4 Biggest Email Marketing Challenges and Strategies to Overcome These

Marketers, who are engaged in the cycle of constant execution of campaigns from one campaign to another, often face critical email marketing challenges. However, these email marketing challenges can be overcome by adopting the right email marketing strategies. That’s why we have outlined the major challenges that can hinder the performance of their email marketing campaigns. Below you will find out four major challenges and explore effective strategies to overcome those challenges.  

Challenge # 1 – Achieving customer engagement rate

The consistent growth of engagement is also considered a huge challenge by 44% of those marketers.

To understand why customer engagement is cornerstone for the growth of any organization, we have examined why it is seen as critical by marketers and how it becomes a major challenge.

Why is client engagement critical for marketers?

Engagement with contacts is crucial in long-standing customer relations. Customers and contacts stay engaged and loyal with organizations they find the most trustworthy. When marketers identify the right segment of customers, their expectations from the product and how they engage, they can adopt the right strategies to start providing the content and information that customers want to engage with and that is relevant to the specific segment of customers. Effective engagement culminates in loyalty, future purchase decisions and brand advocacy. Email marketing is one of the best marketing approaches to help lay the foundation of customer engagement while achieving other business parameters.

Why engagement is challenging?

The best way to engage with contacts is to identify what they are searching for and connect with them through a relevant and optimized chain of content. With mass email marketing strategies becoming a thing of the past, personalized email marketing is replacing the former as modern marketers are focused on creating and automating rich and relevant information, tips, and content to meet needs, expectations. Many marketers will also create personas of their target customers to nurture their audience.

Marketers now segment their contacts into specific groups in order to distinguish the contacts that are engaging and interacting with their email campaigns and to understand why they are engaging with specific types of content and information. Based on their analysis, they create automated email marketing phases with personalized content for different segments of customers and send them those email campaigns at the right time, with the right message and information.

Customer engagement is challenging to maintain for long term relations.. If you only engage and interact with contacts through a welcome email and don’t have a plan for a future stream of emails, then it’s easy for your customers to become detached with your brand. In order to get customers engaged, marketers need to gather the right set of data through forms or CRM to create personalized, relevant and targeted emails that achieve better engagement and retain customers’ interests. The aim should be delivering the right message at the right time to increase customer engagement.

Email challenge # 2: Customer acquisition

Building and increasing customer acquisition   a prime goal of email marketing campaigns for around 52% marketers.

Client acquisition is  an important marketing goal because as businesses get more customers, they  have the potential to tap into influencer and word of mouth marketing to grow their revenue. That’s why growing your customer base is a must, especially during the nascent stage of business growth.    

Why is client acquisition challenging?

Like customer engagement, one of the greatest difficulties in obtaining new clients is defining the target customer segment and determining the best strategy to build a customer base in that target segment.  

Getting new customers can be more expensive than engaging and retaining existing ones.

Marketing automation suites offer lead nurturing capabilities to move prospects through the buying cycle. These automation platforms help marketers acquire new customers at lesser cost and avoid risks of errors by enabling users to schedule and automate campaigns with the right content, well ahead of time, and with thorough planning. Once prospects turn into customers, many of them will  eventually become evangelists and brand advocates.

Email Challenge 3: Enhancing retention rate

Once a new customer is obtained, it is crucial to retain those customers through a relationship where both the organization and customers benefit. When customers start trusting the brand, they will stay engaged and continue returning for more products and solutions.

Why customer retention is crucial for a brand

Client retention can significantly add to the revenue generation of an organization and can generate revenue at lower costs than that of new customer acquisition. That’s why it is imperative to retain your existing customer base who can refer your business to new contacts, bring new customers and become brand evangelists. Thus, customer retention and loyalty benefit brands by helping to grow their customer base.  

Why do marketers find client retention challenging?

As per Jerry Jao, a pioneer in retention marketing, as the business keeps on changing, clients have plenty of choices and options to compare before they make the purchase call. Thus, customers’ attention span is gradually decreasing with an overwhelming range of choices they can opt for while they choose a brand for the product or service they need. At that, one of the best email marketing strategies to retain existing customers is to deliver personalized and relevant content or information to targeted customers. Marketers can use email marketing campaigns to present consumer loyalty surveys to precisely measure consumers’ needs, issues they face and solutions they need to address those issues as well as their loyalty toward the brand.  

Marketing automation suites enable marketers to use email marketing in a more streamlined and measured approach in retaining customers. Automation platforms assist marketers in reducing email marketing challenges in customer retention as they can deliver scalable relevant content and solutions to existing customers by creating data-backed email nurture programs that turn marketing campaigns into revenue generators. In order to create data-driven email programs, marketers can sync their CRM with the automation platform to source the right data about customers from CRM, online signup forms, sales development reps, customer service team notes and by integrating other teams that generate information on customers’ changing persona, needs, lifestyle habits and expectations from products. The more efficiently businesses can identify their customer segments and their preferences, the greater the chances they can retain their customers.  

Email challenge 4: Enhancing email personalization

The significance of email personalization is increasing as it empowers marketers to achieve and fix their various objectives and difficulties. Customized messages that are made relevant to the customer base can reduce the difficulties of acquiring, engaging and retaining targeted customers. That’s why improved email personalization is considered as a prime objective of around 38% of email marketers. However, it is also posed as a major challenge to about 36% of the marketers.

Why is email personalization considered essential?  

Emails with highly optimized subject lines have a 26% greater chance of being opened and can boost the odds of revenue generation from email campaigns up to 760%. The more customer-focused the content of the email campaign you create, the more interested and engaged your customers will be, and the more they will interact with your campaigns. Thus, your email campaign will generate higher click-through rates and greater possibilities of increasing customer engagement. Hence, the key to increase responses from customers is delivering personalized email messages. Modern marketers are pushing the limit to personalize email content in leaps and bounds using email marketing automation tools to help alleviate challenges of email personalization.    

Then, why do marketers find email personalization challenging?

Customized email messages can create positive and effective engagement from customers, however, many marketers are not utilizing the full potential of marketing automation tools in creating full-fledged personalized email content. As a result,marketers fail to grow their businesses significantly and slow down the performance of their email campaigns. Marketers also face challenges in sourcing the right data for accurate personalization. The best techniques of achieving email personalization include email list segmentation, behavior-driven emails, individualized email messaging among others whereas personalized landing pages, behavior-triggered emails, personalized email messages are considered the most challenging personalization tactics.

Many marketers also face the challenge in email personalization as they lack the right automation tools they need to personalize messages for their targeted segment of audience. The best solution is to utilize the right marketing automation platform which present wide range of tools to address their needs to optimize email messages and delivery at the right time, to the right segment.

But one of the biggest challenges facing most marketers is lack of time. Many marketers don’t have enough time in the day to get their campaigns out the door let alone create multiple personalized versions. That’s where an agency can come in handy and act as an extension of your in house team.