Email marketing mistakes can be costly. Imagine finding out milliseconds after sending out a massive campaign that you made a mistake. But we’re not here to warn you about typos or grammatical errors. Some email marketing mistakes can be notoriously hard to detect and resolve.
Conversions do not occur simply just because you have an extensive email list. It depends on the efficiency of your strategy and the dedication behind its execution.
However, it can be challenging to craft a top-notch email marketing strategy with so many variables to consider. Thus, mistakes are inevitable.
Poorly crafted emails can land you straight in spam folders, ruining your reputation. To assist you in avoiding email marketing blunders, we've prepared a list of 14 of the most typical email marketing mistakes to avoid.
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Are your open rates of email unexpectedly low?
What could be the reason behind an unengaged audience base and an alarming unsubscription rate?
Maybe the subscribers do not find the content relevant. Perhaps something is wrong with the way you craft your emails.
Email marketing blunders range from minor to catastrophic. Even the most skilled email marketers make mistakes from time to time. However, what matters most is how you avoid making the same mistakes from happening.
Ready to upgrade your email marketing strategy? Let's begin.
A common mistake most marketers make is by not sending a "Welcome email" to the subscribers.
It is easier to catch the attention of your subscribers right after they signed up. Welcome emails are known as tone setters. They make future conversations with your audience easier by setting a warm tone.
Right after a prospect subscribed for your mails, greet them. Introduce yourself. Brief them about the fantastic journey you have ahead together.
Here's an ideal example of a welcome email by Smashing Newsletter.
Your welcome email should consist of the following elements:
Be it a landing page, email, infographic, or blog post, a must-have for all of them is a call-to-action.
An absence of call-to-action leaves the audience to decide what they should do instead of creating an urge in them to follow a trail that will lead them to your goal.
Thus, before writing an email, have a clear vision of the outcome you want. You can share a piece of content with your audience or the news of the upcoming launch of a new product or service.
Your email's design, text, graphics should lead your audience to the goal you aim to achieve. A clear CTA will entice the readers to follow that track.
Are you wondering how you can create a great call to action? We will describe it later in this article.
As long as your audience can not engage with your emails, the effort you made behind your email marketing strategy will go fruitless.
If that occurs, nothing else would matter - neither an email with zero errors and compelling CTAs nor the fantastic service you deliver to your customers.
If the audience subscribed to get culinary tips from you, then send them those. If they subscribed to get digital marketing hacks, share those. Sending irrelevant emails to your audience will make your emails land in spam folders, or worse, your audience will unsubscribe.
With the increasing number of spammers, your audience has become skeptical about every new website.
Therefore, maintaining professionalism is essential to build trust among your audience.
So, what can you do to make yourself look more professional?
Do not become just another email that gets lost in the recipient's inbox. Become a listener. Instead of rambling about yourself, try to address the problems the audience might be facing. Then add how you can be a savior for them.
Avoid adding details on what your product is about. Consider adding how the audience can reap the benefits from your service.
While crafting an email, forget that you are a salesperson. Instead, maintain a friendly tone with your audience.
Unoptimized emails are a sure-fire way to decrease your open and click-through rates significantly. In fact, 81% of emails are opened and read on phones.
The texts and images of your email should be easily readable on small screens.
Your content should be in a single column, and the width of images should remain within 600 pixels.
Before hitting the "send" button on your inbox, cross-check the final product by sending them to yourself first.
If you lack the time or the knowledge to do this, choose services that optimize your emails.
Beautiful, striking, relevant images enhance the quality of your emails. However, you must add alt texts describing the image content using text.
A proper "alt text" lets your recipients know the images' subject without loading them. Alt text replaces the image with a text if the ESP of the recipient blocks the shot or if the image fails to load.
As a marketer, you probably already understand the value of personalization in email marketing. You can fine-tune your email campaign with this single step.
There is no point in having an extensive email list without an engaging audience. However, your audience is receiving numerous emails each day. Therefore, if your emails do not stand out, you cannot expect to grab their attention.
The first name of the subscriber is not going to be really helpful. Because it's a common technique that every marketer uses.
While signing up, your prospects provided information such as their name, birthday, gender, location, occupation, age, and more. Send them content based on these parameters to engage them.
However, make sure to not ask for too much information from them. Otherwise, your audience will be skeptical and you’ll risk losing them.
Furthermore, inserting CTA is very important while email marketing. The CTA should state your purpose clearly.
For example, if you are sending them a PDF, then your CTA should be like this:
“Download the PDF right now and [Insert outcome]”
However, if you ask the subscribers to take too many actions at once (such as sign-up for the monthly newsletters, join the Instagram community, participate in the webinar), you will most likely confuse them.
This will lead them to take the action of marking you as spam or unsubscribe from your mailing list.
When you are out shopping, don't you go to different shops to buy different stuff? Like you, your customers also have personal reasons for signing up to your mail lists.
Therefore, sending all of them the same email will not only harm the interest of your business, but you will also appear disrespectful to their interests.
To avoid such mistakes, segment your email list based on your gathered demographic and psychographic data.
Bad subject lines wreck the chances of driving your email open rates. 47% of the recipients open the mail seeing the subject line. Therefore, subject lines that sound engaging and give a clear idea of the email content are a necessity.
If your email address looks like any of the following:
You should not really be surprised by the low email open rates.
Not only are you appearing unappealing, but also you are appearing unfriendly to your recipients. Your subscribers will most likely choose those services that are more welcoming.
However, it's not uncommon to be overexerted with emails as a marketer. There's a solution for that too! You can add a link to your landing page where customers or prospects can give their feedback, ask for further information, and send their queries.
Your authenticity and credibility depend on your sender's reputation. Being unaware of the ins and outs of your sender's reputation will affect your email marketing performance.
ISPs award a score to determine the authenticity of your emails. That score is known as sender reputation. You can increase your sender reputation by:
To better understand the efficacy of your email marketing campaign, you need to monitor the open rates, deliverability rate, click-through rates, conversion rate, and other relevant metrics.
By monitoring these KPIs, you can also target your warm and hot leads and take action that will cater to their needs. Email marketing analytics can help you measure the KPIs, tweak, establish, and upgrade your email marketing strategy.
Another common and overlooked mistake marketers make is showing irregularities with email delivery. Remember your ultimate goal is to sell the products to the subscribers or attract them to your service.
When a person subscribes to your emails, obviously, they have expectations. Instead of meeting those expectations, if you disappear from the face of the earth, or worse, if you send them tons of emails, no wonder they are going to block you.
The best way to avoid this mistake is to set a frequency, let your subscribers know about it, and keep your words. For example, if they have subscribed for monthly newsletters, mail them once a month with your newsletter.
Choose professional email marketing platforms to send your emails during set intervals.
According to Hubspot, emails sent at 11 a.m. have the highest open rates. But we don't recommend you blindly follow the statistics. Instead, we suggest you experiment and see when your audience likes to get emails from you.
Sending emails during odd hours is an infallible technique to decrease your email open rates. Therefore, make sure your emails are arriving at your customer's mailbox on time.
Violating the legal guidelines from anti-spam laws, i.e., GDPR, CCPA, CAN-SPAM Act, might lead you to pay hefty fines along with being marked as spam.
You need explicit consent from subscribers for sending them mail. The subscribers need to give you a valid address. Furthermore, you need to include an unsubscribe option in your emails.
Now you know the most common mistakes made by email marketers. We hope you will avoid these and reap the benefits of the efforts you have put into crafting your email marketing campaign.
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