In 2016, more and more people are striving to hit “inbox zero” – a state in which consumers get rid of their thousands of unopened emails in favor of having a cleaner inbox. Therefore, marketers and businesses should be smarter and more in tune with what consumers want from marketing emails. Here are some email marketing trends to delete from your inbox for the remainder of 2016:
- Sending emails without an unsubscribe button or link.
- While it may appear to be counterproductive, it is very important to provide readers with the choice to opt out of receiving emails from your brand. Sending email after email to consumers may frustrate them or turn them off to what you are trying to convey to your readers. Additionally, a consumer might have displayed initial interest in receiving promotions or content, but their interest was only for a certain promotion.
- Sending out cold emails with no targeted audiences in mind.
- Instead of reaching a national consumer, segment your audience to reach just college students. Sending cold emails to random recipients from your target audience is outdated – with marketers now focusing on behavioral segmentation. For example, when marketing to college students through email, it is important to segment this vast demographic by different subcategories – such as gender, year, interests, or involvement in different clubs and organizations on campus. Therefore, segmentation facilitates reaching your target market by providing them with content they are interested in and want to read about.
- Spam-sounding subject lines.
- The subject line is the key decider on whether or not a reader will open an email. It is important to keep subject lines away from wordings that sound like spam in order to get consumers to open up and read content. Especially with consumers now interested in hitting their inbox zero, it is vital that the subject line does not contain any words or sayings that can be confused with spam.
- Not tracking performance.
- Measuring performance and comparing it to previous campaigns will be the only logical way to tell if your campaign succeeded or failed. 2016 is proving to be a data-heavy year, and it is crucial for businesses to provide the numbered results of their campaigns in order to keep up with competition.
- Being unclear with multiple calls to action.
- The typical email user will receive dozens of promotional emails every day. Marketers should be wary of utilizing one too many calls to action in their emails. While there may be many promotions occurring, it is important to separate them based on previous purchases or similar interests. Do not bombard your reader with different calls to action in the same email. Provide emails that are clear, concise, and to the point to ease consumers into the next step of the purchasing process.
