Email has the highest return on investment (ROI) of all marketing channels.
Email generates 40 times more customers than social media.
Email yields a 17% higher purchase value per order than social platforms.
Email is used by over 90% of all US consumers on a daily basis.
Sadly, what you may not have seen … are the results.
Naturally, this disconnect makes you buy telegram number list wonder, “Why — despite those uplifting stats — aren’t I reaping the rich rewards of email marketing?” And honestly, wonder is too polite a word. In fact, your frustration may lead you down the dangerous path of believing so-called “gurus” who claim that email marketing is – gasp – dead.
What you don’t realize is this: while a lot of the tips you’re being fed are immensely useful, an equal number of them are myths – insidious myths that are hurting your chances of success.
To clear up the truth from the lies, here are 10 email marketing myths that could be killing your ROI.
1. You need a big list to make a big impact.
When it comes to your number of subscribers, bigger is always touted as better. This leads to what I like to call “list envy,” but it also leads many businesses into the fruitless game of aiming all their efforts at collecting sign-ups.
Obsessing over or constantly comparing list size prevents you from serving the people who matter most: your existing customers and fans. After all, those are the people who won’t just become your brand evangelists, they’re also the folks who represent your best chance and generating long-term profits.
Also, let’s be honest: how many of those 50,000 subscribers are active loyalists? A small percentage, most likely. But a small, active list is far more valuable than a giant list of disengaged subscribers.
Instead of getting disheartened, focus on serving each one of those 1,000 subscribers with humility, heart, and honest affection. To figure out who these people are, start segmenting your email list.
Read more: Email marketing tips for small business
2. Open rates are the most important metric.
Messages that don’t get opened, don’t get read. This self-evident truth is why open rates are widely regarded as the metric that makes or breaks an email marketing campaign.
But an extreme focus on open rates will draw you away from the purpose of email marketing: to get your subscribers to take action.
In other words, what you write inside your email should be just as alluring as your subject lines or preheaders. You want to fascinate your subscribers enough to take the next step – be it downloading your ebook, buying your course, or offering feedback.
Monitoring click-through rates and ultimate conversion rates are far more central to email marketing success that mere opens.
And don’t forget that a quality email marketing campaign can do so much more than just drive additional conversions.
Read more:
5 Dead Marketers To Bring Your Emails Back To Life
How to increase your email click-through rates
3. There is one “best” day or time to send emails.
You’ve probably read that Tuesday mornings are the best times to send emails. Or wait, maybe it was Thursday or Wednesday?
Every year, GetResponse analyzes this in their Email Marketing Benchmarks report, by looking at over 7 billion emails sent by their customers. Similar studies have been conducted by other companies, which you can read more about in this CoSchedule article.
They all came to that three-day conclusion:
email marketing myths
However, the truth is: best practices will only get you so far.
The right days and times to send emails change dramatically according to your industry and audience. Far better than just applying what works across the board is optimizing and testing your own campaigns. While you can certainly do this manually, you can also use a feature like Perfect Timing that drips out emails based directly on each subscriber’s personal history.
4. Don’t send the same email twice.
Want to hear something that sucks? Your subscribers do not read every email you send.
They could have skipped your first email, or maybe just didn’t check their email for a while and decided to delete all their unread emails in frustration. You worked long and hard to craft an enjoyable message for your subscribers. You deserve to have more people read them, right?
So what do you do?
Resend the exact same email directly to the people who didn’t open it the first time (and this is where segmentation and “trigger-based” automation helps out immensely). GetResponse team’s experience shows that you can get between “5% to 40%” more opens per email simply by resending it. Don’t leave money on the table with a one-and-done approach.
5. Unsubscribes are bad.
It hurts when someone chooses to click on the Unsubscribe button. But unsubscribes aren’t always bad. Sometimes they’re a blessing in disguise.
Why? Because it costs money to manage an email list. And you don’t want to waste your hard-earned bucks on those who are not interested in your brand.
Email marketing isn’t a pursuit of vanity. It’s never about how many subscribers are on your list — see Myth 1 — but always about whether you are helping the right people.
When a few people unsubscribe, they’re making space for others who are eager and willing to hear from you. Say a prayer of thanks, continue serving the ones who do love you, and even consider getting proactive about list hygiene.
6. Inactive users are dead weight.
Some people sign up for free goodies and then promptly forget you exist. It’s terrible, I know … but that’s the reality.
Worse yet, they don’t unsubscribe; they just lurk in the shadows without a peep. Your first impulse may be to delete them because, after all, maintaining a list is expensive.
But what if some of these inactive subscribers just need a nudge from you to wake up?
Approach inactive subscribers in two ways. One, try sending what email mastermind Dean Jackson calls the “magic, nine-word email”:
Hi [Name],
Are you still interested in [niche product]?
Or two, incentivize their reactivation, like Susan Su did for 500 Startups:
email marketing myths
Why would you want to pay to reactivate an inactive subscriber? Because as Susan explains, “Based on an estimate of your subscriber acquisition costs … for many businesses, paying $10 for a reasonably engaged subscriber is not a bad deal.”
