Promoting Your Event: Email Marketing 101
A major misconception in marketing is that email is not a viable place for marketing communications and promotions; however, that’s just not true. Email continues to be the best route to your target audience in a secure and trusted way. It also provides more accurate tracking statistics and insights than other channels.
When managing your email marketing campaign, avoid these common pitfalls:
- Sending to any recipient list or a list you “acquired”: this will damage your sending reputation and may even get you blacklisted – only send to people who have opted in and are expecting your emails
- Buying contact lists to easily access thousands of new contacts: similarly, these contacts do not know who you are and will most likely either ignore the messages or mark them as spam
- Sending the same content to all recipients: if you want to increase engagement, it’s much better to segment your audience and target the segments with specific content
- Re-sending an email that received low engagement the first time: an unengaged audience is a sign that they are not interested in that message and sending a copy a second time may get you marked as spam
- Sending too many emails: increasing your sending frequency actually has diminishing returns – the more you send to your list, the less people will engage
- Adding too many images: images used thoughtfully can make for a visually appealing and effective email, but too many can impact the deliverability of the email – make sure you have a higher text to image ratio
- Writing long, wordy subject lines: short and sweet is actually best and should be 50 characters or less – if your subject line is too long, pull out the most important keywords and create a new, simplified subject line from there
The most important take-away is to simplify. Re-think your email campaign and spend more time testing and analyzing your data. Make your time count!