Is Your Campaign Haunted by the Four Ghosts of Email Marketing?

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Key takeaways

• Don’t treat email marketing as “set it and forget it.” Plan, design, test and collect feedback over weeks or months.
• Use benchmarks to spot trends, but avoid mixing metrics across different campaigns to prevent unrealistic expectations.
• Timing matters but isn’t the single most important factor. Prioritize high-quality, relevant content for always-on mobile audiences.
• Avoid one-size-fits-all blasts, segment your list and tailor content to each group’s needs.
• Design templates, clear CTAs and audience feedback loops as core parts of any campaign.

Introduction

With Halloween right around the corner, chances are there are plenty of spooks, specters, and other frightful apparitions floating around in your daily life. However, did you know that these macabre occurrences can spread into the world of your email marketing operations? To ensure that your upcoming campaigns aren’t haunted by the four ghosts of email marketing – as detailed by Media Post’s April Mullen – let’s spend some time covering these phantom threats and what your brand can do to ensure that it always gets the most out of its email marketing operations.

Email Marketing Is a “Set It and Forget It” Process

The first ghost that haunts most outdated email marketing campaigns comes in the form of assuming that email marketing is a simple, “set it and forget it” process. Yes, sending an actual email is as easy as a click of a button, but delivering an email that actually generates some sort of response from your audience requires quite a bit of work and preparation.

Designing templates, crafting optimized content that appropriately leverages the power of calls-to-action (CTAs), and constantly reaching out to your audience for feedback are just some of the pieces of the puzzle that go into crafting a winning take on inbox outreach campaigns. Simply put, with all of these variables factoring into the process, it can take weeks or even months of advanced planning to properly execute and extract all of the value that comes from a successful email marketing endeavor.

Comparing Benchmarks Across Campaigns

As Econsultancy’s Christopher Ratcliff explains in his look at key performance indicators (KPIs) used by email marketing experts, benchmarking the gains of your campaign is a complex process. Unfortunately, the complexity of these measurements becomes even more exaggerated when you start trying to compare your current campaign with the progress of previous offerings or even the endeavors of your brand’s competitions.

The truth of the matter is that each campaign is a unique foray into the inbox, complete with its own strengths and weaknesses, so letting the specter of comparative benchmarks loom over your progress evaluation is not a winning recipe. Yes, benchmarks are still relevant and should help show upward or downward trends related to audience interaction and response, but try to refrain from “mixing and matching” these metrics between campaigns if possible. Failing to heed this advice could lead to unrealistic expectations and lost opportunities for meaningful inbox content refinement and optimization.

Time of Day Is the Most Important Metric

Speaking of metrics, there’s plenty of talk that honing in on the right time to send your message is the most important factor that determines the success of your campaign. There’s no denying that optimal timing is a nice metric to work around as you plan out the delivery phase of your campaign, but labeling this factor as the “most important” variable indicates a dated viewpoint on how modern consumers interact with their inboxes.

With the advent of mobile viewership, Matt Rosoff of Business Insider reports that 98.4 percent of smartphone owners check their email on these devices at least one to three times a day, with 33.8 percent of these respondents easily breaking the 10 times a day mark. From all of this we can deduce one key point: Picking out a few good times a day to fire off emails is a great addition to an established campaign, but – given the nature of the modern world’s “always on” mobile contact – your brand is far better off focusing instead on quality content that is relevant regardless of the viewing timeframe.

Blasting Away at Your Content List Is a Good Idea

The final ghost of email marketing offering up by Mullen comes in the form of relying solely upon email blasts. Not too long ago, firing off a “one size fits all” message to your entire contact list was the go-to method for reaching out to a target audience. However, this approach is nothing more than a haunting visage of email marketing’s past that simply won’t fade away.

Dissecting your audience into multiple segments and tailoring content exclusively to the needs and desires of these users is a far more effective approach to modern email marketing. If this seems like overkill, it’s important to understand that the inbox is an extremely competitive place; if you’re not able to zero in on the particular pain points of these highly specialized groups within your audience, don’t be surprised when your competition happily slots their content into this value-driven role.

Fortunately, with what you’ve learned here leading the way, the inbox doesn’t have to be a scary place for your brand anymore. As long as you’re willing to take on a modern approach to providing quality content to your audience, there’s no reason why your business can’t say goodbye to these ghosts for good and forge a powerful relationship with the customers that matter most.

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