This is something that every email marketer and business that has tried email marketing has been through: an email campaign that failed so badly that it had to be cut down. Even though you might have tried to make it sound better or find a positive side, you had to be honest with yourself: your email effort failed horribly.
You have two options when something like this happens: you can either give up on email marketing and feel hopeless, or you can pick yourself up, be smart, and learn from the mistake.
If you picked the first option, good luck, and we’ll see you later. Should you have picked the second option, please keep reading.
Accept that you failed
It is very important that you accept that your email strategy failed before you can move on. It doesn’t look good for the KPIs, and the effort has failed no matter how you look at it. You should put it in the red box for costs you paid and money you will never get back if you were doing it for work. Own up to the fact that you worked on the ad for a client. They need to know that you will do everything you can to fix this.
More than anything else, you need to accept your own loss. If you try to avoid it, it will only lead to trouble (and maybe even ulcers) in the future. People who work in email marketing have failed many times before. It happens a lot of the time.
Everyone fails. In that way, you just agreed with everyone else.
Figure out what caused it
Before you can learn from your mistakes, you need to know what they are. In other words, you need to figure out what went wrong with your email push. Given that the list of reasons is pretty much endless and that they are often a mix of several reasons, this can be hard to do. Still, doing things the right way is worth it.
Your list might have been wrong in some other way or out of date. Coming up with the right email marketing list is incredibly tricky and hard to do (especially if you don’t use tools). A lot of email campaigns fail because the recipients were, for lack of a better phrase, the wrong people.
When email campaigns fail, the text of the emails is often another big reason why. It might have been too salesy, making you seem like too much of a spammer. It’s possible that the content wasn’t fully thought out, and it showed. It’s possible that the copy was full of spelling and language mistakes that made you sound like you couldn’t read or write.
If your company does business all over the world, it could have been as simple as mistakes with the language. This often happens when email marketing efforts are thrown together quickly and by multiple teams that don’t talk to each other or work together well.
Maybe the people you want to reach are very good at email marketing and your effort failed because you weren’t good at it.
Also, keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Many things can go wrong with an email promotion, and you need to be sure you know what they are.
Take on new habits
It’s time to start thinking about how you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future once you know why your email marketing strategy didn’t work.
When you’re making and changing your email list, you should start using a tool like TriggMine. This will help you avoid sending emails to leads who will never convert. This kind of tool will actually help you understand better why your strategy failed in the first place.
If your email marketing was too salesy, you will switch to a more content-based approach. This way, your subscribers will be able to learn more about your product or service and the business in general before you even try to sell them something. You will also spend more time and money making and editing material.
If you are working on a worldwide email campaign with a lot of different people who will be contributing their ideas and knowledge, you might want to buy a collaboration tool that will make working together easier and help you avoid making mistakes like sending emails that aren’t properly edited for each country.
Being open to new ideas and tools that could help you do your job better is very important. Don’t get stuck in your ways.
Keep track of how the changes you made are affecting you.
After making changes to your habits based on the mistakes you saw earlier, it’s time to start using them. It is very important that you keep track of the changes you made and how they affected your next email efforts once you get to this point.
Again, a tool like TriggMine and your knowledge of email marketing can help you see how helpful the changes have been.
Word to End
To sum up, you should accept that you failed, figure out why, start using new methods, and keep track of how well the new methods are working.
That’s really all there is to it.
