Several times a year, we hear at Flywheel that email is dying or dead. But email is not dying because people are no longer using it. In fact, it continues to be our primary form of digital communication for business. Email is dying because of the way businesses mistreat or ignore it on a regular basis. If you do a good job with your email communications program, customers will love email… but too often we see email abused and at death’s door.
Here is how your business could be killing email.
Freezing and Alone
Your website usability is top notch, your digital ads are performing well, and your lead based pages… have no email capture capabilities! Your visitors might be looking for that next step of engagement outside social media, where you could directly communicate with them, effectively track their actions within your site and assist with purchasing decisions. Instead they are left outside without that next step, cold and lost.
Starved to Death
As a stroke of brilliance you set up an email capture form on your home page for digital communications promising great info on your products and services. Time passes and you ignore the list month after month without creating a plan for what you were going to do with all of that valuable contact information. You took the first step and collected emails (which can be paralyzing to some companies), now start using them! Your customers are starving for updates.
Choking on It’s Own Filth
You built your list through smart marketing tactics, days started to pass and in haste you quickly designed an email and sent it out. And it looked exactly like it what it was; rushed, unpolished, and laden with errors. You lost the chance at a great first impression and your brand took a hit. You may have got some clicks, but it’s unlikely those people will come back. Be patient and do it right… beautiful and well-thought out is better than immediate and careless.
Infected
Your list looks great, and the email is designed to perfection so you hit send, only to realize you did not properly test the design and all of the links in a variety of email clients. Your email looks and behaves terribly, like a zombie that thirsts on ruining your brand. We have seen emails go out with subject lines that say “Test”, broken images or links to 404 pages. Make sure you test your email in different email clients and always triple check those links.
The Mass Killer
Some trigger happy marketing exec. saw a great conversion % or sales figure with their email communications and thought they should double the number of emails sent per month. They saturated their customer’s inbox with crap emails with limited quality content or constant ‘deals’. The email then became noise to all those who received it and killed everyone on your list. Maybe a great email plan is the plan you stick with, making small tweaks based on results rather than just rushing to dial it way up. Quality always comes before quantity!
Don’t be a business that kills off email, one bad decision after another. Embrace it as something that can and will give your business life!
Author: Shane Davis
Marketing