D2C Marketing
You may oversee or work for a company who has found a way to do this. If your business supplies and sells, D2C marketing is an optimal path. D2C marketing strategies aren’t the same as B2C. There are unique and creative ways to leverage the messaging available to you in a D2C product lifecycle. This can help your company showcase differentiators and close more sales.
While some businesses may still send out glossy mags, most are digitized. And there is one primary method in your arsenal. Let’s talk about email.
D2C Email Marketing
First, email is not a dinosaur or endless black hole. Often, businesses feel discouraged by open rates or succumb to the whisper of (untrained or inexpert) consultants who say email is inefficient or outdated. In fact, email marketing is very much alive and well.
For D2C marketing, it is probably the best way to reach your target customer with the right messaging. If you’ve tried and it isn’t working, the harsh truth is that the system isn’t broken: your people just don’t know how to use it.
3 Common Email Marketing Mistakes
There are endless ways you could do email wrong. Don’t be alarmed. There are also easy fixes. If you oversee a marketing team or have a marketing agency on hire, you don’t have to be an expert. You can still learn the basics of what should and shouldn’t be done. If your email open rate is in the basement or it has become a dead in the water tool, you have a problem to resolve. First, look for these three issues. If some or most of them are present, your team may need a wake up call.
(If you see the red flags, contact us. We provide consulting services that hold marketing teams accountable for performance criteria like these. Don’t waste more time and money waiting for results. Pin down the people you are paying and demand transparency, analysis and results. We can help. Go here to learn more.)
1. Sending the same email to everyone on your list
Incoming leads are different. They have a different level of interest and are asking different questions. Unless you sell one single product to the exact same customer every time (that would not be called “a good business”), you must segment your audience. Audience segmentation promotes healthy open rates and click-throughs. This is because you are serving individual leads with relevant information.
For example, you should at the very least segment your email list with the following categories:
- Brand New
- Never Bought From Us
- Bought From Us Once
- Repeat Customer
Brand new leads need welcome information. If they get emails that niche down into specific product offerings or sound like a continued conversation, it will feel irrelevant. In contrast, a repeat customer shouldn’t be getting a welcome email. Email fails when it doesn’t feel personal. It’s a flyer in the mail. It’s a shot in the dark. It’s a waste of time and money. Resolve that issue by segmenting the audience and writing emails that specifically speak to those groups.
2. Not mobile optimized
Amazingly, this has to be said. You probably know that most people check email on their phones. “Most” is not an overstatement: for the 25-34 year olds, it’s 92%. In case you need more convincing:
- If an email displays poorly on mobile, it will likely be deleted in 3 seconds. In addition to using a responsive template, your emails should have well-labeled images with alt-text (for when wifi signals are low), multi-column layouts and plenty of text breaks.
- Mobile users have a 70% higher conversion rate for emails than desktop users.
- A bad mobile experience makes a customer 52% less likely to buy from you.
All good CRM and email management systems should have mobile-friendly templates. Your team should also be testing these. Every time Android or Apple software systems update, your system needs to update too. This is an area that requires ongoing monitoring.
3. No clear CTA
Sometimes marketing teams get very enamored with storytelling, detailed value propositions and other minutiae of brand representation. All good. But none of it matters if the customer doesn’t convert. A CTA (Call to Action) is the way to get someone to DO something in response to your carefully crafted messaging.
There are several CTA errors that can be undercutting the effectiveness of your emails. The first of which is not having one. Have your team audit: is there a CTA present in every single email you send? This should be something like:
- GO HERE
- DOWNLOAD NOW
- CALL US
- GET A FREE TRIAL
- CLICK HERE
A second mistake in CTAs is to space them out too much. For instance, if you have a lengthy “CEO update” or “monthly newsletter” email, don’t put the CTA at the very bottom of the email. If you do, you are relying on people’s sustained interest to scroll through a heavy block of text. Consider the mobile, “checking my phone at a stoplight” experience. Frowned upon? Yes. Happens? All of the time. Can your reader respond within seconds? These kinds of CTAs are called exit ramps: give them plenty of chances to get off the wild ride of your narrative and make a purchase.
What’s Wrong With OUR Emails?
Not sure what’s wrong with your emails? It could be a combination of the above or something else entirely. The best way to find out? Ask. Set up an auto survey for people who opt-out of your emails. It won’t take long and some people will fill it out. At the very least, this gives your team a place to start.
Here’s an example:
Unaddressed issues in your emails are costing your business money. Don’t miss out on viable customers and valuable revenue streams. Contact us to learn more about how to hold your employees and agencies accountable.
