5 Biggest Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Fix It

Email marketing Hong Kong

Email marketing today is like that relative no one in the family wants to acknowledge exists.

It’s not sexy. It’s not “in”. It’s not “cool”.

What it is, is still one of the BEST digital marketing channels for ROI.

Say what?

Yes, email is not dead. It’s alive and well (and most likely kicks social media’s butt in a showdown).

But it’s just not glamorous anymore.

It’s like driving a hybrid versus driving a fully electric vehicle.

But here’s the thing, email marketing is still one of the most effective and positive ROI marketing strategies you can have.

It’s just many people are doing it wrong.

Here’s the top reasons why your email marketing isn’t working (as well as you’d like) and how to fix it:

You buy email lists, databases, web scraping services

Your boss is throwing a rant about how ineffective your email marketing efforts are and makes you find thousands of email contacts as fast as possible and blast them to “boost” your email marketing efforts. He/she doesn’t care how you come about these emails, just magically make them appear as fast as possible.

You find a vendor that sells you such a list.

You send an email blast to this list and wait for the results to come in…

…nothing happens…except for an avalanche of unsubscribes and angry responses about why you’re emailing these people.

Sound familiar?

I get it, there’s the dilemma of fulfilling what your boss is asking for (despite the fact they know nothing about email marketing) and wondering if this actually works.

The fact is, buying such lists/databases don’t really work (and is most likely breaking a ton of international data privacy laws).

Why?

  1. You don’t know where those contact details came from; many web scraping services will end up populating these lists with emails such as “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”, are these useful emails to you? Highly doubtful.
  2. These people didn’t ask or specifically show interest or give you consent to email them about your product/service
  3. There is no real targeting in this method, you’re really just sending out a bunch of emails to strangers and HOPING something good happens

The solution?

You need to focus on building up your own email list.

That means finding and getting in front of a targeted audience and asking them for permission to email them.

The reason why I see many marketers and business owners reluctant to do this is it’s not that easy for them and it’s not fast enough for them.

If this is you, you should have a look at our Autopilot Leads™ service.

Your email content is boring

“But, nobody reads emails anymore!”

Sound familiar?

This is what I hear all the time. But it’s not really true.

This is just what people keep telling themselves to justify not doing email.

I recently had a chance to speak to a business coach and he off-hand made this comment which I felt was very powerful,

“So, what story are we telling ourselves today?”

Here’s what IS true though, people don’t read BORING emails.

In fact, take a pen and paper and write that down: “People don’t read BORING emails.”

The solution:

There’s a lot of ways to be interesting in your emails and have your email audience craving for your next email.

But let me share my most favourite way of writing interesting emails: incorporate stories into your email content.

The next thing (objection) I hear most often, “But where do I find stories to weave into my emails?”

Let me share one of my top sources for an endless amount of stories:

It’s Reddit.com, or specifically a sub-reddit called “Today I learned”.

Here you’ll find an endless amount of story inspiration (just be sure to do your own research to ensure the story is accurate).

You’re using a free email service provider (you know what I’m talking about)

I’m not going to name names now, but you know who they are, the ones offer a free plan for you to send emails out. 

Hey, I get it, when you’re first starting out, you’re bootstrapping things and need to keep costs low, I get it.

But practically EVERYONE I speak to who uses the most common free email marketing solution on the market complain about how bad it is or how ineffective it is.

And it doesn’t surprise me at all.

I’ll try not to get too technical but these free email marketing accounts have the emails sent from the SAME server (simply a computer that is on and connected to the Internet 24/7).

And what happens is because there’s so many of these “free” user accounts, many people abuse this service (i.e. sending spam emails, sending emails to people who haven’t given permission to receive these emails, etc) and this results in this email server getting a bad reputation.

So, whenever the Gmails, Yahoo’s, etc see emails coming this “bad reputation” server, they’ll block the emails from being received to protect their email account users.

So, from your end, the people you’re sending to, really aren’t receiving your emails or they’re just being put into the SPAM folder and so you think email marketing doesn’t work.

Think of a swimming pool where a lot of people in the pool is peeing in the pool, it just ruins it for everyone else.

The solution:

That’s why PAID email marketing accounts are better because you’re “swimming in a cleaner pool”.

If you want an easy-to-use and reliable email marketing tool, then check out our Grow Email Marketing.

You’re NOT emailing your list enough (didn’t see that coming right?)

The most common objection I hear from people who don’t want to do email marketing:

“I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

“People don’t read emails.”

“I don’t know what to write in my emails, I can’t make it a sales message every time.”

See, that’s simply incorrect.

Go back and see the points I made earlier about why people don’t seem to want emails, they really just don’t want boring and bad emails.

But not emailing your list enough is also a huge detriment to your email marketing efforts.

Let me explain, imagine an acquaintance you met many years ago, you hardly speak to them and all of a sudden one day, they show up at your door asking you for money.

Would you give it to them?

No, you probably wouldn’t.

Why? Because you hardly know them and you hardly hear from them!

Now, if a close friend or family member you see very regularly came asked for some money, you’d be more likely to lend them some money right?

Most likely, because you know them, you have a familiarity with them.

And that’s the same with email marketing.

If you only email your list once a month, do you think people are more likely to read/open and buy from your emails? Or someone who emails their list at least once on a weekly basis?

The solution:

Email frequency really depends on your market and list, but at a minimum I usually suggest at least once per week.

Use my tip above on incorporating stories to find useful/interesting content to put into your emails.

I have a whole training on how to get high-performance email marketing (just contact me for details).

And if you really don’t want to do it yourself, we can do it for you with our Profit Emails service. Just get in touch to see if we’re a good fit.

Conclusion

So, I hope this has helped you see email marketing in a new light and explain why you may not be seeing the results you’d hoped.

Just taking action on any of these items should help you get more performance out of your email marketing.

And if you need any help, just reach out to us for help.

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