Make sure you avoid these costly marketing mistakes.

Avoid these expensive marketing mistakes

Every company has a service or product that’s worth promoting, but throwing money at your marketing campaign shouldn’t be the first thing you think about. To save money and potential headaches, take a look at these examples of costly marketing mistakes.

False promises

Don’t promise anything you can’t deliver. These false promises can have a negative impact on brand affinity. An easy way of promising something you can’t deliver is through your company’s tagline. For example, Avis, an American insurance company states that “We try harder”, despite only getting an average rating on 1.1 out of 5.0 for customer satisfaction on ConsumerAffairs.com. Another US company, Radioshack promised, “You’ve got questions… We’ve got answers.” These broken promises resulted in a satisfaction rating of 1.4 out of 5.0.

Make sure your motto matches the experience you deliver!

Bad data

Businesses today cannot afford to work with bad data – it harms the ROI of a potentially profitable marketing campaign. Econsultancy stated: “New research from Experian Data Quality shows that inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88 percent of companies, with the average company losing 12 percent of its revenue.”

If you split test clean data, you will get viable results back that will give you an indication what works for your target audience. If you work with bad data, the opposite will happen. You will get untrustworthy results back that could potentially ruin your campaign.

Make sure your data is clean before you use it.

Aggressive emailing

Email marketing offers a great ROI for most business, no matter the size. Yet, sometimes marketers forget to segment their audiences correctly. A generic email blast to the entirety of your email list may cause many to unsubscribe or even mark you as spam.

Of course, it’s expected to lose a few subscribers along the way. But if you regularly get marked a spam, your email service provider may ban you from using their product. According to Campaign Monitor, “The industry standard for an acceptable percentage of complaints per email campaign is less than 0.02 percent.”

Make sure you segment your lists – you don’t want to be marked as spam!

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