5 common misconceptions about email marketing

Misconception 1: email marketing is spam

A common misconception about email marketing is that it is spam. There is a lot to be said about this. Do you have 10,000 email addresses and you send them a daily email with news that doesn't resonate with them? Or do you have 10,000 email addresses that you never email except at Christmas? Well, then something is going wrong. After all, it's not about the emailing itself. It's about the content.

Content is king! Have you ever heard of that? We are convinced that it is. It's just how you put your e-mail. Mailing your e-mail list with attractive offers is the easiest way to sell your products. How? By matching the content to your target audience. Do you see that your e-mail is barely read or often marked as spam? If so, don't sit back. But think about how to do things differently. How can you reach your target group? You do this by thinking carefully about what exactly you want to say. What is your target group waiting for? Do you have several target groups in mind? For example, VIP customers who buy from you often and new customers? Then split up your target group and create two newsletters. They can contain almost the same content.

With new customers, you capitalise on some more general offers and a more general range. You still have to get to know these new customers. The same applies the other way round: customers need to get to know you. Show them your product range, your benefits, the right of return. Anything to give them the confidence to order from you again and not from your competitor.

VIP customers are approached very differently. These customers are already familiar with your product range and order from you regularly. Reward this behaviour with extra goodies or a nice discount.

You see what I did there? E-mail marketing is no spam and a real addition to your marketing strategy. As long as the content connects well with your target group.

Misconception 2: Emails should be sent daily

Always ask yourself the question: would I be waiting for this myself? If the answer is a no, don't do it. Some marketers think it is better to send daily emails to increase recipient engagement. Would it make you more engaged yourself if you got a daily email from a particular company? Fair is fair: we would just find it irritating. You want to avoid that. You don't want to irritate your customers. Instead, you want to be seen as a fun, interesting or perhaps hip organization.

We list the signals you can recognize when you are over-mailing your target group.

1. You have many or increasing unsubscribes

Did you know that... Receiving too many e-mails is the main reason for unsubscription? The second reason is that the content is not interesting. It is therefore important to test well among different target groups exactly how often people want to receive a newsletter, and when.

Once a customer unsubscribes, he or she will no longer receive an e-mail from you at all. That is a shame. A lot of time and effort usually goes into getting email addresses and customers. Unsubscribes are therefore the last thing you want.

2 .Your subscribers mark you as spam

Oops, you are marked as spam. A subscriber can indicate this themselves in their inbox. You select the e-mail and click the 'mark as spam' button. What your customer is doing with this is signalling to his inbox that your e-mail is unwanted. This is not good for your sending reputation. The more often you get marked as spam, the more often you end up directly in the spam as well.

How about that? Imagine: an Outlook or Gmail sees that you are marked as spam dozens of times. In that case, Outlook or Gmail will automatically forward your newsletter to the spam inbox more and more often. That's definitely something you want to avoid.

When your customers mark you as spam, they find you irritating. Irritation says a lot about the frequency and content of your newsletter. We'll come back to it: content is king!

3. Your click rate is getting lower and lower

Of course, you track your newsletter statistics like no one else. You want to know what your work done pays off. This is something that comes with e-mail marketing. You send a newsletter out into the world. But you also want to know what the world did with that particular newsletter. This is how you continuously improve your e-mail marketing. Which, in turn, is good for conversions!

Do you see your newsletter getting fewer and fewer clicks? Then you will have to check with yourself whether your newsletter still connects well with your target group. Why are they clicking less? Are the highlighted products not interesting, do the offers not pop enough or is it something else after all? Try to find out what keeps your customers from clicking through in your newsletter. Run A/B tests, for example, to find out what works.

4. Your conversions are getting lower and lower

Do your customers actually click through? Awesome! Now they just have to convert. And even there your customers can still drop out. What if the click rate is very high, but conversions are falling? This can have several reasons, such as:

• Customers click through from your newsletter and are mistakenly directed to the wrong product;
• The price does not match what the newsletter says;
• The link doesn't work at all.

Misconception 3: Email marketing is not effective

Sometimes it seems like marketers need to be convinced of the power of email marketing. Although e-mail marketing is already an old channel, it still has a very high ROI (Return On Investment). Provided you do it right, of course. We list 3 reasons why e-mail marketing is indeed effective.

1. You send targeted messages to your customer

Sending e-mails with e-mail marketing is more than just sending a newsletter to your larger target group. With e-mail marketing it is possible to communicate with your target group in a very targeted way. Imagine: a customer has bought brand X. Then send an automated e-mail to this person with offers from brand Y, which fits brand X perfectly. This is also known as cross-selling. Or send your customers a reminder when they have left a shopping cart in your webshop. This way, you send your customers purposefully back to your website to checkout. Do you have a group of customers who order from you often and spend a lot? You may want to approach this group of customers differently from 'regular' customers who order from you less frequently. Segment to infinity and approach your customers personally.

2. Email marketing is quick and easy to implement

The basics of email marketing are relatively easy to implement. Once you have set up some of these 10 indispensable email campaigns, sales will soon be pouring in. The big advantage is: in Reloadify, all these campaigns are already pretty much ready for you. All you have to do is apply your house style to the e-mail. Of course, the weekly, daily or monthly newsletter is also just part of it. Make no mistake: if you send a newsletter regularly, you keep your target group warm and it can generate serious money. Spend half an hour a week on your e-mail marketing, and you will see that it is well worth your time and energy.

3. It does not cost nearly as much as paid advertising

The email channel is quite cheap when you contrast it with other channels to convert customers. Think about social advertising or Google advertising. Quite a lot of money goes into this. And certainly a lot of time. Ads need to be monitored and optimized. Of course, the same goes for e-mail marketing. With e-mail marketing, you can easily see in one overview how your e-mail is performing, what is being clicked on and how many conversions it generates. Whereas with a Google or social ad, this can sometimes be quite complicated. An SEA specialist can spend all week optimizing and analyzing one specific ad. Whereas for e-mail marketing, you tweak one and other and see the sales pour in. Besides: how much time and energy does it take to send one newsletter a week to your customers?

Misconception 4: Emails should be designed for desktops

Do you read your emails on your phone or desktop? On average, as much as 58% of your website traffic comes from a mobile device. People are browsing more and more on a mobile device. We scroll some in a day! But all too often we see that e-mails are only optimized for desktops. A shame, because you are skipping a huge audience. How do you take your mobile audience into account? We give you some tips.

1. Keep your subject line short

Perhaps an open door. But a mobile device is many times smaller than a desktop. So keep your subject line short and sweet. Otherwise, you run the risk of your subject line being shortened by three dots (...). Such a truncated message is much less likely to reach you.

2. Make use of your snippet

Your snippet, or pre-header, is essential to fill in. This is the text that ends up below your subject line. Think of it as an extra text box you can use to entice your customers to actually open your newsletter. You have to take advantage of this opportunity! Especially since you want to keep your subject line short.

3. Use one column

As mentioned earlier, a mobile device is smaller. You simply have less space to accommodate your offers and message. Whereas on desktop you might use two, three or four columns, this is not recommended for the mobile version of your newsletter. If you create multiple columns, the content of your newsletter may turn out very small. So small, in fact, that the image might not be pretty anymore. Or that customers can no longer read the text. All awkward and unnecessary if you think about this carefully.

4. Thick fingers

It sounds crazy, but you have to take into account thick finger syndrome. You want to make things as easy as possible for your customers. Fat finger syndrome is when you click a certain button, image or text with your fingers and narrowly miss it. Can happen. Must have happened to you. What you don't want is for your buttons to be too small. Or that they are too close together, so that your customer just clicks on the wrong button. Because that would be frustrating. So take sizes and distances into account.

5. Dark mode

You want your newsletter to be easy to read at all times. Wherever and whenever the customer reads it. Mobile devices nowadays have what is known as dark mode as an option. Dark mode is often used in the evening. It filters blue light from the screen and colours are reversed, so to speak. A white background becomes black, and all bright colours are toned down. This is more pleasant for the eyes.

6. Hide elements on mobile

Ideally, you should let your desktop design and your mobile design differ. Reloadify's editor makes sure your newsletter is responsive. Responsive means that it is easy to read on a mobile device. This can make the structure of your newsletter slightly different. Imagine: on the desktop version of your email, you have three columns next to each other. Reloadify then automatically scales this to three columns below each other for a mobile device. Do you want to change this? Perhaps because you find the three images in the columns too small now. In that case, you can choose to hide the three columns for mobile viewing. And put a banner/image in its place. This banner can be hidden on the desktop version.

This way, it creates a slightly different newsletter for mobile devices. But one that is easy to read and clickable.

Misconception 5: Email marketing is not suitable for small businesses

We often hear that a company considers themselves too small to start email marketing at all. No business is too small to start email marketing. In fact, it is precisely small businesses that will benefit from email marketing. We would like to take you through why every webshop should do e-mail marketing.

1. Improve your customer retention

If you have a small or just starting webshop, you are happy with every order. Every order is an opportunity to retain your customers. These customers have ordered from you once. You would love to get them to order again. But... How exactly do you do that? This is where e-mail marketing comes in. Get your customer to convert again by sending targeted newsletters. Or maybe even a cross-sell mail? Anything is possible to retain your customers!

2. Strengthen customer relations

Not only your customer retention, but also your customer relationships can be strengthened with e-mail marketing. Especially with a small database, a lot of insight can be gained. Be personal and send targeted offers. Ask your customers specifically for information: which products are they looking for, what is their favourite brand? By getting to know your customers, you can add that personal touch to your e-mail marketing. Is a customer a real cat lover? Then only send e-mails with fun offers about them. Or is your client's birthday coming up? Nothing is as nice as a present from you! And often this will result in a conversion.

3. Inexpensive way to approach your customers

Did you know that setting up your e-mail marketing does not have to cost much at all? Unlike other channels, such as Google Advertising, you do not have to put a budget on each e-mail. You only have to spend staff time setting up e-mail marketing (and a subscription to an e-mail service). After you set up part of your email marketing, such as automations, revenue will come in without you having to look after it. Of course, tweaking every now and then never hurts.

4. Let your abandoned customers checkout after all

With e-mail marketing, you have the opportunity to get your customers to checkout after all, when they have abandoned their shopping cart. When your customer is checking out, there are many factors that can distract them and cause them not to check out. As many as 49% of your customers may drop out at checkout. And that's a missed sales opportunity! Get these customers back to your website by sending them an e-mail reminder that their cart is still waiting for them. Has your customer still not checked out after that? Then set up another reminder. Maybe this time with a discount, so your customer will still checkout.

We've probably motivated you to get started with email marketing soon. Finding it exciting to just get started? Then read how to create an email template. Reloadify customer? Our support is ready to help you!