Are You Making These Email Marketing Mistakes? – Emily McGuire

Email marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your target audience and increase your business revenue. And it’s still very effective! But too many companies fail to do it right, whether it’s because they don’t send out emails frequently enough or they don’t have a clear email campaign goal. Our today’s guest is here to share some actionable tips and tricks on how to do email marketing.

Emily is the owner of an email marketing and automation studio called Flourish and Grit. She has spent over a decade in tech, sent thousands of email campaigns, and earned her clients over $80 million in email campaign revenue. She’s passionate about teaching others how to leverage email marketing to increase their sales and engagement. From educating Esty shop owners to working with million-dollar e-commerce companies, Emily has done it all. She loves helping people who want to be better at emails and she considers that her contribution to the email marketing industry.

According to her, an email has a purpose to connect with people on a human level. The more you treat it that way, the better you’ll be at email marketing.

In this episode of the Think Business With Tyler podcast, we discuss the benefits of email marketing and why every business needs to have a strong email list. How to set, achieve and most importantly measure your email campaign goals. We also get into the most common mistakes that brands make and we talk about the key metric to look out for in email marketing. If your company has a hard time leveraging email marketing to boost sales and engagement, tune into this episode to hear from the expert.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Emily McGuire

💡 What she does: She’s the Owner and Chief Email Marketer of Flourish & Grit: An Email Marketing and Automation Studio.

💡 Noteworthy: Emily has been in the industry for more than a decade. She earned her clients more than $80 million in email marketing revenue.

💡 Key Quote: “Something is better than nothing. And it’s something I have to tell myself constantly. Because we all want it to be perfect. We want it to be right. And the thing with everything in our lives is that we have to start somewhere.”

💡 Where to find Emily: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Emails can have a much higher ROI than social media channels. Email marketing is still quite powerful. According to Emily, it’s much more effective than social media marketing because you practically get permission from your customers to market to them. If done right, email marketing can increase your revenue and engagement, which are both crucial metrics for every business. “What email does is just follow up with people with all the relevant content and offers. So, it’s a really powerful owned channel, as opposed to social media, where you’re at the mercy of algorithms and other databases.”

What are the most common mistakes that people make in email marketing? In her long experience helping clients do email marketing, Emily has learned what the most common problems are: unclear goals and lack of measurement. These two are intertwined – if you don’t set a clear goal, you can’t measure your results. If you want your email campaign to be successful, start by defining your goals and then measure them. “Nine times out of 10, most people cannot articulate the specific goal, or how to measure it. And so if you don’t have a way to measure the effectiveness of your emails, or what you’re even measuring, you’re not going to know, you don’t have the visibility or the transparency into what is or isn’t working. So usually, that’s the first place is just starting with what are the specific goals for your emails? What do you want people to do? And then how do you measure that? And how do you guide people there?”

Always be list-building. Building an email list for your brand is one of the smartest marketing techniques that you can do. It’s particularly good for brand awareness. Emily says you should start building an email list even if you don’t have an email program yet. Start by acquiring subscribers through every channel that you’re using for brand promotion. You’ll easily go from there later on. “You do need a consistent source of traffic or leads to start packing your list. So you need that brand awareness first. So social media ads, whatever you’re doing, that are outbound efforts, is gonna make your email program really, really, really successful. So definitely start with brand awareness. And then work on the email campaigns, but always be list building.”

Engagement will always win. Although revenue is the ultimate goal of email marketing, the engagement rate is as important. You shouldn’t be spamming people with your emails but aim to give value and help them solve their problems. Quality over quantity, always. “Engagement will always win the day, no matter what digital channel you have. And in particular, for email and this is true for social media platforms is that engagement improves the performance of your account overall. So having a higher engaged list actually helps improve your ability to end up in the inbox as opposed to the spam folder.”

Top Quotes

“People forget that marketers are people. And when we make mistakes, it’s kind of like, Oh, right, there is a person over there. And usually, if you can do it with some sort of grace or humor, my dog ate my mouse or whatever, people respond to it really well.”

“That’s part of brand, having a personality and having something that differentiates you from the crowd. For some folks, that’s humor, others, it might be thought leadership, or expertise, or, a really great visual brand. So I wouldn’t say that a brand or an email has to have personality, it has to connect with people on a human level.”

“Running ads to a lead magnet or a signup offer is going to make your list explode. And also just promoting it on social media and everywhere you touch potential leads. So if you’re speaking somewhere or you’re at an event, make sure you’re letting people know that you have something special for them if you join their list.”

“A month in the digital world is an eternity. People aren’t going to remember you if you’re only contacting them once a month.”

“We all have several goals in mind, depending on your business, but often, it’s breaking those down into smaller steps to think about the subscriber as a whole. They’re a whole human, they’re not going to want to buy from you every single email you send, unless they’re rich and in that case, send them my link because I want to talk to them. But then you got to break it down into smaller steps in terms of engagement and getting them closer and closer to that goal.”

“Something is better than nothing. And it’s something I have to tell myself constantly. Because we all want it to be perfect. We want it to be right. And the thing with everything in our lives is that we have to start somewhere. And we have to iterate it’s a continuous improvement process. So it’s really hard to go blind into something and do it right the first time.”

Links

Flourish & Grit Website

FREE GUIDE: Supercharge Your Lead Magnet

LinkedIn