Do you send emails? You maybe even spending a lot of time defining the best email marketing strategy. However, do you not have the results you expect? Most likely, you are making mistakes that many make through lack of attention or simple ignorance of the field.
For marketers, email is a proven and effective way to engage current and potential customers, and it will remain so for quite some time, with an average ROI of 3,800%. Many other channels have emerged, such as social networks, which weave relationships with customers in a different way. However, email allows marketers to send messages directly to their inboxes. Email as a channel has grown, and so has its personalization and design.
A good email marketing strategy will consist of sending the right content at the right time and to the right person. Now, an email must possess some characteristics to arouse the interest of the customer. Needless to say, it is not easy to define, and a mistake can occur at any time. Knowing this, sending emails with gaps or mistakes might cost you a lot!
A bad email can be highly damaging to your mark, whether a grammatical error, a mistake, or, even worse, sending a message to the wrong target. A well-written email that matches the needs of your plan, on the other hand, can yield very positive effects. So how can you avoid gaps in such an important part of your marketing strategy?
Discover the most common email marketing mistakes entrepreneurs face and learn how to avoid them now!
1. Working With Outdated Email Lists
As you probably already know, email service providers impose very strict rules on their users regarding the quality of the lists used. Email lists with too many non-existent or outdated addresses, generating too many returns and complaints, are penalized: senders are blocked. Why create messages that do not arrive in the inbox of their recipients?
It is essential to ensure the quality of the email addresses used. How? By regularly cleaning your email address lists, deleting non-existent emails, and setting aside inactive addresses. This will allow you to improve the performance of your email campaigns.
2. Not Knowing Your Audience
It is essential to have a good understanding of your target audience. You certainly know that. That said, sometimes it is useful to repeat certain things to be aware of them. This is indeed a mistake that we can all make, especially if we do not do a good job of segmenting our audience.
It is no coincidence that all the best autoresponder software allows you to segment your mailing list. All the people who will subscribe to your email list do not all have the same interests. Some are prospects who are very interested in your products but expect something more from you. Some are, on the contrary, already customers and are only looking to nurture a deeper relationship with you, etc.
This is why sending the same email to the first or second person does not make sense. You need to know your target well and send an appropriate message depending on the circumstances. The most common mistake is not segmenting your audience and sending the same email to everyone on your list.
3. Not Welcoming New Subscribers
A new user has just subscribed to your mailing list? That’s excellent news! But the mistake would be to let it marinate until your next campaign.
Welcome emails are essential to captivate your prospects directly. Why? Because at the time they receive this message, users are probably still on your site. This is the perfect time to increase their shopping cart or encourage them to convert. Additionally, welcome emails have higher open rates than other messages. But that’s not all! Instead, with a 336 percent higher transaction rate and a 196 percent higher click-through rate than any other email, they produce 320 percent more income than other marketing.
“Focus on growing your list all of the time as newer subscribers are more engaged, adding to healthier open rates and ROI.” – Karl Murray
4. Without Any Strategy
If you don’t have a strategy for your email marketing, you’re wasting your time. As with any other type of marketing, you need to set specific goals for what you would like to accomplish. Maybe you want to use email to increase traffic to your website, build social media engagement, or increase sales.
Knowing what you want to get out of your efforts will allow you to develop a strategy that will help you achieve those goals and move your business in the right direction.
“That which is measured improves.” – Karl Pearson
5. Not Automated
When you only have a few customers, it’s easy to keep in touch manually, but as your business grows, sending out manual communications will become cumbersome. You can optimize your time while maintaining those important relationships with your customers by taking advantage of email automation. Don’t worry. With the appropriate plan, you can automate without sacrificing the personal touch that’s so important for effectively nurturing your leads.
6. Lack Of Catchy Titles
A bad title is a title that does not make you want to click or that is not consistent with the content. Clearly, it is not an easy thing to know how to write the right subject line that will make your audience want to click and read. This is something that can be mastered through time, which is why copywriting is a skill that is looked after by businesses.
That makes it a very big mistake and probably the one that can cause you the most damage. Why? An email with a title that is not catchy is an email that will not be opened at all. This means that you can, for example, offer the best possible offer, but it will be useless because no one will know about it.
“When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – David Ogilvy
7. Not Optimized
These days, email service providers are offering newer and better algorithms to block promotional emails from reaching your recipients’ inboxes. If you’re not careful how you approach your email campaigns, your messages are likely doomed to die in the spam folder.
To avoid this, make sure your emails are optimized by avoiding spam trigger phrases and requesting that your recipients whitelist your email address.
8. Grammatical Errors
Nothing is more awkward in email marketing than launching an email campaign to hundreds of subscribers only to discover you made a spelling or grammatical mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, but it’s essential that you deliver relevant and persuasive information, and even the slightest grammatical error can diminish your credibility.
Triple check all your content, send your content to multiple editors, and when all else fails, copy and paste the body of the email into a word processor and perform a spelling and grammar check. Even the most talented writers and editors can sneak a peek at a simple mistake, so be sure to use all editing tools and solutions before hitting “send.”
9. Stuffed CTA
Too many CTAs kill CTAs. Some tend to include too many call to action in the body of the email, thinking they are doing the right thing: “Visit our site,” “Order,” “Buy,” “Give your opinion,” etc. But, of course, asking for too many actions of a person tends to lead to inaction. They don’t know where to start anymore. Your contacts will be lost if you solicit too much from them.
To optimize your conversion rates, limit yourself to one or two CTAs. Ideally: one email = one CTA.
10. Ignore Mobile Devices
50% of mobile users delete an email that does not display properly on mobile. While content that is displayed in an appropriate manner has strong conversion power: revenue generated by emails read on smartphones has increased by 37% in 1 year.
Always check the compatibility and design of your email on small screens before sending it.
11. The “One Size Fits All” Approach
The most effective form of marketing depends on its relevance. Therefore, in today’s era, the “one size fits all” approach no longer works with modern email marketing strategies.
Out here, your messages should be relevant to the readers of your emails. Although email list segmentation helps make your marketing relevant, only 11% of companies segment their email lists, according to statistics.
Segmentation can be basic or complex, but once you segment your email list in your CRM database into different groups and personalize your messages using the contextual information collected about those leads and customers in your best CRM software for small businesses easy to use, you will surely find a boost in the click-through rate of your emails and thus find more engaged customers in your email list.
“Don’t continue to do what you’ve always done just because it’s easy to do!” – Ian Minnis
12. Only Send Image-Based Emails
According to an Email Marketing Benchmark report, only 33% of email subscribers have images enabled by default in their email readers. Therefore, if your emails are only image-based, it implies that your will emails will show up as one long blank space and cannot be read by more than 67% of your email list subscribers.
Although you can send “image-based only” emails if you sell visual products such as art decoration, clothing, or deal with travel, nevertheless, it has been observed that image-based emails of text have a CTR (Click Through Rate) that is more than 40 percent higher than that of entirely image-based emails.
Therefore, even if you must use images, make sure to illustrate your images in simple texts so that your leads, prospects, and customers can take the necessary actions, and also make sure to link your email to a web version of your email, which covers the message inside the email.
Final Words
With the total number of email users worldwide expected to reach 2.9 billion by 2019, there is no doubt that email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools for reaching, engaging, and converting customers. However, it is only effective if you do it correctly. By avoiding the mistakes listed above, you’ll improve your bottom line and enjoy a better return on investment.
