The other day, I came across an upcoming webinar I would really like to have been a part of through an online ad. After reading the landing page pitch, I entered my personal information and my email address and received an automated email response. Although I was initially very excited to be a part of this webinar, that soon waned. You see, the automated email response included a link to a software homepage, as opposed to a link to the webinar. Furthermore, there were no instructions as to how to join this webinar – would we be receiving a further email the day of the webinar? Is there a code we have to enter somewhere? To make matters worse, the automated email came from a no-reply email; which means there was no easy way to contact someone in charge who could correct these errors.
Now, I did manage to reach someone in charge of email marketing at this organization after some clever (albeit lengthy) navigation on the company’s LinkedIn page; but I have good reason to doubt many other people in my situation would take the same steps. What’s important to note here is how quickly email automation can go wrong for you. The company in question here paid for ads, created an appealing landing page, got people engaged enough to complete a form only for their entire campaign (attending a webinar) falling apart due to poorly implementing their email automation.
Like many other busy marketers, I know how important email automation is towards meeting your marketing goals. It probably is the most efficient way to nurture your prospects and close more business online. That being said, if email automation is not implemented properly, it will swerve off course like a ship without a rudder, leaving you stranded in the middle of the ocean or worse, crashing into land! Unfortunately, many companies are still making basic mistakes in their email automation strategies. Following is a distilled list of what I consider to be the biggest no-nos.
Not Testing Properly
If there is one lesson we can take away from the automated email marketing campaign described above, is that each and every one of your email campaigns needs to be properly vetted. Clearly, the team behind the webinar campaign didn’t test the campaign properly, therefore I would expect the campaign to struggle to hit its goals. When we speak about testing though, we can’t simply talk about making sure the links are correct and working, scanning your copy for spelling and grammar errors and making sure the style looks great. You must really test everything to do with your email automation sequences, from the infrastructure of the automation like your personalization tags to email time and frequency. The last thing your email automation campaign needs is sending multiple emails to the wrong people. Make sure you are sending professionally crafted, frequent, relevant and timely emails to engaged audiences.
Not Including An Obvious Call To Action
So, you worked hard to get your ideal prospect to sign up to your email updates – and that’s great. You have a wealth of knowledge that you want to share with them. Sharing information is one of the best ways to build a relationship with prospects in your sales funnel. That said, your email automation strategy should want your readers to do something for you – this may ask them to shop for fall/winter styles if you are a clothing retailer, or download a white-paper on running successful digital advertising campaigns during the holidays. If your email automation objectives include getting your prospects closer to a sale, then make sure that your emails include a very obvious call to action. This could be something as simple as a link to a specific page on your website or ask them to watch a video. Whatever you chose to include, make sure it is clear and very obvious to them.
Not Timing Emails Properly
With respect to timing, it is recommended you start frequently and then increase the intervals between your content as time goes on. If you are a math wiz like me, you may have heard of the Fibonacci Sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …); it basically is a sequence that expands over time. To give you an example, your first sequence would be one message on one day, then one message every two days, then one message every three days and so on and so forth. That’s one way to do it. Another way to time your automated emails is by offering a series; for example, you can send interested readers an 8 part series on “How To YouTube: everything you need to know about launching, branding and marketing a YouTube channel successfully”. This kind of content can be delivered to your readers quickly, and expand the intervals between messages from there. Both are good ways to communicate with the prospects who have just recently expressed an interest in what you do but also keep in touch over time so that when they do become interested in your service or would like to investigate purchasing product, you are still keeping in touch with them.
Not Updating Your Content
This might be a greater problem for businesses that have a long history with email automation, but it goes without saying that the content you are sending out, or have scheduled, needs to be fresh. Think about the content you have created in the last 6 months. If you were to send a brand new prospect one of your blog post, would you send them an article written a week ago, or five months ago? Obviously, you would send them the former. It goes without saying that you need to keep on top of every landing page that you have, all the lead generation assets that you have, as well as every sales or lead funnels you have, and regularly review all the automated email campaigns you have coming off the back of it. Keep in mind, the first 30 days of your automated email campaign is your best selling opportunity. Leads go from hot to cold during this time. Therefore, you must maximize your follow-up within that time frame. Make sure that any automated emails scheduled to go out, are of the most relevant value to the reader.
Final Thoughts
Automated email marketing is still relatively new, so it’s only natural that it can take quite some time before you establish a good rhythm. While these may not be the only mistakes out there, they appear to be among the most common and avoiding them could be the tipping point between meeting (or exceeding) your goals, and failure. Email automation is a powerful tool that can really scale your efforts but it will only bear fruit if you have a proper plan and are creating and sending your prospects content with a defined purpose. If you stay clear of these rather obvious mistakes, your email automation campaign will see your ROI increase. Those are my thoughts on the matter, now over to you. What are some of the worse offenses you have seen from automated email campaigns? I would love to read them in the comments area below.
