Email marketing is easy, right? Build a list, pick an offer, send an email campaign and sit back and wait for the sales. Sometimes that happens, but often the email campaign doesn’t deliver the results you were hoping for. What do you do then?

Before you decide email is a complete waste of time take a closer look and decide if you were really at the top of your game on these four crucial elements.

The list for your email campaign

The success of your email campaign starts and ends with the strength of your list. Without a good permission based list event the most creative campaign is doomed to failure. Maybe you are working with an old list, with lots of out of date email addresses. Periodically taking time to clean your list and purge people who never open your email will give you a much better sense of how big and viable your prospect pool is.

Also, it is entirely possible you took too broad an approach, trying to send one message to everyone on your list. Not everyone on your list is going to be interested in everything you have to offer, so instead of watering down your content so there is something for everyone, take the time to write messages for specific audiences. The more you can personalize the email, the more likely the reader is to respond.

The message needs to be relevant

Even if you have the right list, your email campaign can fail if you send the wrong message. So if you have kept your data base clean and you have selected a target segment and you are still hearing crickets instead of a flurry of phone calls you need to consider that you sent the wrong message to the right people. They were qualified prospects but they didn’t respond because you didn’t send them information they cared about.

This is hard for most business owners who are passionate about the product or service they sell. But sometimes you need to step back and look at your business through the eyes of your prospect and ask yourself, if it wasn’t your business, what would make you care enough to respond to an email.

Timing is everything

The right message at the wrong time will not work. So as you plan your email campaign don’t forget to think about when  you are going to deliver the message. Timing can refer to the time of year (no matter how hard you try it is tough to sell snow shovels in July) or the time of day. People may be willing to read your email first thing in the morning, from their cell phone, but they won’t take the time to click through and fill out a form. Be sure your email arrives in their in box when they are likely to be able to act.

Your email campaign needs a call to action

Maybe the message was all right, delivered to your exquisitely clean list at the perfect moment. People opened your email and then closed it because it didn’t tell them what to do next. If you forgot to put a call to action in your email, or you did, but the call to action wasn’t compelling people will not respond. A good rule of thumb is to have one button in the top third of your mail with a clear compelling reason to click. Don’t clutter your email with too many different offers, save some for the next campaign and you are likely to have better results.

The good thing about all these problems is that they’re easily solvable. Often just a slight adjustment in your strategy will significantly improve your results. Need help finding out what went wrong with your marketing? Give us a call. As a Constant Contact Master Certified Agency, we can help you improve your next email campaign.

Roundpeg is an Indianapolis content marketing firm.