5 Email Marketing Fallacies that Could be Hurting Your Marketing Efforts

Email marketing has grown to be the king of all digital media channels. Even with all of the emerging mobile and digital channels, email remains a very worthwhile marketing strategy. With a 4400% ROI and 281 billion emails sent and received in 2018, email is an essential tool for retaining and acquiring new customers. However, after 47 years email marketing still holds misconceptions.

Let’s break down fallacies marketers believe that could be holding them back from achieving greater growth of their brand.

Fallacy #1: A big email list = big impact

The key here is quality over quantity. You may have a list of 15,000 people, but how many opens will you get from that? How many opens will convert to sales? It all depends on the quality of your list. If you have a list filled with people who are not likely to purchase your product or service, the impact of the email will be minimal. Focusing on list quality on the other hand, will be more likely to reap the benefits of gaining a bigger impact on your email marketing.

Fallacy #2: Email is dying

With channels such as Snapchat, SMS, Instagram and Facebook, email has been overshadowed, thus making people forget how effective and powerful email actually is. With the outstanding ROI mentioned in the beginning of the article in addition to it being 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers, it’s safe to say email is not going anywhere soon.

Email has a conversion rate of 66% in comparison to social media, SEO and direct mail. And in some circumstances, email is better when it comes to reach. A study done by Social@Ogilvy found that only 6% of your fan base on Facebook is reaching you organically. This is compared to the average email open rate of 21.7%. If you want to maximize engagement with customers, email is your best bet.

Fallacy #3: Tuesdays at 9am is the best time to send an email

There are numerous articles on best time of day and week to send emails that are backed by research. According to MailChimp, Thursday demonstrated to be the optimal day to send emails. However, Hubspot noted Tuesday to be the ideal day for opened emails. So is it Tuesday or Thursday?

It’s neither. All brands are different and the same can be expected for open rates due to the audience, industry and trends over time. Understanding your customers, monitoring their preferences and testing will help you decide the best day and time of week to send to your audience.

Fallacy #4: High open rates are determined by a great subject line

Subject lines are super important to a successful email campaign. However, they are only partially a factor in open rates. The other factor to look at is who the email is from. Switching up and testing the “friendly from” name for different types of emails can make a big difference in your open rate. For example, an email from the CEO at your company might have a higher open rate than just using your company name. The subject line and friendly from name make a great combination that will help better motivate people to open the email.

Fallacy #5: High email frequency will lead to a high unsubscribe rate

There may be an inkling of truth to this if you’re not accounting for who your audience is. For example, if you email people too often without regard for who they are, you might end up annoying your audience. However, this is easy to avoid through targeting and segmenting your list based on certain criteria. For example, you can segment your list based on their location, prior behavior, interests, preferences and much more. By offering quality email content based on your segmented lists then the amount of emails you sent out won’t matter as much.

Conclusion

You can’t believe everything you hear or read about email marketing. Base your email marketing strategies on what works best for your audience based on your past experience. Email is not going anywhere anytime soon.

About Madrivo

Madrivo helps brands launch successful email advertising, social, push notification, mobile and display campaigns for lead generation, customer acquisition and brand awareness.