I'm in the process of gathering research into the challenges most commonly faced by marketers when executing email campaigns. What are yours? And what role do your play in the process? (Job title?) Looking forward to a spirited discussion!
Getting subscribers in the first place is the hardest. The next hardest part is formatting email templates in a nice way, and finding content to fill them up when just starting out.
I always have 20-30k in new subscribers. My frustration is the email providers that blacklist my IPs soon after I send a newsletter. Note: a newsletter. Some email providers' spam filters are superior (like gmail's) and can tell the difference between email spam and a newsletter, but for the rest of them, they do not care. Luckily, as many times as I emailed the email providers' support the IPs would get unblocked. Still a pain in the ass.
I used to have the problem that sometimes I would broadcast a message and the open rate would be very poor. What I have learned to do is pretest my subject lines with some either paid marketing or facebook and once I have a subject that is getting I action I would use that and my open rates went through the roof.
It's not hard to get subscribers if you have quality traffic on your website and creating an email template can be created in a simple way. I recommend using Firecart the all-in-one marketing automation, which allows using various features like to create lead capturing landing pages, exit intent pop-up, email newsletters, referral marketing, customer feedback, cart abandonment and more. I hope after using this, you will not have more questions.
In my opinion, email list creation is the first and the most difficult part! I think that we must divide our email lists on specific groups and send defined emails to those determined groups! Another difficulty is creating acceptable content of your letter! I think that it shouldn't be only text, we need to add some pictures, videos or some interesting information.
The most frustrating/challenging part about sending marketing emails is Deliverability. Many self-hosted mailing softwares fail to reach Inbox and typical Click Through Rate (CTR) achieved is around 0.1% and for reputed popular autoresponder companies it's only 0.5% to 1%. The role I play in the process is "Email Marketer" (email sender)
Copy writing a sales ad that doesn't look like a sales ad, but appears to be something along the lines of a subject that they are already interested in and captures their attention which causes the receiver to click open the email. You have to figure out the right head line too.
I controlled the email list for a small company, it was a fairly good sized list though... The most frustrating part was the owner wanting to put his "mark" on the sales copy. Ouch. He was a terrible writer and it was very frustrating to have him act as "editor".
Well you said to provide some more details, I'm digital marketing manager at Alexadners in Christchurch, New Zealand. I manage the list we have and send out newsletters every month to different lists with different content. Some of the issues I face: 1. Goddamn email severs, for most of the new registers emails end up on spam or black listed. 2. HTML email format, there is a difference between different systems that render emails, for instance Outlook is a piece of crap in this area, it is still using the Microsoft Word to render emails and it sucks. It takes tons and tons of testing to get it right. 3. Open rate and click rate, in our industry open rate is around 27% but I get 39% which is good yet still needs improvement. Click rate is as low as 3.5% which I get around 5.3%. I noticed (inline with some research that also confirm this) time of the day, time of the week, colour themes, even general theme of the newsletter are all important to increase these beside the efficiency of your list. I hope these help you a bit in your research, would be more than happy to discuss this in details as well. I'm a PhD candidate and understand how difficult it is to do research and find the right sample. Good luck
If you're sending the emails yourself, its delivery. It almost makes it worth paying the money for Aweber to get good delivery rates. Of course, actually getting a good list is extremely difficult.
The most frustrating part for me is inboxing. Seems every AR gets blacklisted often. Re's Rob Whisonant
In your little, dinky world everyone is a spammer. Sending one email once a year to a friends may not be considered spam in your little, dinky world.
I don't think if you sent a newsletter once a year you would get black listed.... maybe your friends don't want to hear about qwikad.com because they are using craigslist...