Content Marketing Strategy Mistakes
Email marketing is a complicated aspect of a content marketing strategy, no doubt about it. You are dealing with so many moving variables at once. The most important thing in this equation is your leads. We want them all to like us, love our products and services, and purchase from us not once, but many times. So how do we keep their attention and avoid triggering unsubscribes during the process of communicating with them? There are a few things to consider in the planning of your email marketing. How often should you send emails to your leads? What type of information should you be sending to them? What happens if someone does unsubscribe? We’ve outlined need-to-know factors below:
The Cadence of Your Emails
How often are you sending emails to your leads? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Be very mindful of the frequency of your sends. If your unsubscribes are astronomically high, try backing off a little and see if they slow down. The optimal method to set a frequency to your emails is by the stage of the lifecycle the lead is currently in.
If your leads are in the beginning of their product or service discovery phase, give the lead more information on differentiating factors in your product or service, as well as alleviators to their pain points. This is the point in time where you want to be very careful about how often to email. It is like in the beginning of dating, where you don’t want to seem too needy. As they move down the pipeline you can deliver messages more frequently on more specifics, like price and timelines. If the lead is not opening your messages, slow it down or change your subject lines.
Your Content is Not Relevant
Are you actively watching your lead’s behavior? Do you have nurture campaigns set up for segmented behavior, rather than a generic lead nurture campaign that you dump everyone into? People want to know they are individuals and that they have their own personal needs and wants. If you have an ecommerce site and you know a lead has been checking out a particular product, but has not purchased, it is the perfect time for you to send them more options or remind them that the product is still available. Don’t send the same emails to your entire database, because that can quickly take a great marketer into Spammer territory.
Failing to Personalize
Do your email marketing efforts begin with “Dear Valued Friend,” or “Hey There?” Unfortunately, your prospects are on to the fact that you didn’t take the time to personalize the message. Seth Godin once said “I don’t want email, I want me-mail” – and as usual, he was right. The more personal you can make your messages, the better – call people by name, and tailor your communications to their interests.
Thinking All Unsubscribes are Bad
As an entry-level marketer, I used to look at my unsubscribe rate, and wish and hope that it would be as low as possible. Now, I don’t mind when I see a slightly higher percentage. If a lead unsubscribes from my messaging, I know that he or she was not my target market. The lead quality of your segment improves as you shake off the dead weight of those unqualified leads. In some cases, unsubscribes are simply evidence that the sales cycle is a funnel, not a tunnel. In addition to having your lead quality go up, your deliverability rate will also go up because people are not reporting you for spamming them. Instead, they can simply unsubscribe.
Nurturing your leads into a sale is a hard job, but somebody’s got to do it and why not take the credit for the ROI of your brainpower and your marketing automation system? You should always be working to perfect your emails, drip campaigns, and automated efforts.
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