“The campaign was a failure”
Social media is full of people claiming instant results from email marketing (well, mine is, it’s also full of campervans, I guess that says a lot about my online activity!). We all want rapid transformations and instant results, especially in business, but there is no magic bullet. To get results, we need to put in time and effort, and email marketing is no exception.
While email marketing, when done correctly, does still offer the best ROI it’s important to me, as a business owner who offers this service, to manage expectations. So, when someone says that “their campaigns have failed” I ask questions.
Who are you writing to?
If you are writing to a new audience you may not know them that well or even at all. If they have signed up to hear from you then you can assume you have a solution to a problem they have. That is a great starting point so your actions from here on in are important.
If you are writing to an existing audience, how often have you engaged with them? when did you last contact them? did they sign up to hear from you or are they scraped from previous enquiries and orders? If you have scraped them from enquiries and orders and had no formal way of collecting consent then my advice would be to send out an initial email explaining what you offer, why you are contacting them and asking them explicitly if they want to stay on your list. Give a clear call to action asking people to update their preferences or unsubscribe. It may feel counterintuitive to ask people to unsubscribe, but there is no point in talking to people who don’t want to hear you. You will end up with a vanity list – a long list of people with little or no engagement.
What do you want to happen?
Every campaign should have a purpose and a desired outcome. However, if the desired outcome is lots of sales from a list who haven’t heard from you in a while you are likely to be disappointed.
To get the best results from your email marketing campaigns you will need a little patience. Nurture your list like it’s a tomato plant. You know that when you sow the seed it’s not going to yield a crop a couple of weeks later, you need to keep it warm, feed and water it, give it light and trim it. Without those things, it will wither and die.
Before rushing in with your big offers start by consistently sharing useful content. Trickle it through it regularly like you’re watering a plant!
Readers need to trust you, and the best way to gain trust is to share content that offers a transformation. It doesn’t have to be anything massive. Going back to the plant analogy, if someone wants to grow tomatoes but doesn’t know how then sharing a few steps on best practices could be transformational for that reader.
Be explicit
If you have a great offer explain how to get it and make it easy. People are generally busy and like you, want an instant response. If you make people jump through hoops to get your offer they probably won’t. Let’s say you have a holiday house and you want to increase the bookings. You offer an exclusive package which includes an irresistible free three-course meal for all the guests, just for booking. The reader is told to “click here to find out more” but that link takes the reader to an enquiry form with no other details. The reader then has to wait for someone to get in touch. That’s annoying and time-consuming for them, they just wanted to know prices and availability so off they go to Airbnb!
Are you stalking your readers?
I’m not suggesting you start hiding behind bushes with binoculars and a long raincoat. You can find out loads of useful information from your email provider software.
The tracking reports will give you great insights into your subscriber’s behaviour as well as how well your campaigns perform. You can check the open rate, click-through rate, conversions, forwards and social shares, time of opening and more. Analysing the reports enables you to adjust campaigns that haven’t performed as well as expected. Sometimes, changing the time of day you send the email could have a big impact on the open rate or tweaking the words in the subject heading could result in more (or fewer) opens. If you want to change your results you have to change what you do and you can’t do that if you don’t know what worked and what didn’t.
Before you can say that a campaign wasn’t a success take a look at the reports. A campaign that had a low click-through rate but over 50% open rate is not a failure it’s a little tomato plant waiting to be nurtured.
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