way in saving you money. The moment you see any of these, start getting curious. Look under the hood of your campaigns and get on the road to making the necessary changes to put your campaign back on track. If you are lazy or ignorant about these, then you will only ding out when it is too late. It is kind of like learning at the last moment that you have stage 4 cancer. Consider yourself warned.
- Low Squeeze Page CTR – This is the most common danger sign. You know something is wrong when people don’t bother to get around to clicking on your squeeze page link. It does not matter how you are driving traffic. Maybe you are driving traffic from Facebook, Google search results, or forums. The fact that people are not clicking through to your squeeze page means you are sending the wrong messages, you are qualifying your visitors the wrong way, or you are trying to drum up traffic from all the wrong places.
- Low Sign-Up Rates – Once you reach a point where you are able to drive people to your sign-up page but very few sign-up, you have a more manageable problem in your hands. The problem with the low squeeze page CTR is that it is not anybody’s guess why people are not clicking through. However, assuming that you are able to get them to click through, then your problem becomes easier to manage.
Now, you have a fairly fixed set of parameters to play around with to get your sign-up rates up. Maybe you can change the pictures on the sign-up page. Maybe you can change the text. Perhaps there is an issue with the font or the size of the font or the colors of the text. In other words, the universe of the things that you have possibly gotten wrong is much smaller in this context than when you are dealing with a low squeeze page CTR.
Do yourself a big favor and keep playing around with the different elements and keep running the traffic to see if you can continuously increase the conversion rate of your squeeze page. - Low Open Rates – Now that you are gotten people to sign up for your mailing list, you might be thinking that you are out of the woods. Well, not quite, You can have 1000 thousand people on your mailing list but if your open rate is pathetically low, you are probably not going to make money off your mailing list.
People have to open your email for them to click on your offer so they can put dollars in your bank account. It does not get any simpler than that. The good news here is that this problem is fairly limited because you know that they are not opening your emails at all.
This means that you need to play around with the subject lines of your emails. They have to stand out. They have to grab the eyeballs of your list of members and slap them around. the great thing about this is you can keep experimenting with different headlines until you get titles that produce the right effects. - Low Up-Date Link Click Rates – You may be able to get your list members to the point where they are opening your emails at a high rate. It seems that a lot of people love to read your emails. This is great. But the problem is, they are not clicking on the link inside the body of your emails. This is going to be a big issue because this is what pays you. This is what puts dollars in your bank account. Well, it starts the process.
The good news here is that this is a fairly limited problem because you only need to keep changing the call-to-action text and maybe the surrounding text. With enough experimentation, you should be able to improve your click rates. - Low Sales Conversion Rate – Assuming that you are able to get people to open your emails, and click on the links inside those emails, the next step is to get the page that they land on to convert them into buyers. This gets a little tricky because if you are promoting affiliate offers, chances are you did not create that sales page. It was created for you. You either have to take it or leave it. You really have no hand in it. This is going to be a problem. The good news is, by changing the offer as well as changing how you talk about the offer, you may be able to improve your conversion rates.
Keep the five common danger signs above the top of your mind. Otherwise, they might creep up on you and you may end up spending a tremendous amount of time, effort, and energy on email marketing with pretty much nothing to show for it.
Wrapping Up New To Email Marketing
Remember that you have to be motivated by the right values for you to succeed because email marketing, especially if you are new to email marketing, this is because it can be hard on your nerves. It really can be. As an email marketer, you have to go out there, figure out where your customers are, rub digital shoulders with them, and pay attention to what is going on on the ground. Once you have that information, you then have access to the data points you need to build a business system that speaks to existing demands.
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