Email marketing is thriving, though it doesn’t mean there are not challenges out there. Below are the top eight biggest enemies of a successful email marketing campaign.
Unroll.me
This startup makes it easy to “unsubscribe” from emails, though it really just pushes them to a folder where users won’t see and interact with them. So the person remains in your database but never sees your emails, messing with your open rate.
Creative lag
Technology provides great tools for triggering re-targeting emails based on web, social and even in-store activity of targets. But what’s the point if you’re just going to blast the same message in response?
A lack of proofing and quality control
Not all enemies are external. While marketing departments can create overkill by having ten people review an email before it’s sent, the opposite – one person creates and sends – is much more disastrous for a business.
A dirty database
There’s no use emailing a customer when you have their long-forgotten email address or there’s a typo in the self-entered data. That’s why it’s important for marketers to clean their databases regularly and ensure that all of their data is up-to-date and accurate. Failing to do so can result in a waste of time and resources.
No scheduling checks and balances
Sometimes, there are multiple departments or multiple individuals working with the same database. When there isn’t sound scheduling or communication, the result can be multiple emails going to the same audience within minutes or hours of each other.
Gmail filtering
Gmail rarely introduces a feature that so dramatically impacts a user’s inbox, but when it introduced filtering, effectively presorting emails into a main inbox, social, and promotions, it moved marketing messages further away from recipients eyeballs.
Disposable email
A google search finds dozens of companies that churn out random emails you can use to give to companies and organizations that require one to conduct business with you.
The emergence of chat
While Millennials still prefer to hear from brands via email, there is no doubt that chat apps like WhatApp, Facebook Messenger, and others threaten to monopolize users’ communications activities. Chat and other frictionless communications threaten the time spent in inbox and will continue to do so.
