How Mailchimp & Mass Email Delivery Systems Are Ruining Your Engagement
If you are here, surely you have heard about email marketing. This is a practice that most large companies resort to, because it is easy, cheap to produce and can generate many benefits. However, it is a practice that must be done carefully, since incurring in bad practices when carrying out mail marketing can even generate the opposite effect to the one expected, and among those bad practices, is the uncontrolled automatization using applications such as MailChimp.
But first, let's talk about email marketing, what it consists of, and why it is used so much these days.
Email marketing consists of a marketing strategy in which a company, or an interested party, sends massive emails to a list of contacts. This brings its benefits, since it allows communication with our clients or potential clients by sending information to them directly.
It is a very powerful tool since, according to statistics, 95% of internet users have at least one email account. On top of this, sending emails is easy, fast, and if done right, it can improve outreach with your customers.
Email marketing can be used for the following purposes:
To communicate directly with your customers, so that you can get into their top of mind, that is, that your clients think of you, whenever they require a service that you provide.
Allows you to send newsletters to your followers, so that they are always aware of the news in your company.
Create loyalty through discount coupons or special offers.
Ask for opinions to find out exactly what people expect from your company or your products, as well as conduct surveys.
Attract new users through cold emails, which consist of sending emails to potentially new customers, and try to capture their attention.
But not everything is so simple. If an ordinary user tries to send a bulk of emails from a normal user account of a mail service like Google Mail, they will quickly run into a problem. These email services have a limit on the number of senders you can address to, which can vary between 50 and 100. And that's when web applications like MailChimp appear, which allows their users to send up to 10,000 monthly emails on 2,000 addresses with a free subscription. In addition to this, it brings a series of tools to be able to design the emails that they want to send, among other options.
But now we have to talk about the bad practices that certain companies incur when implementing email marketing, which is enhanced by the ease of use of applications such as MailChimp
Sending too many cold emails:
Although it seems like a good idea, to just send a bulk of emails to anyone, expecting to attract potentially new customers, this can be counterproductive, since there are people that have no interest in the product or service that your company provides. This will cause the users to mark your email as SPAM, eliminating all communication with this user.
Not segmenting the user base: Segmenting users is a good practice that should be considered when doing email marketing, since not all users are the same. If your company provides different products or services, it is necessary to determine which users could be interested in each email. Applications like MailChimp in their free plan do not allow segmenting their users, so this can complicate the situation if you do not subscribe to a paid plan.
Being too invasive: An interesting thing about email marketing is that for you to send an email to your clients or future clients, they previously must give you their email, they can do this, for example, by subscribing to your web page. So, this user has already a predisposition to receive your emails... However, you cannot be sending them emails constantly because they can get tired of it. It has happened to more than one user, that they subscribe to a web page to use a one time service, and because of that inbox is filled with emails that they are not interested in, so they proceed to mark it as SPAM.
Make emails with little personality and with generic templates: This goes in hand with the "Not segment the user base" thing. We all like to feel special in some way, even though when you open an email that was sent to you by a company, you clearly know that the same email has been sent to thousands of people. It still makes you feel good if it keeps the illusion that they were thinking about you when they produce that email. So, you have to know who will be the ones receiving which email, and the content you put into. Also, the design of the one is important, many user spends very few seconds reading the email, so with that in mind firstly the email needs to be recognizable, use the color pallet that best represents your brand, and last but not least, you can’t just put a bunch of text expecting people to read it, the message has to be short and precise, to avoid users getting bored.
As we have seen, email marketing and applications such as MailChimp are a very powerful tool to improve communication with our potential clients, but like any tool, it must be used correctly if we want it to meet its intended objective and not have the contrary effect.
