Major Challenges in Email Marketing

Email remains to be an important tool in most digital marketing strategy. Newsletter subscription, for example, is an affordable form of keeping customers updated.

I have received a lot great deals alerts from Groupon and airline companies and they have somehow become my important sources for deals. I believe some of you have the same experience.

Nonetheless, email marketing isn’t as easy and rosy as it seems. A research conducted by MarketingSherpa (n = 1100 marketers) revealed that most marketers struggle with the challenge of delivering highly relevant content to their target audiences.

Unlike Facebook or Google marketing platform, email marketing doesn’t target consumers based on demographic or keywords. Newsletters are effective because email promotions are sent to people who wish to receive updates from a specific company. In other words, it targets based on consumers’ interest.

However, there are companies which simply copy and paste unknown email addresses into their “opt-in email lists”. Users automatically become subscribers and consistently receive promo emails until he or she switches off the subscription. This tactic annoys users and hurts the brand. Businesses need to be patient when growing a email list filled with targeted audiences. It is better to focus on quality than quantity.

One of the more appropriate tactics is to ask users to leave down their email addresses before downloading a report, say a digital marketing white paper. In this way, marketers can at least be sure that these email addresses collected are people who’re interested in digital marketing. The white paper offers valuable content for readers and creates a deeper brand impression. It also portrays the brand as a thought leader in its industry.

Measuring email marketing ROI is another major challenge. Marketers probably find it hard to trace the number of responses and conversation rate to sales/lead. If you have less than 1,000 subscribers, you might want to try out MailChimp, which offers free email marketing management and measurement. The paid options aren’t that expensive, considering the amount of headaches MailChimp helps you to solve. I also find this online email marketing ROI calculator useful for a quick estimate on your campaign effectiveness. All you have to do is to fill in the blanks and the calculator will churn out your campaign’s ROI. Here’s an example.

The rest of the major challenges are self-explanatory and more on technical problems. You might also want to check out our email marketing checklist to ensure you have everything ticked before launching your email campaign.