How most businesses fail at email marketing
Tanel Vetik
Head of strategy
Email is the most profitable marketing channel for nearly all businesses out there. But it’s getting far less attention (and money) than paid ads or social media marketing campaigns. The reason is simple – writing good emails is hard. It’s mentally challenging to get started. It’s even harder to be consistent with it.
Most leads need about 5-12 email interactions before they’re interested in hearing more or willing to buy from your ecommerce store. But most businesses do about 1 email campaign per quarter. No wonder email makes up just 5-10% of their yearly revenue, while successful email campaigns attribute up to 40% of a business’s yearly revenue.
Could even be that their mailing lists are more than a decade old, with less than 30% delivery rates. This would mean that not only are their sender authority scores low (this means more emails make it to Junk and Spam), but that they are also overpaying their email service providers like Klaviyo and Mailchimp for garbage email addresses.
How most businesses fail at email marketing
Tanel Vetik
Head of strategy
Email is the most profitable marketing channel for nearly all businesses out there. But it’s getting far less attention (and money) than paid ads or social media marketing campaigns. The reason is simple – writing good emails is hard. It’s mentally challenging to get started. It’s even harder to be consistent with it.
Most leads need about 5-12 email interactions before they’re interested in hearing more or willing to buy from your ecommerce store. But most businesses do about 1 email campaign per quarter. No wonder email makes up just 5-10% of their yearly revenue, while successful email campaigns attribute up to 40% of a business’s yearly revenue.
Could even be that their mailing lists are more than a decade old, with less than 30% delivery rates. This would mean that not only are their sender authority scores low (this means more emails make it to Junk and Spam), but that they are also overpaying their email service providers like Klaviyo and Mailchimp for garbage email addresses.
Email is the most profitable marketing channel for nearly all businesses out there. But it’s getting far less attention (and money) than paid ads or social media marketing campaigns. The reason is simple – writing good emails is hard. It’s mentally challenging to get started. It’s even harder to be consistent with it.
Most leads need about 5-12 email interactions before they’re interested in hearing more or willing to buy from your ecommerce store. But most businesses do about 1 email campaign per quarter. No wonder email makes up just 5-10% of their yearly revenue, while successful email campaigns attribute up to 40% of a business’s yearly revenue.
Could even be that their mailing lists are more than a decade old, with less than 30% delivery rates. This would mean that not only are their sender authority scores low (this means more emails make it to Junk and Spam), but that they are also overpaying their email service providers like Klaviyo and Mailchimp for garbage email addresses.
That’s your money out of the window
Did you know that almost all email service providers bill you based on the number of contacts in your account? If half of them are invalid, then you’re potentially paying hundreds per month for nothing in return. And with most businesses only sending one email per quarter on average, they’re missing 4-5-figure revenue per month.
That’s a lot of money being wasted and left lying around.
The average ROI of email marketing is 4800%. This is a £48 return on every £1 invested. Now imagine you took just 25% of your paid ads budget to do better email marketing. You’d probably increase your business revenue by thousands of pounds, if not more.
With a lot of email marketing automations, you can build them once and they’ll keep delivering year after year. This is a one-time investment to fix your email marketing situation if you’re not already using automation software like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and Smaily to generate new revenue literally from thin air.
What we see other businesses like yours do all the time
Most businesses are sending out generic, boring, bullshit emails that all want you to part with your money. There’s little value offered because the writer doesn’t know who the reader is. Not really.
If they did, then most emails would be amazing. We wouldn’t be reaching for the delete button every time an unknown email finds its way to our inbox. You do it, I do it, and everyone else does it too.
It’s one thing to write those emails, and another thing to keep in mind is you email sender reputation score. This determines how many emails end up in “Junk” and “Spam” folders. It also affects your email bounce rates.
Most businesses are terrible at this. Their mailing lists are full of deleted email addresses, people who have been replaced three times over, and their email bounce rates are through the roof.
What you can do today to fix your email marketing
Invest a bit of your time to understand who the people reading your emails are. What sort of issues they are facing, how they are tackling those difficulties, and what sort of resources they have to fix whatever they’re struggling with. Your goal is to know what they need, but don’t have enough of.
Then personalise your emails to that need. Show them how you are uniquely qualified to help them out.
Another thing to keep in mind is to keep your emails on-point and concise. Nobody has time to read a Tolkien sized email. Think about the last email you read and how long it was. Keep it less than 100 words.
A/B test your email headlines to find out what gets your audience to open those emails. Don’t be deceitful and don’t use clickbait. People are not stupid, and they’ll remember your shady clickbait tactics. Sure enough you’ll see a decrease in open rates should you take this approach.
Use UTM tags to track traffic engagement on landing pages. You want to know for sure which mail brough how much revenue. Then you can start sending more of those and sunset the ones that didn’t convert as well.
And don’t worry about making mistakes. People don’t generally remember the emails they receive. Unless it’s terrible. But if you put some effort into it, keep it concise, and research your target audience, then you’ll be just great.
Essentially, you have 3 options here:
- Do it yourself by learning how to use the tools, write emails, and track performance.
- Hire someone to do this for you, but then you take all the risk.
- Hire an agency, but if you don’t have tons of budget, then your account will likely be handed to the assistant of the managers apprentice.
That’s why we offer a 3-month results guarantee. If we don’t improve your email marketing in the first 3 months, then you’ll get a full refund on our services. No dodgy contracts, no set it and forget it account management, and no beating around the bush with progress reports. We focus on results and aim to get you more perfect customers.