Email Marketing Challenges & How To Overcome Them. By Basil Mbuna

Email Marketing Challenges & How To Overcome Them

Email marketing is a key part of a successful inbound marketing and sales process, but there are numerous challenges to making the most of this critical marketing tool.

In MarketingSherpa's email marketing benchmark study, surveyed thousands of companies and asked them to identify their most important email marketing challenges. Their top five results were:

1. Integrating email data with other data systems.
2. Improving deliverability.
3. Growing and retaining subscribers.
4. Achieving measurable return on investment (ROI).
5. Using email for funnel optimization

These results were far from being the only ones pointed out in the MarketingSherpa survey, but they were the most consistently high-ranked results. So, without further ado, here are some strategies for overcoming the top five email marketing challenges:

Challenge #1: Integrating Email Data With Other Data Systems

Every marketer wants access to as much data as they can possibly get in order to create the best marketing message that will draw more customers to their company. Integrating data from various sources allows marketers to optimize the content of their emails to create better sales leads and provide customers a positive buying experience.

There are several steps to properly integrating your data systems, including:

• Acquiring useful data-integration tools. Having the right data integration tool can allow you to easily collect and collate your results data from your email marketing, blog posts, lead management efforts, and give you a clear, understandable report to base your future marketing decisions on. HubSpot's COS program is one excellent example of a quality data-integration and management tool.
• Segmentation- Compiling all of your marketing databases allows you to identify different consumer segments so that you can create content that specifically speaks to them. Creating buyer persona to address each of your customer segments can help you create the ideal marketing message for each of your customer segments.
• Develop Content- The goal of compiling all of your marketing results data is to create better content. Once you know what it is that your customers are actually looking for, you can make new content to address that need, which will lead to more sales success with those customers in the future.

Challenge #2: Improving Deliverability

The issue of deliverability is a matter of acquiring and maintaining accurate information for contacts. Basically, your deliverability rate is the ratio of the emails you have sent versus how many messages that actually make it into the inboxes of your intended recipients. While one might assume that any email that is sent will make it into the recipient's inbox, not every message that is sent will make it into an inbox.

When an email fails to go to a recipient's inbox, this event is called a "bounce." There are two kinds of bounces:

• "Soft" bounces, which are temporary and usually the result of a full inbox.
• "Hard" bounces, which result from a more permanent error, such as the email in question not existing.

Bounces are a problem for two reasons. One, internet service providers may block you if you have an especially low deliverability rate. Two, a very low deliverability rate represents wasted time, money, and effort trying to reach nonexistent contacts.

The solution to this challenge? Practice great email hygiene by:

• Regularly updating and maintaining your email contact list. Are there contacts in your email list who never open or click your emails, or engage your website? You should have metrics for such information in your marketing software. If a contact has been inactive for a long time, remove that contact from the email list.
• Rethink your email opt-in process. Try adding an extra step or two to your email opt-in process, such as entering email information twice, or using an emailed confirmation, or both. This helps to eliminate the honest mistakes that can happen with any form of data entry. Sometimes, a customer is not intentionally giving your company the wrong data, but just missed a digit in their 26+ character long email address.
• Give contacts the ability to update their information. From time to time, a customer might have to change their email address. Either they lose access to an old work email, or they just need to switch addresses to reduce the amount of spam they are getting. Whatever the case, if you make it easy for them to keep their contact info up to date, they are much more likely to self-report an address change.

Also consider asking them to self-report their preferences for email communication, such as the frequency and content of their emails. This allows you to give them content that is more meaningful to them as frequently as they are comfortable with. Another benefit is that this can help with the next challenge:

By 

          Basil   Mbuna