Why does my email marketing strategy fail?

02/07/2019
  • Why does my email marketing strategy fail?

  • Do you think you could get out more of your email marketing campaigns and you do not know why your strategy fails? This  post clarifies some key points.
  • Don't you get out of your emailing? Do you think that they should convert better? Why does not my email marketing strategy work? These questions are relatively frequent and the answers are simpler than you may think. 

  • No, email marketing is not dead

  • Maybe not for all niches or all companies in the same way, but the truth is that it is one of the strongest strategies....when done right. 
    Users continue to use email extensively, maybe not so much as before the explosion of social networks, but between personal and professional issues, 
    99% of users daily check their accounts. Also, we visit our inbox about 20 times every day on average. Keep in mind that we tend to think that email marketing only reaches users of middle age or older, but stats, as of this report's from Adestra, shows that it is still very alive among young people (14-18 and 19-24). 

  • Among the changes that the famous European GDPR brought, emailing or, rather, capture leads, or subscribers we have done to make our lists, has had to be reviewed carefully for not incurring illegalities that may give us some other annoyance (occasionally serious trouble by the amount of penalties). 
    Other issues matter, not so much use and behavior as we mentioned before, but that related to user´s context who has managed more than one account for long and often has one specifically for records and services management which can generate marketing communications. We can add to this redesign and filters that are applied to e-mail services clients that are becoming more restrictive, as Gmail itself and its automatic folders. But although we tend to see all this very apocalyptic, email marketing works and if yours does not, it may be due to one of the reasons that we are going to go through below. 

  • Why my email marketing strategy does not work?

  • Before finally throwing in the towel, perhaps it is worth to take a look at some of these issues. We will try to shed light on this matter. 

  • #1 – Bad segmentation

  • I have no doubt that, most of cases, if a campaign does not work is either because it is not segmenting well, or at least not enough. 
    In recent year,s we see how online marketing is developing amazingly. It is getting more and more sophisticated, there are techniques, strategies and tools that help us be more effective and disruptors... However, do not forget that the user is also learning because it is part of this evolution. 
    Go over your lists to make sure that they are up to date, keep several of them according to their buying´s behaviour (high recurrence, medium, low buyers, and directly ex-customers),circumstances and attributes. 
    The effectiveness of your campaigns will be much better because it will allow you to deploy different strategies encouraging consumption and moving users among lists. 
    Important: do not get confused with the kind of message and avoid whart happened to Amazon with a communication to a specific list of clients who were expecting a baby but was received by other users. 

  • #2 – You are customizing badly

  • Paradoxically there is nothing less personal than a bad customized email. 
    Most professional email marketing platforms such as
    Mailchimp, Mailrelay and others allow you use a few simple parameters to be able to send the emails addressing users  by name, surname or company (for example). 
    When this implementation is not suitably checked small disasters may occur as the typical: "Hello * |" FNAME | * "it may seem like a small mistake, but the user may laugh or be angry about it." We are getting the opposite effect we wished leaving our intention clear. We can find immediate reactions on Twitter as 
    this user from the screenshot below: 
  • And if it is bad getting the name wrong, it is also bad doing so with the subject (many times we find emails containing the word TEST or similar as the subject) or the public list name which the user belongs to,pay attention to this barbarity revealing a clear ilegality detected by another Twitter user. 
  • Seriously? A mail list with the name "scrapped gmails of Facebook"? Bad, very bad if you are doing something similar,but it cries out to heaven if you have no slight malice.

  • #3 – You still think in desktop computers

  • At this point it may seem obvious, but unfortunately we still find good products, interesting promotions and even well-designed pages that fail in this. 
    Mobile is basic to the user, especially when using electronic mail. Keep in mind that, despite sitting at a  computer screen, push notifications reaching our phone have a magnetic effect, above all due to their immediacy. 
    Please take care of your emails design and, above all, the mobile user´s experience. You need everything to be fluid, images must not exceed a reasonable size which slows downloading, buttons and calls to action big enough(use at ease by the the mail´s recipient) and with a marked mobile intention. 

  • #4 – Regularity is going too far

  • Bombarding people with too many emails in very short periods of time is one of the things that most may back out them.
    In these cases you lose credibility, the user feels harassed and ends up considering you spam, so the abandon rate or 
    churn rate skyrockets. The latter, rather than a consequence, is a symptom you should be concerned about: If users unsubscribe en masse means something is not working well and spam has more chances to be the reason. 
    Rethink regularity and leverages each email to focus on what you have to say, if you publish weekly:
    newsletter, promotions on Mondays, a reminder of the promotion on Thursday and an email on an event on Saturday... 

  • #5 – You do not add value

  • You can be driving the strategy, measuring time, without mistakes, with perfect automations, aligning strategy with other channels... but adding nothing. 
    Every email is an opportunity to impact customer with our knowledge about the niche we work on, updates we launch to market, promotions and discounts that improve client loyalty and reactivate customers. Therefore, do not write senseless, make each opened mail wortwhile. 

  • Do you think you are making any of these errors? Do you think any of them is the reason why your marketing strategy fails? Think about it and get to work!

  • Images | Fotolia, sites and linked users. 

Laia Ordoñez


Laia Ordóñez is a copywriting & eCommerce content marketing expert. She is Content & Marketing Manager at DueHome, a copywriting & content independent advisor, and Oleoshop's blog's editor-in-chief.

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