Mistakes that are killing your email-marketing conversions

Back in the 2000s, nobody received any email at all — that is, email marketing was highly effective. In my experience, I had 60% open rates on campaign emails and reached 80% with transactional emails! That scenario clearly changed. The amount of spam increased exponentially and email communication lost the effectiveness it had before. Open rates around 20% nowadays are a rare thing. Email providers introduced strict rules for spam control and, if today you do not work with Return Path, a good list-hygiene process and opt-in, you will have little effectiveness. For these and other reasons, here are some of the reasons that are killing your email-marketing conversions and what you can do for each situation.

Emails that do not reach recipients When you send an email-marketing campaign to a large email list, it is quite likely that a percentage of it will not receive what was sent. That happens because some emails may be deactivated or have incorrect addresses, reject your email’s content, or have your IP blocked by providers. Whatever the reason, there are tools that reduce these bounce rates using records of fluctuations. Those records should drive changes and point your email program in a positive direction. Also called return path, these programs indicate where those returns are coming from and how to deal with them. Doing list hygiene, cleaning addresses that return emails, should be a frequent task to improve your conversion rates. There is some information that most email-marketing tools provide and that is very important for list maintenance:

• Hard bounces: emails considered invalid. That includes those that once existed and ceased to exist, those indicated wrongly on purpose, and also emails with typing errors;

• Soft bounces: valid emails, but that for some reason could not be delivered. The reason is normally that the inbox is full;

• Spam complaints: indicates that the user was bothered and believes your company did not have the right to send that email to them;

• Unsubscribe requests: it is every company’s obligation to offer in the emails sent an unsubscribe option. That means the user no longer wants to receive these messages.

With that information in hand, it becomes easy to keep the list clean. Just remove, before each send, users who already had hard bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribe requests. Most good email-marketing sending tools already do all of that automatically. Language that is too commercial Have you noticed how similar most of the messages that arrive in your inbox are? Sales-focused language, overselling the product as if it were the best thing the client will have in life, most of the time is tiring and unappealing. Unless you do it differently, your email will be just one more lost in a large list of messages. To avoid sounding that way, seek to make your emails always more personal and personalized, using names and talking like a friend. Start by talking about the client’s needs and problems, and not about how fantastic your solution is. Not using calls to action If you are working with a landing page, a blog, or an email, calls to action should always be present in your strategy. It is only through them that you will get a greater number of conversions and use the content to take your client to the next stage of the sales funnel. Use clear and objective calls to action, highlighted from the content, but that fit the context. What do you want to achieve with this content? Launch an event? Get your client to sign up for other content? Make a sale? Direct all the text and images toward that objective.

Overusing images Your first instinct will probably be to pack your email content with captivating, beautiful images that catch your client’s attention. The thing is that a large share of the people who receive your email will have images deactivated. In that case, will your message still make sense?

That does not mean you should not use images. What matters is taking care to leave the text understandable without the accompanying images, as well as completing the images’ alt text with words that describe exactly what is being displayed. Not matching the client’s expectations If your clients signed up for your newsletter, that means they are expecting a specific type of content, at the frequency that was promised to them. If you stray too far from that topic or send emails more often than had been promised, there is a good chance clients will unsubscribe from your list. Beyond that, even if clients are expecting given content, if your emails become repetitive in terms of content, there is also a chance they will become uninteresting. It is important to find the balance between what your clients are expecting and the best way to surprise them, both in email marketing and in other channels. For that, it is necessary to have calm and balance, selecting the right channels for your objectives. Being omnichannel is not always a good thing.