Recently after many months we resumed to start email marketing , few of the biggest mistakes we made in this journey are:
- Not overcommunicating: There’re so many things we assume during meetings and later regret of why didn’t over specified them. During the start of the pojrect we clearly mentioned collection of 500 emails. However, later we were also told to get other information like LInkedin URL, company name & website (which took the project timeline a lot long)
- Giving a fixed deadline: For any project, don’t give a fixed deadline anytime. You can’t predict anything (your team member may get a family commitment, medical issues, etc.). Thus give a buffer period (of 10 to 15 days) beforehand so your reputation isn’t at the stake. In this case the brand’s team can’t pressurize you unecessairly when you had given a buffer period
- Keep a good boundary of what needs to be done or what not: Especially when you’re dealing with agencies, the work is super divided so many a times we made unnecessary changes that would have no effect on teh conversions. Plus respecting the timings are also needed as I’m a college student plus Heeral (who had handles the complete email creation & extraction of leads) had other project commitments. So giving a fixed timeline of yoru availability helps both the parities
- Don’t risk your timeline with free tools: When the client don’t want to spend on quality tools, you can’t give a concrete timeline of project completion. We used cloudflare for email hosting and due to a server error the emails couldn’t get processed. As we had the free version so no support was provided & starting plans were too costly.
- Doing everything yourself: Atleast hiring a system admin helps in solving deep errors that are uncommon for marketers. Giving a fixed fees for the system admin helps in resolving issues in real time & keep the project on track
- Scrapping Tools: Thought we used different reputed email extracting tools from free version, you wont’ get all valid emails. Minimum 30% of the emails will be inactive/doesn’t exist/mailbox not receiving new emails, etc. So you can’t expect a high open rate from each lead (as many of them won’t receive). Instead use paid email extracting tools & extract 40% more leads than the actual target to maintain high engagement on your campaigns
- Takign teh client for granted: No matter how many tasks you’ve (even in family ermgenices) prioriization is a must. If the client has been so patient by the extended project deadline and still you’re giving any small excuses, it would harm not only your busienss & reputation but also your overall retention rate of lient. One unpleasant experience is remembers over 50 plesant experineces, so ensure that the client has the highest satissfaction rate.
- Not keeping the 3rd party agency in the loop: We made the mistake of not giving the real timeupdates and that backlashed with us. So when communicating in the group we gave updates in the mrning & then directly in the evening resulting in high project extension. So even if you’re busy or solving any eror – keep the agency team members always informed.
Few Techncial Errors We Made During Cold Emailing:
a) 𝘈𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘌𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳: Never use a free email hosting platform. Neither you’ll get a good support nor your issues will ever get fixed
b) 𝘚𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘋𝘰𝘸𝘯: Free email hosting providers has downtime issues – during a critical email campaign your results will highly affect
c) 𝘡𝘰𝘩𝘰 𝘊𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘴: It is for newsletter and not for cold emailing. Snov has the smooth interface to manage multiple cold email campaigns and filter active leads accurately.
There were a lot of combinations we tried in getting the right tool for cold emailing.
In the find of a good & free tool to experiment with – we took cloudflare and then shifted to Zoho campaigns.
2 consistent mistakes we did:
- Cloudflare: No support at all to the free members so whichever server errors we were getting weren’t resolved and project was getting super delayed. So shifted to the DNS settings to Zoho campaigns
- Zoho Campaign: It is used for email marketing and not for cold emailing. A wrong decision lead to time consumption. So though we were grttingthe open rates – that wasn’t what the tools is made for. So choose GoDaddy for hosting the emails.
Finally we found the good place to host the 3 email domains and those can be sent through Snov.
By switching on the custom tracking domain – the deliverability almost doubled up.
We revamped the unsubscribe page with the new look and a good copy to retain the outgoing lead.
We created a different flow for leads who haven’t opened the emails and followup sequence who booked the meetings.
Hoping to get some results in the month end….still the sequence is working adn will update you its status soon