The Keys to Minimizing Your Email Marketing Regret

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Key takeaways

• Regret in email marketing most often stems from wasted marketing spend and decisions that don’t maximize budget impact.
• Start automation small: automate audience segmenting via surveys/feedback and basic triggered messages (purchase, signup).
• Scale automation gradually so you can reallocate time to strategies that don’t suit automation.
• Ensure your website supports email-driven traffic: mobile responsiveness, bug-free experience and clear information reduce lost conversions.
• A stronger email to site connection can improve conversions and help SEO, amplifying the value of your email spend.

Introduction

No matter what brand your industry calls home or how well you know your audience, there’s most likely been a time in the past when you would have given anything to turn back the clock and yell, “Stop!” as you did something that your organization undoubtedly came to regret. Unfortunately for you and the rest of the email marketing community, there is no rewind button in the inbox.

However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from these lessons and move forward with a game plan that not only minimizes these regretful moments, but helps boost productivity and reach within your contact list at the same time. To help you along this path, let’s talk about some of the best ways to keep your future email marketing decisions on the right side of the regret paradigm.

Understand What Causes Regret

The first place to start reducing the amount of regret you face during your time in the inbox, according to David Baker of Media Post’s Email Insider blog, is by building a healthy understanding of what actually causes regret. While most talking heads in the industry would claim that there is no singular answer to this seemingly nebulous question, Baker suggests that virtually all regrettable email marketing actions come down to one common attribute – wasted marketing spend.

Whether you failed to tailor content to specific segments of your audience, or selected a sub-par email platform to serve as the basis of your operations, all of these decisions factor into money that was improperly allocated as part of your marketing budget. Thankfully, by understanding that the fundamental reason for regret comes from this source, you can ensure that history isn’t bound to repeat itself.

Learn to Automate Properly

So now that we know that almost all regretful outcomes originate from decisions that didn’t maximize your marketing budget, we can start to hone in on ways to optimize your marketing spend and guarantee that you always make your presence felt with customers on the other side of the screen.

One of the best ways to go about this process is by learning to automate the portions of your content strategy that truly benefit from this approach. As the HubSpot Blog’s Erik Devaney explains, there’s nothing wrong with starting off small. Automating the segmenting of your audience via surveys and feedback forms that funnel into your overall contact list is a good place to start, as is the refining of “triggered” content that occurs when individuals make a purchase or join your mailing list.

The best part about scaling up your automated efforts over time is that as you become more and more comfortable with the role of this approach in your standard email marketing operations, you can afford to turn more of your attention toward other practices and strategies that don’t necessarily lend themselves toward automation.

Build a Better Connection Between Your Emails and Your Site

Devaney goes on to point out that supporting your email content with a strong website experience can help limit the amount of wasted potential within your email marketing campaigns. Essentially, having a poor showing on your branded page stands as an indirect cause for marketing spend that doesn’t generate a strong return on your investment.

Think of it this way: You come close to converting a reader into a customer, but end up missing out on this sale because your site isn’t functional or user-friendly. This mishap isn’t directly tethered to the budget you allocate toward email marketing, but it definitely diminishes the positive effects of your spending.

Ensuring that your site is responsive to mobile platforms, resistant to bugs and technical errors, and also offers up vital information for those who make their way from the inbox to this point of the sales process can help minimize the potential for regret and provide you with a steady stream of conversions that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks. This approach can also do wonders for your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, thereby bolstering another portion of your multi-faceted digital presence that contributes to sales and site traffic.

As you can see, minimizing regret requires a keen eye for details and a willingness to start from the ground up in terms of refining your email marketing operations. However, with these tips in hand, as well as a better understanding of the root causes of this kind of regret, there’s no reason why your brand can’t leave these worries in the rearview mirror as it cruises toward a happier – and more profitable – future in the inbox.

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