The digital revolution has given companies more marketing channels than ever. Using them effectively is key to your success.
That means it’s important to avoid certain digital marketing mistakes. To ensure you’re leveraging email, social media, and other digital channels to their full potential, avoid these common errors.
Not Segmenting Your Email List
Email marketing is still effective because it allows you to maintain relationships with followers over a long period of time. In an age when consumers are exposed to marketing content left and right, you need to engage them with your brand on a long-term basis to cultivate relationships.
Make sure you’re taking full advantage of email by segmenting your subscriber list into multiple, smaller lists. This prevents you from bombarding followers with content that isn’t relevant to their interests.
After all, you can’t assume all your followers will be interested in all your emails. Maybe you sometimes use email to promote branded events your company hosts. While such an email will be interesting to followers who live close enough to the event venues to attend, those from other regions will consider such emails to be spammy. Segmenting your list by geographical location helps you avoid this.
Email list segmentation has also been shown to boost open rates. The more people read your emails, the more effective your campaigns will be.
Not Testing Strategies
Don’t make the mistake of assuming your digital marketing strategy is perfect. There’s almost always room for improvement. Thus, you should be testing different approaches constantly, monitoring your performance to determine which techniques deliver results, and which do not.
A simple way to experiment with different strategies is A/B testing. This involves testing two versions of a piece of marketing content and measuring which was more effective. For instance, perhaps you’re sending your email subscribers an alert about upcoming promotions. You might segment your list in half and send two versions of the email with different content, formatting, calls-to-action, etc. Then, you can check which email yielded the most conversions, helping you improve your strategies in the future.
Buying Followers
You want your online following to develop naturally. Although some brands try to take shortcuts by purchasing social media followers, experiments show this doesn’t actually result in substantial brand engagement.
Don’t assume you can take digital marketing shortcuts. The best way to develop a genuine following is to share genuinely valuable content across your channels. It may take longer to earn followers this way, but the followers you do earn will actually be interested in your products and services.
Not Optimizing Content for Mobile
Remember to consider what types of devices your customers will be using when they see your marketing content. After all, people tend to browse the Internet and check email via mobile devices more often than desktop computers these days.
You need to design your marketing content accordingly. That means making sure it’s formatted to appear clearly on a mobile screen. Don’t include too many long sections of text, use headers to identify key sections of content, and include other dynamic elements (such as video and images) to break up the visual monotony.
Not Collecting Customer Information
Don’t forget to use social media, email, and all other digital channels to collect information about your customers (with their permission, of course) whenever you have the opportunity to do so.
This has become increasingly important as consumer preferences change. Surveys indicate that consumers want personalized service and advertising now. The more you learn about your customers, the easier it will be to deliver that type of service.
Most importantly, always approach digital marketing with a beginner’s mind. You want to be willing to constantly learn. When you are, you’ll be much more likely to succeed.
