Email marketing is a goldmine for B2B businesses to engage with customers and increase revenue. So, your email marketing strategy can either make or break your communication efforts.

However, many small businesses still struggle to generate great results with their email marketing. This article will break down some of the common email marketing mistakes you could be making that are hindering your success.

1. Little to no personalization

The most common mistake some marketers make with their email campaigns is sending generic emails.

Studies show that customers are more likely to click on emails if it is more personalized and targeted to their needs or interests. No wonder customized emails have a 139% increase in click-through rates compared to generic emails.

Email personalization also reduces the rates of canceled subscriptions and boosts revenue. They build trust, thus increasing engagements and generating higher ROI.

What to do?

• Use automation tools like SharpSpring to segment and gather customer data. These tools also help with personalizing emails. The more personal the content of your email is, the higher the success rate.
• You can also program your tools to recognize and send special occasion emails, like birthday wishes, discount offers, or product recommendations.

2. Limited knowledge of your audience

Most email marketing tactics fall flat due to inadequate audience data. If you do not know your customers and what makes them tick, it will be challenging to create content that speaks to them.

What to do?

Do ample market research to identify who your target audience is. What are their interests? Their pain points? Where do they hang out? Who are they?

Once you understand all the basics about your targets, communicating with them becomes easier.

3. Your content is lacking

If your content adds no value to your audience, you may lose their interest. Relevant and helpful email content ideally addresses their needs and challenges, providing appropriate solutions. Many marketers send generic or salesy emails that often come off as spam when delivered.

What to do?

Even if the end goal is to sell your product/service, your email content does not have to sound too “salesy.” Instead, think of the reader on the other end as someone you’re having a conversation with. Then write your email as one who knows what to do and is willing to help.

Writing for email is like writing for the web. So, you might want to consider investing in good copywriters.

A few tips for creating great email content:

• Identify a clear goal for each email. Subsequently, close your email with a well-written call to action.
• Each email should focus on a specific message to not overwhelm readers with information. Aim to provide solutions rather than outright selling. Let your focus be on the action you intend to invoke.
• Optimize your content for better readability, be specific. Use short, well-structured sections and highlight different ideas distinctly.
• Use positive, conversational language and avoid overusing block letters, or it makes your content sound aggressive.
• Include visuals to liven up your content and get your point across faster. Research shows that the human brain process images 60,000 times faster than text.

4. You’re not A/B testing your emails

Email marketing is not "one-size-fits-all ."So, you must test your campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t. Without A/B testing data, optimizing your email marketing campaigns for the best results is harder.

What to do?

• Create variations of your email (templates, content, media) to see which one performs better.
• Highlight critical segments of your emails and A/B test them separately as needed. Tools like Litmus are essential for such processes and can help you create fully optimized emails.
• Regularly analyze testing data to identify sections that need improvement.

5. You’re not tracking and measuring

For some email marketers, their work ends when they hit send. No wonder their email marketing campaigns are not effective. Not measuring or tracking your results means you do not know what works or needs improvement.

As such, you would probably experience reducing ROI for your email marketing.

What to do?

Set goals and KPIs for each email. Then prioritize your analytics data to show whether those goals are being achieved. Automation tools usually come with such capabilities as well. That way, you can devise new strategies to improve your email marketing effectiveness.

Some important KPIs include:

• The open rate of your emails could indicate how interesting your headline is.
• Your click-through rates as they indicate how well readers engage with your content.
• Unsubscribe rates, as they indicate that your content or emails schedule is slipping.

6. You’re sending too many emails, or too few

Bombarding your subscribers with too many emails can be off-putting. Worse still, it could land your emails in the spam folder. Meanwhile, sending too few emails makes you forgettable and disengages your audience. These scenarios could affect your engagement and thus affect your email marketing effectiveness.

What to do?

• Work with pre-set schedules and tailor them according to your customer behavior and profile. For example, a SaaS customer does not need as many targeted emails as a fashion retailer, so that email frequency would be lesser.
• Use A/B testing to find out the most optimal times to reach out to customers.
• Maintain consistency. It pays for your audience to know when to expect to hear from you.

7. You have no clear calls to action

Calls to action (CTAs) are important because they guide your customers to the next stage of your sales funnel. Without CTAs, your content becomes a dead end, and you, therefore, run the risk of losing potentially valuable customers.

What to do?

Include relevant calls to action on every piece of content you write. What do you want them to do with the content you just provided? Visit a webpage? Make a purchase? Place a call? Donate? Whatever it is, find a catchy way to encourage them to act.

Furthermore, make it prominent and ensure appropriate placement.

Conclusion

An effective email marketing campaign is an excellent way to engage, nurture, and convert your leads. So, to reduce your failure rates with this strategy, these are some of the common mistakes to avoid.

Instead, pay attention to your target audience's needs, be personal, and test often. That way, you remain relevant to your customers and know how to improve.

To create and execute an effective email marketing strategy, reach out today and find out how we can help your business.