Avoid These Three “New Email Marketer”​ Mistakes

Originally published April 14, 2020 on the Email Optimization Shop blog. 

I had a call last month with some smart people who were new to email marketing. It was concerning to me how misunderstandings were driving their efforts — and dooming their program. Here’s how to avoid the same fate.

Misunderstanding #1: You need a large email list to be successful

There’s no magic ‘threshold’ on list size; you can have a list of a million that performs poorly or a list of 5,000 that’s profitable. The key to success with a list is the quality of the people on it.

So what makes a quality list? Here are a few keys to success:

• people who are in your target audience
• people who have a relationship with your brand
• people who will find the content you send them relevant
• people who are in a position to purchase your product or service

The misunderstanding here is focusing on quantity over quality. Notice that the first word of each of my keys to success is ‘people’ — not email addresses. Your list is made up of people, it’s more than just a numbers game.

Misunderstanding #2: Email list growth is effortless

For most organizations, your website is ground zero for list growth; the majority of people visiting your site are in your target audience and would be good candidates for your email list.

But not always. In this case, the email sign-up had been in a prominent location above the fold on their website — but the only people who signed-up for email were outside the target audience, not potential customers. So they moved it to the footer.

Did this stop a large number of unqualified prospects from signing up each month? Yes. But it also pretty much stalled their list growth. Now they had maybe a handful of new email sign-ups a month, and even they weren’t great quality.

So not a great solution. The keys to success with email sign-ups are:..

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