The Top 10 Mistakes Made By Email Marketers & How You Can Avoid Them

Email marketing isn't new or complex. Yet we see the same mistakes being made over and over again by the marketing executives, sales professionals and owners of small businesses.

They are not able to reap the rewards of email marketing and abandon this potent channel of marketing too early. This is a lose-lose situation for your and your prospects.

If done properly & correctly, email marketing is a very effective medium to generate new leads, and build regular contact with your customers and prospects. It can easily help you generate new sales and meet your targets.

Take care of these top 10 mistakes and you are on your way to new sales!

1. Underestimating current customer list - This is by far the biggest mistake I see. Marketers just disregard their current customer list, and leave money on the table. Even worse, most have no systematic way of capturing their customer's email and contact details in a common list. They are always on the lookout for a fresh list, a competitor's list, or anyone else list, except building and nurturing their own list.

A consolidated customer email list can be easily used to market new products to existing customers or to get repeat orders if done regularly and consistently. Existing customers have seen your product and service before, they know you, and are more likely to buy from you again.

In a study, it was found that all things being equal, people would do business with those they know already. So why waste your list?

2. No specific target - One big, long message for everyone is no longer smart or effective. Nothing works this fast way. Now the trend is to do personalized, 1 to 1 marketing. If your standard message is for all prospects in all industries, chances are that it does not address anyone needs.

It is best to send several small, targeted emails to focus groups, which you can track to see what works in which industry, and who opened which mail. With this powerful arsenal, you can focus your efforts on those chosen few to spend your time upon, and generate sales with a much bigger ROI.

3. Using cheap lists - Using 300,000 emails from a $100 CD is bound to fail. These email addresses are mostly defunct, and most are acquired through snooping and email extraction from forums and websites.

Most will not be from your target market anyway. Just sending a blatant marketing message is a sure-fire way to get yourself banned from major Internet Service Providers. Anti-spamming laws are catching fast in most countries, so beware of such tactics.

You can either buy a good list of your target group from reputed list brokers, or start compiling your own house list of all past and current prospects, customers, vendors, suppliers, contractors to market to them.

4. No system to measure response - Most marketing departments just continue to send out message after message: No measurement of ROI, no evaluation of efforts, and no mechanism to evaluate the response of past messages. No wonder such efforts hardly bring in any results or prospects.

A systematic measurement system is very important. With emails, you can tag each and every link, email account and email sent, so that when it is opened or clicked, you can immediately know who is interested, who is keen to buy, what product, and how eagerly.

With a good measurement system in place, you can call those few that spent time with your message, or on your website, and by knowing their browsing behavior, you can customise future messages for them. Market something that they have shown interest on, and you are closer to another sale.

5. No clear goal or strategy - Start with the right goal and marketing strategy. Your first goal should be to establish trust and credibility within your target market.

Secondly, get the prospect interested enough in what you are selling, so that they are willing to give you their contact information, and trust you to provide them with more information.

Thirdly, your marketing message should be sent out regularly so that the prospect expects it, waits for it, and it shows to them that you are consistent, reliable, and trustworthy.

Remember, marketing exists to generate leads, prospects and help Sales and Delivery teams to close the deals, & not for any other purpose. So focus, and strategize on these lines.

6. Marketing folks don't have time to update anyone about their initiatives - Most of the time, the services folks, the receptionist and other employees of the company are not even aware of what marketing is up to.

So when a prospect calls the office to talk about the offer made in the email, neither the receptionist has a clue, nor the employee from the service department. None has seen the email, and have no idea who to refer this prospect to. They route the calls from one department to another. Here goes another lost sales...

Marketing efforts need to be integrated over the entire organization, and everyone should understand the need & importance of what's going on.

7. Marketing message is inconsistent - Many marketing firms just send out a message, without making sure that it is consistent with the other company collateral. It is not even properly linked to the company's website, and does not incorporate the complete office address, telephone, fax, contact information.

Just giving an email address is not sufficient to build trust and prove that yours is a genuine offer. Make sure you provide full contact information from all the various channels, and don't hide it in fine print. Make it big enough to read without squinting.

8. Boring marketing message or Ad copy - A long repetitive message is no way to capture the prospects attention. You can't watch a boring movie even if you paid for the tickets, so who is going to read your unasked for marketing email if you are not even addressing the problem.

Most messages spend countless paragraphs talking about what they offer, their products, services, and me, me, me. There's nothing in the message to catch the reader's attention. You need to talk about the problems faced by your target market, their industry, and their issues.

Once you establish a bond by acknowledging that you know about their problems, they will be more amenable to your message, and products.

9. Dropping prospects half way - It is a proven fact that a new prospect will take an average of 5-7 different interactions before they build enough trust on you, your company and your products or services before thinking of buying from you.

So if you drop prospects after meeting them once or twice, thinking that they are not qualified or do not seem interested, you are losing sales too quickly.

Continuing to hand hold them and stay in constant contact will help you in the long run, as you will be familiar to the prospect. People love to do business with people they know, and not strangers. Email is the most cost-effective way to stay in touch.

10. Not interested in educating the prospect - The marketers are so focused on sales, that they do not spend enough time with their prospects to educate them. Remember that if you service a prospect well, they will most likely convert to a paying customer sooner or later.

Have patience. Use email to market to them regularly with information, education, free offers etc. until they build enough trust to buy from you.

Conclusion:
Email marketing has been proven time and again, if done correctly. Big companies like IBM, Amazon, HP are using it effectively, and smaller companies are catching up fast in understanding its marketing reach.

With its lows cost, and effectiveness, email marketing helps to build long term relationships with your target audience. Use it wisely, and ye shall reap its rewards!

To your success in Email Marketing,

Vinai Prakash