According to recent reports, a staggering 3.7 billion people worldwide use email. That may come as a surprise, but if you think about it, you need to have an email address to do most interactive things online – from signing up to purchasing a product or service.
With the recent GDPR update, many businesses have reduced their email marketing strategies. However, this form of direct marketing is still extremely affective, and as long as you are adhering to the new legislation, you will benefit from a more engaged client base or target audience for the long term.
Here at Make More Noise, we strongly recommend using Mailchimp for executing your email marketing strategy. It is a great platform for putting together strong, visual campaigns for your email subscribers, plus you are provided with detailed reporting and a clear insight into what your recipients did or didn’t like with the use of A/B Testing.
That said, there are several mistakes that are commonly made when using Mailchimp, and to give you a helping hand, we’ve managed to debunk our top five:
Be strategic with your subscriber lists
Hands up who clicks ‘unsubscribe’ when receiving irrelevant emails? Yes, us too. The great thing about MailChimp is that it actively encourages you to create email marketing lists – and a key positive about GDPR is that we, as businesses, are now required to ask consumers exactly what they want to hear from us about. Combine the two, and you have a clear subscriber strategy in place – only sending the most relevant content to the right people; maximising engagement and reducing those monthly unsubscribe hits.
ALWAYS test out your email
Imagine you’ve prepped and preened your email content, and you’ve hit send and realised there is a massive glitch in your content. Things can look completely different in an actual email block, so ensure you send yourself a test to see if anything can be changed before you send it out to your email contacts!
Too much text
There’s nothing worse than having a quick glance on your phone at an email from your favourite brand and having to decipher through a whole essay of text. “Where are the pictures?” We hear you ask. Mailchimp offers lots of visual content options so that you can add imagery and even videos to your template, ensuring your readers are engaged and not wanting to hit that unsubscribe button straight away.
Stay out of the spam folder
The whole aim of using MailChimp is for your subscribers to see your latest news or exclusive offers. In essence, we all want to avoid the dreaded junk folder. Lucky for you, we’ve researched the latest tips so you’re right at the top of your follower’s inbox:
Don’t use a Gmail account as your sender address, and ensure you refrain from creating a hefty-sized email – overdoing the number of images you use and starting the subject line with ‘Re’ or ‘Fwd’ can translate through your follower’s email provider as spam. There are also a number of other different words that be incorporated as spam, which Mailchimp have kindly put together a list for you to look through here.
Not emailing your list regularly!
With any type of marketing campaign, you need to be consistent to see results. Keep your subscribers well informed and reward them with valuable content or exclusive offers for remaining loyal. For the latter, don’t forget to create exclusive codes for measuring that all-important ROI.
Interested in finding out more about the benefits of a carefully curated email marketing strategy? Get in touch with us today on 0121 306 0996 or email hello@makemorenoise.co.uk.