Understand and address these challenges to improve your email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing is an essential aspect of a successful marketing plan. When all the challenges of email marketing are addressed, email campaigns become much more successful.
Many marketing professionals agree that email marketing is an essential part of an effective marketing strategy. Even though professionals agree on this, there are still many email marketing challenges many companies are facing that are hindering their email marketing efforts.
Greatest Email Marketing Challenges of 2018
1. Lack of Coordination
When Litmus polled hundreds of marketers and asked them what their greatest email challenges are, more than 16% stated a lack of coordination between departments or channels. Consumers today use multiple devices and channels to interact with companies. For this reason, companies too must be omnichannel. It is essential that marketers ensure that all departments and channels are operating together for their message to be seamless to their customers, no matter where they interact with the brand. A lack of coordination creates many challenges with email communication.
2. Inadequate Staffing
A lack of the right staff is the second greatest challenge marketers say hinder their email marketing strategy. Having an efficient number of people to work on an email campaign is the difference between the campaign being successful and not. It has been proven that marketers that have a well-staffed email campaign are seven times more likely to see their campaign succeed compared to marketers whose campaigns are understaffed. It is important for marketers to ensure that they have a good number of people working on their campaigns if they want them to succeed.
3. Email Service Provider Limitations
Another of the top challenges faced in email marketing is having an email service provider with limitations. There are hundreds of email service providers to choose from, so a marketer who is using a provider that is no longer providing what they need to create successful email campaigns, it is time to shop for a new provider that can. There are many providers to choose from so it is no excuse to continue to use a provider that hinders your email campaign success.
4. Terrible strategy
Creating a good strategy is the first thing to focus on before beginning to execute a campaign. If a strategy is bad from the beginning, though, it will not matter how well it is executed. It is important, when creating a strategy, to focus on the needs of the customer, not just the needs of the brand. When companies toss the needs of the customer aside, they lose sight of what will give them an effective campaign that appeals to their customers.
5. Inadequate Quality Data
Good data is the key to creating better campaigns. When companies lack a good amount of helpful data, their ability to improve their campaigns is stunted. As machine learning and AI get better and companies begin to utilize this technology more, businesses that can not keep up and use this technology to better their campaign efforts will lose out to their competitors who can.
6. Lack of Creation Tools
Before executing an email campaign that you want to be successful, it is essential to have checklists and creative email briefs in place to ensure that your campaign will be appealing and engaging. Another beneficial practice is to have a content calendar marked throughout the year so that everyone involved will know what is going to be sent out when it will be sent, and the content of what will be sent. When everyone is on the same page, the campaign is guaranteed to be much more successful.
7. Ill-Defined Goals
Not setting clear and concise goals before launching an email campaign causes major problems with email marketing. Goals not only help keep everyone involved with the campaign on track, but they also clarify the reason for the campaign in the first place. It is much easier to create compelling content and engage with customers better if everyone involved knows why they are creating the campaign and what the company wishes to accomplish with the campaign as well.
8. Email Performance Clarity
Just like with having a lack of data to begin an email campaign, it is tough to determine what needs fixing if the marketing team has no idea of how their campaign is progressing. Good metrics allow marketers to know if they’re achieving their goals and if customers find their campaign engaging enough. It is important for a company to leverage the existing performance data available to them from their email service provider.
Creating and administering a successful email campaign is easy, once all the above challenges are examined and fixed. These challenges all work together and, once addressed, will guarantee that your next email campaign is your most successful one yet!
