Email marketing is known as one of the most effective marketing techniques out there. It’s one of the most customizable marketing strategies available, and can be adapted to fit almost any need in any industry. That’s not to say that it’s always easy, of course. Indeed, there are certain challenges that an email marketer will run into at one point or another.
In order to best leverage your marketing potential, it’s important to understand where some of these common challenges lie and how to overcome them. Today, we’re looking at the top five challenges of email marketing.
Attracting New Subscribers
Sure, your current subscribers are (hopefully!) loyal and enjoy reading your emails. This isn’t something you should take lightly, as customer loyalty is crucial. However, the truth is that it’s difficult to grow your email marketing potential if you aren’t attracting new subscribers.
New readers are one of the most important elements of any campaign, and you might find your efforts stagnating without them. Recent research shows that attracting new subscribers is the number one challenge facing email marketers.
If you find yourself at a loss for how to attract new subscribers, don’t panic! There are things you can do to overcome this issue. The most important thing is to have a clearly defined benefit to receiving your emails. Why should people subscribe to your email list? What do you offer them that others don’t? Breakdown the benefits of your business for potential subscribers, and be explicit. This will help you grow your list organically instead of purchasing subscribers.
Understanding Your Customer
It’s not always easy living in a world run by numbers. Too much information is almost as detrimental as too little, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the data that comes your way. This, in turn, makes it surprisingly easy to lose focus on the important things about your customers.
To overcome this issue, make sure to utilize your email marketing service! Whether it’s a company or a software, chances are you’ll be able to find the following information about your subscribers:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Purchase Information
Locate this information, and use it to help refine your marketing efforts in order to better appeal to your audience.
Using Your Customer Data
So you understand the importance of having accurate customer data, and you even know where to look for it. But, do you know how to effectively use it? This is a big challenge facing many email marketers. Simply being in possession of customer data isn’t worthwhile if you don’t understand how to utilize it.
One of the best ways to use your data is via a newsletter! Newsletters are a fantastic way to catch the attention of your customers. As well, this allows marketers to showcase all of the hard work they’ve been doing. Use the data to determine what kinds of subjects will interest your users the most, and then create newsletters around that content.
Remember that you can even tease topics in a newsletter, then release the full pieces via your email marketing campaign.
Creating Email Content
Another major issue facing email marketers is the content creation process. This can be a tedious activity that many find overwhelming, but it’s one of the most important things you can do as an email marketer. Luckily, there are some surefire ways to jumpstart this process and keep it going throughout the campaign.
First of all, accept that creating great content takes time, and plan to do so accordingly. Content creation isn’t something that can be done in the blink of an eye. Allow your employees time to research interesting data and write relevant content for your campaign.
Once you have some excellent content, remember that you can always repurpose that information and use it in a new way; turn it into an infographic, use it for your website or even take information from your website and repurpose it for email marketing. You can also utilize user-generated content such as reviews, testimonials, comments or social media interactions in your campaign. This is probably the most cost-effective way to create trustworthy content.
Avoiding the Dreaded “SPAM” Label
One of the most frustrating prospects facing email marketers is the thought that their hard work will be for nothing thanks to the spam filter.
To avoid being tossed in the spam folder, there are some common words and phrases to avoid. These include the following:
- Free
- Contest
- Win
- Deal
The plight of an email marketer is not always an easy one, but with the tips above, hopefully you’ll find it a rewarding journey!
