Email marketing is still one of the best ways for businesses to reach their customers. It has the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other business marketing platforms such as social media or blogging. Businesses can leverage email marketing to send their customers information on discounts, promotions, and events. Nevertheless, it is critical that marketers do not make common email marketing mistakes in order to gain the most from their campaigns.
Time and effort must be invested to develop an effective email strategy. Here are 5 major email marketing mistakes that should be avoided when sending campaigns to recipients. Eliminating these errors from your emails can increase your chance of converting a potential customer into a sale.
5 Common Email Marketing Mistakes
1. Using an Outdated Email List
It is imperative to stay up-to-date with your email list. You must actively manage your email list and avoid sending out campaigns to contacts who have unsubscribed or bounced regularly. This can be done on your own or with list management services like those offered by FrescoData.
Sending out campaigns to contacts who previously unsubscribed violate international spam laws. With GDPR coming into effect this year, this can be a costly blunder for your business. Ensure that you maintain a positive email reputation by only emailing contacts that have opted-in to your email correspondence.
Furthermore, your company must remove emails from your growing list if they regularly bounce. Emails can bounce for a variety of reasons:
- The recipient’s email is misspelled so not an active email
- The recipient’s inbox is full
- The recipient’s email is inactive
Sending campaigns to emails that regularly bounce can affect your deliverability rates. This can negatively affect your email reputation and even cause your email to be blacklisted.
2. Avoiding Email Segmentation
If you send the same email to every person on your contact list, you should stop. Your email content should always be as targeted as possible, and using this strategy is not effective. Your business marketing must cater to the needs of each individual customer.
Segmenting your email lists will allow you to group your contacts into more focused, like-minded groups. This will allow you to create email messages that resonate with each segment, rather than sending one campaign that tries to cater to everyone in your email list. By tailoring your campaigns to the wants and needs of your different segment, you will increase click-through rates thus a more successful campaign.
Some of the ways you can segment emails include:
- Purchase patterns
- Engagement
- Preferences
- Gender
- Age
3. Sending Emails with No Purpose
Do you tell your customers what to do when you send them an email? Every email serves a purpose. Sending emails with no purpose simply crowds your recipient’s inbox. This can decrease engagement and increase unsubscribe rates, all of which affect your email deliverability. Plus, this has a direct effect on your reputation with potential customers.
You must make the purpose of your emails easy, clear and obvious for your recipient to follow through on. Whether you want them to buy a product or follow your company on social media, make sure there is a call to action (CTA) for it. Doing this may seem a bit forward but in email marketing it critical to creating the outcome you desire.
Also, ensure that you do not crowd too many CTAs in one email. This can confuse your audience and lead them down various paths, rather than the main one you desire. Keep your emails focused. This will help positively build your brand’s reputation in the long run.
4. Not Optimizing Campaigns for Mobile
This year, over 47% of all emails have been opened on smartphones. As customers continue to open emails on mobile, it is critical for companies to consider mobile optimization when sending out email campaigns. Otherwise, they risk marginalizing a large segment of their email recipients.
Customers are ruthless. If they see ill-formatted email campaigns on mobile, they will immediately delete the campaign. Worse, some recipients will unsubscribe if the email is formatted terribly on mobile. This can negatively affect your email strategy in the long run.
As smartphone usage continues to rise, it is imperative that all companies use mobile responsive email templates into their email campaigns.
5. Overlooking Message Preheader Text
Preheader text is defined as a text that provides a short summary, usually around 100 characters long, about the content of an email. It usually follows the subject line in an email’s inbox. Preheader text is particularly important in mobile inboxes, where it is prominently displayed.
When sending our email campaigns, you should modify your preheader text. Otherwise, it will be propagated with random text, which would be text from anywhere in your email (think “Click Here to Unsubscribe.”) Preheader text can make the difference between getting a user to open your email campaign or not.
Conclusion
Do you commit any of these email marketing mistakes? While these mistakes can be costly, they can easily be remedied for more email marketing success. Take note and modify your approach to shift toward email marketing best practices. With practice, you can shift your email blunders into email successes.
