6 Warning Signs Your Email Marketing Is Scaring Away Subscribers

Email marketing has been around for more than two decades now, and it’s here to stay.

In fact, its stake in the success and failure of an online business is growing larger every day. That’s why every online marketer is focusing on building a large email list. After all, the bigger the list, the more the conversions, given that you are not spamming your customers.

But adding new subscribers to your list won’t help if the old ones keep leaving your list quickly.

So here’re six brutal mistakes that are scaring away your subscribers.

1. Sending too many emails

It’s tempting to assume that sending more emails will increase the chances of subscribers buying from you but that’s actually not the case. The more, the merrier doesn’t always hold true.

According to a survey by Technology Advice, 43 percent of email subscribers want businesses to email them less frequently.

Source: Chadwick Martin Bailey

But to avoid over-mailing, you shouldn’t sacrifice your conversion rate by under-mailing either. The best way to decide the optimal number of emails your business should send is through A/B tests.

Further, you may find that different segments prefer emails at a different frequency, in that case, you can tailor your send volume for each segment accordingly.

Also, here are some specific questions to ask yourself before sending an email:

Is your email providing any real value to your subscribers?

Is it tailored to your subscriber’s email preferences?

How does the email response rate vary for your previous emails for different lists?

Another best practice to consider before implementing a frequency capping, is giving your subscribers an option to pick how many times they want to hear from you.

Remember, there’s no rule regarding the number you can send. Just be mindful of the customer journey and make sure your emails are enhancing the customer experience rather than hindering it.

2. Using clickbait subject lines

When it comes to email, subject lines play a crucial role in determining your open rates. No matter how good your emails are, if your subject lines are boring, your open rates will suffer. So, it goes without saying that they need to be catchy and creative to capture your recipient’s attention.

Now, don’t be tempted to over sensationalize your subject lines or add keywords that aren’t related to your message to induce more opens.

Why? Because catchy subject lines are good at grabbing your recipient’s attention and increasing your open rates, but they’ll only take the desired action if you offer them what they’ve been promised. Nobody likes to feel deceived.

So avoid using misleading subject lines to retain your subscribers on your list.

Here’s an example of a clickbait subject line:

Losing your subscribers trust to increase your email open rate isn’t worth the risk.

3. Treating every subscriber in the same way

One size never fits all, but when it comes to email marketing, most marketers are still sending the same messages to everyone on their list. Though batch and blast is the quickest and easiest way to earn money from your emails, it can erode your email marketing conversions very quickly, as too many generic emails force subscribers to jump off your ship.

Instead, send personalized emails based on a subscriber’s preferences and behavior on your site. Also, segment your list based on all the data you have about your subscribers.

Most marketers are only doing basic segmentation based on the geography, gender, or the acquisition source. To personalize effectively, you’ve got to segment on deeper levels. So leverage all the data you have about a user to craft hyper-personalized messages.

Given below is a study conducted by us. We sent 1000 plus emails, a non-personalized mailer to one batch and a personalized one to another batch, the personalized version received both better open and response rates.

4. Focusing only on promotion

Marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention says a Gigaom Research.

Rather than using email marketing to increase your bottom line, use it as a medium to engage your customers and build customer loyalty. Yes, your ultimate goal is to promote and sell your product, but if you want to get better results from your email-marketing program then take a step back and focus on engaging your customers.

Why it matters?

When you keep your subscribers engaged, they’re much more likely to open each and every email (including promotional ones) they receive from your brand. And once a subscriber starts engaging with your emails they’re more likely to convert through them.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage and ultimately convert prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers. Provided you’re not taking it for granted by simply sending batch and blast emails.

5. Not giving subscribers what they wanted

People will join your list and they will unsubscribe too, some churn is unavoidable. But it’s your duty to ensure that they aren’t leaving because they are merely being treated as an email address.

In order to retain them with your business, you need to send them the right message at the right time and with the right content.

Give people what they’re looking for, or get ignored.

If you have a high unsubscribe rate, find ways to fix it. Here are some of the reasons, which are responsible for driving your subscribers away.

• Unmet expectations
• High email frequency
• Poor email design
• Lack of personalization
• Poor email copy

6. Lack of intelligent email remarketing

The quickest way to annoy customers is to ask them to do something, which they have already done. And, with remarketing emails, this happens most of the time. Why? Because today, your customer touch points are spread across multiple devices, and a lack of coordination between various marketing channels can sometimes lead to loss of marketing opportunities and customer churn.

At times, poor segmentation is the reason that leads to a higher churn rate. If you don’t get your segments right, then you will end up sending irrelevant emails to your subscriber base. For example, sending an email with a discount on a product that customer has just purchased. It happens all the time.

Email remarketing is very powerful. But if you are not using it strategically it’ll sink your boat. Invest in a marketing automation platform that gives you access to a single customer view so that you have a complete picture of your customers.

Email marketing wrap

Building a large email list takes a lot of time and resources. So, if you’re making any of these mistakes mentioned above, it’s time to fix your leaking funnel.

Guest Author: Reshu Rathi is the Digital Marketing Manager at Betaout, a customer segmentation and marketing automation platform for e-commerce. Her job is to create content & marketing campaigns to help e-commerce marketers personalize their marketing & increase conversion. When she’s not working she spends her time in reading and running not simultaneous although that’d be very impressive. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on Linkedin

The post 6 Warning Signs Your Email Marketing Is Scaring Away Subscribers appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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How to Tie Marketing Metrics to the Data that Boards, CxOs, and Investors Really Care About - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

SEOs and executives speak different languages. It’s a simple fact, but it’s one that often acts as a blocker for getting your ideas and investments approved. A simple change in how you communicate your marketing goals, triumphs, and challenges could be what’s standing between you and getting the C-suite buy-in that’s integral to your success. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps you translate your marketing jargon into financial metrics and data that the folks in charge will actually care about.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about tying marketing metrics that marketers use to the things that CEOs, CXOs, whatever the C-level titles that you’ve got are, investors, board members, to the metrics and data that they care about.

This is a problem that I’ve talked about with many marketers over the last few weeks, especially at some conferences and events where folks say, “Hey, we’ve got our metrics dialed in. We know what we’re doing. But when we present it to the Board, or when we present it to our CMO, or our CEO, when we show it to our investors, not only do they not get it, it’s like we’re not speaking the same language, and therefore we’re not able to have a conversation productively about where investment should and shouldn’t be made, and they’re not able to give input into whether they think our idea is a good one, or whether they think there’s a good return on investment there.” This can be tough.

Start with the metrics that marketers care about

So what happens is you’re a marketer, you’re presenting here to your Board of Directors or to your executive team, and you say, “Hey look, we’ve got traffic growing in every category. SEO is up. Social is up. We’ve grown our link profile, which is going to help us with search, all these great things.” Fantastic, but the Board is sort of sitting there like, “Well, I don’t really know how to contribute, and how does that tie in to higher lifetime value of customers, because that’s the thing that I know and the thing that I care about, and I’m not sure this marketer person is really investing in the right kind of ways for the organization.”

That sucks. As a marketer, that totally sucks, because it means that you are not communicating your message, and that means you’re not going to get, you’re unlikely to get buy-in from all these people that you really care about and need their permission and their acceptance in order to make the investments you need.

The thing is, marketers are very focused on the funnel.

We care about metrics that show top-of-funnel growth. We care about which channels send that top-of-funnel traffic. We care about how people are moving through the funnel. We want to see conversions and conversion rate, which is why we work so much on conversion rate optimization, and we care about marketing metrics that predict better retention or greater recidivism, meaning people are buying again or coming back and becoming customers again.

This is our world and we live in it. It does translate okay, decently to the Board level.

Translate marketing metrics to the financial ones that investors care about

But if you think about what folks care about at the highest levels of a company’s strategic imperatives — that could be a Board of Directors, could be investors, could be C-level folks — they’re really focused on things like market size, meaning: How big is our addressable market? Who could we potentially reach? What if we run out of those people — can we keep growing? Are more of them coming into the fold, or are people exiting this market and going somewhere else?

They care about cost of customer acquisition. How much does it cost us to get one new customer?

They care about customer revenue, the revenue that we actually get from those customers that we’re bringing in, whether that’s going up, and overall growth rate. Are we getting more customers over time? Is that rate of growth expanding, meaning acceleration?

They care about customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value is something that pretty much every metric we calculate as marketers should tie back to that, especially when we’re having conversations with these kinds of people. Essentially it is when a new customer comes in and they make any kind of purchase from us, they spend any type of dollars with us — a product, a service, a subscription, whatever it is — how much do we get over their customer lifetime? Meaning if it’s an e-commerce play, it could be the case that they come and they buy five things from us over the course of two years on average, and that dollar total is $360, and 40% of that is gross margin for us. Essentially, the rest is cost of goods. Okay, that’s customer lifetime value.

Or if you have a subscription business, like Moz is a subscription business, if you subscribe to our tools, we’ll charge you $99 a month or $149 a month. I think on average our customer lifetime value is essentially $120 times the average customer lifetime span, which is somewhere around 11 months all in. So it’s that number multiplied out. So $1200 or $1300, somewhere around there, that’s customer lifetime value.

That doesn’t actually count recidivism, people who quit and then come back again. We’re trying to get to that metric, and we need it, because you want to be able to speak to true customer lifetime value. This is sort of the underpinning of all the rest of this.

But other things these folks are going to care about, comparison of cohorts. So it’s not the case that all customers are exactly the same. You know this as a marketer, because you know that it costs you a different amount of money to acquire folks through one channel, and they perform differently than folks who are acquired through a different channel. You know that different cohorts of personas, for example, people let’s say who work in an agency versus who work in-house, maybe those are two different kinds of people that you serve in a B2B model. Or you know that folks who are higher income versus lower income spend different amounts at your e-commerce shop, that type of stuff. That comparison is very interesting to these folks as well.

Another comparison that matters is a competitive comparison. How big are we, how big are they? How fast are they growing, how fast are we growing? What’s their customer lifetime value, what’s ours? What’s their retention and recidivism rate, what’s ours? Those things, massively interesting to this group as well.

Then there’s a bunch of other stuff that they care about, like cost of goods and teams and market dynamics, etc. Marketers generally don’t touch that stuff and don’t usually need to worry about it.

But the solution to our problem here is to speak this language.

So let’s go back to our initial story.

Instead of saying, “Here’s traffic growth from all these different channels, and here’s how we’re investing in search, versus social, versus paid ads, versus trade shows,” all this kind of stuff, what we want to say is something like, “Hey, here’s the traffic from SEO, and here’s the traffic from social, and as those have been growing, our cost to acquire a new customer has been falling, because those channels are organic, and that means we don’t pay each time we get a new customer from them. We only pay for the upfront investment in sweat equity, creativity, engineering needs, web engineering needs, and whatever we’re doing. But then it keeps paying dividends, and because of that you can see this CAC falling as our search traffic has risen.”

Now you have the attention of these folks. Now you’ve engaged them in a way that they care about, because they say, “Aha, more organic search, lower cost to acquire a customer,” — which is great because CLTV to CAC ratio, the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, this ratio right here, is something that every investor, every Board of Directors member, every CXO cares deeply about. It’s the underpinnings of the company. That’s what makes a profitable company work and what gives it the ability to grow. When you speak their language, you get this type of response.

So what I’m going to urge you to do as a marketer is to take any metric, any data point, any story you’re trying to tell around return on investment, around a project you have, and turn it into something that makes sense to the group of people that you’re talking to, especially if that’s strategic-level. You want to tie those to tangible improvements or to issues. It could be problems. It may not be just positive things. It could be negative things too, in the areas your CXO or Board or investor cares about.

So let’s imagine — and this is a conversation that many, many folks have — they say to me, “Rand, we want to hire an SEO consultant, or we want to bring an SEO in-house full-time, but we’ve been having trouble getting buy-off from our CEO or our CMO or our Board.”

Well, let’s change the conversation. Instead of, “We need to hire an SEO consultant because SEO is really important, search engines send a lot of traffic, and search traffic is something we’re not competing in well right now,” to, “CAC is high. CAC is too high. Our cost to acquire a new customer right now is too high, and our CLTV is too low for customers that we buy via paid search. So we’re spending a lot of money on paid ads right now, and the customers we get via that have this high customer acquisition cost, because we have to spend money to get them, and the CLTV isn’t as high because customers who come through paid, on average, usually tend to underperform compared to those who come through organic. It’s just a fact of who clicks on ads versus who clicks on organic results. But, if we ranked organically for more of these keywords, and we could get more SEO traffic compared to our PPC traffic, we could stop (a) losing those searches to our competitors, who are outranking us now, and (b) we would bump up the CLTV and we’d be lowering cost of customer acquisition.”

Boom. You have changed the conversation to something that this group of folks really gets, and you’ve made it much more likely that they are going to say yes to your proposal.

Same thing here. Let’s say you say, “Hey, we’re going to do something crazy. We want to actually spend more on trade shows, on events, on speaking, on going places physically in-person. It’s expensive. We don’t reach as many people as we do over web channels or over traditional ad channels, but we’ve been getting good customers via events.”

That’s a real tough sell unless you do this. “Dear Board, here’s a comparison of customers acquired via our five major marketing channels. Here’s SEO, here’s PPC, here’s our Facebook ads, here’s organic social, and this is events. You can see cost to acquire, you can see lifetime value, you can see the ratio, and you can see the numbers of folks that we’ve gotten via each of those channels and the revenue they bring in.”

Awesome. Now, repeat buyers and referrals are so much stronger from events, from this group over here, that even though it costs much more, the math works out that it is the best investment we can make over the next couple of quarters. We want to bring this up by two or threefold, and if we keep seeing continued investment or continued metrics in the same way we have the last few months, we’re going to have the highest positive ROI from that investment versus any of these other channels.

Awesome. Change the conversation, made it something these folks understand. Speak their language, and you get the buy-in you want.

All right, everyone, look forward to your comments and thoughts, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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