7 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to reach their customers and promote their products or services. However, it is essential to avoid common mistakes to reach your audience and achieve your marketing goals effectively.
In this article, we will discuss seven email marketing mistakes businesses should avoid in creating successful campaigns. By learning from the mistakes of others, you can ensure that your email marketing efforts are effective and help you reach your target audience.
A great way to effectively pass a message across to your audience is via email. And, if done correctly, you can do more than pass messages.
Some people believe emails are an old, ineffective form of communication and marketing. Interestingly, the opposite is true. Statistics show that emails generate an astounding 4,200% ROI.
While you may have recognized the importance of email marketing software to your business, there are some mistakes that you should be mindful of to make the most of your email campaigns. This article critically examines seven email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
Statistics show that emails generate an astounding 4,200% ROI.
What is essential in an email marketing campaign?
Target audience: It is essential to clearly understand who you are trying to reach with your email campaign. Your emails will be more effective if you tailor the content and design to your target audience using personalization.
Message: Your email should contain a clear and concise message. As well as being relevant to your audience, it should address their needs and interests.
Subject Line: When people receive your email, the subject line is the first thing they see, so it should be engaging and attention-grabbing and sometimes needs to create a sense of urgency.
Call-to-action: Include a clear call-to-action in your email, like “click here to learn more” or “sign up now.”
Design: Visual appeal and easy reading with the right font should be the hallmarks of your email design. Since many people read emails on their phones, it should also be optimized for mobile devices, which you can achieve with an email template.
Testing: It is crucial to test different aspects of your email marketing campaign, such as subject lines, messaging, and design, to see what works best. Using A/B testing, you can send two versions of the same email to a small group of people and compare their responses.
Timing: It is also essential to consider the timing of your email. It is more effective to send emails during the weekday mornings or afternoons than during the weekend or late at night.
Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
There are several types of email examples that businesses can use to reach their target audience and achieve their marketing goals, These include:
- Newsletters: These are regular emails that are sent to subscribers to keep them up-to-date on the latest news and information about the business. Newsletters are a common practice for businesses to provide value to subscribers who are interested in what they have to say.
- Promotional emails: These emails are used to promote special offers, sales, or new products, a common method used in B2C products.
- Transactional emails: These are automated emails that are sent in response to a specific action taken by the recipient, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.
- Lead generation emails: These emails are designed to collect information from potential customers, such as their name and email address, in order to build a list of leads for the business.
- Event invitations: These emails invite recipients to attend events or webinars hosted by the business.
- Re-engagement emails: this email example is used to re-engage inactive subscribers and encourage them to continue receiving emails from the business.
- Surveys and polls: These emails gather feedback and insights from recipients about the business or its products or services.
SEE: Best Free Email Marketing Providers
Here are seven important mistakes to avoid
1. Tracking the wrong metrics or not tracking at all
This mistake is more common than you can imagine. Amateur marketers often send out emails with high hopes that their audiences are going to open, read, and act upon the emails. Sometimes, they drive action. Other times, nothing happens.
As you send out email campaigns, it’s crucial to realize that there is room for improvement and that the various elements of your email could use some tweaks. To find out exactly where to focus your improvement effort, you need to track the right metrics. Here are some metrics and what they mean to your email campaign.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the percentage of emails that didn’t reach the supposed destination. This rate gives you an insight into the quality of your subscribers. However, there are two types of bounce. The hard bounce is emails that cannot be delivered due to permanent issues (e.g. invalid or blocked email address). These emails should be removed from your mailing list immediately to prevent a drop in your deliverability.
The second type of bounce, soft bounce, happens when an email is temporarily unable to deliver due to some technical issues on the recipient’s end. This type of bounce is really not a big deal since the unavailability is temporary and the next emails may get delivered.
Open Rate
The email open rate represents the proportion of subscribers who have opened your email. It reflects the effectiveness of your subject line in grabbing attention and motivating recipients to open the email. A low open rate indicates a need to enhance the creativity of your subject lines to increase engagement.
Click-through Rate
The click-through rate is the percentage of individuals who have clicked on any of the links in your email. It is generally lower than the open rate. However, a high click-through rate indicates that your content is compelling and that your call-to-action (CTA) is effective.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of individuals who have chosen to opt out of your email campaign. It is uncommon to have a 0% rate, as not everyone will be interested in your campaign. However, a high unsubscribe rate can be a concern for marketers as it suggests a misalignment with the target audience, potential issues with campaign strategy, or content that is missing the mark. In such cases, reevaluating your approach is advisable.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the marketer’s ultimate focus. It is the percentage of your email recipient that eventually purchased your product after opening the email, reading, and clicking through the embedded link.
A good conversion rate is an indication of a kickass email campaign. Interestingly, this metric hinges on your ability to improve other previously mentioned metrics.
2. Unclear CTA (Call-to-Action)
Emails are communication tools. We use them to inform our recipients about what we know. And, as a business, your emails are no more than a piece of information without a precise CTA.
The CTA triggers the recipient to take a specific action. In many cases, this action may be to click a link or shoot a response. Whatever your goal of sending an email may be, using very short and clearly stated CTAs are far more effective than ambiguous ones.
3. Not Prioritizing Your Mobile Users
It’s typical for small business owners and marketing professionals to create email campaigns with their PC. However, more than 90% of global internet users go online through their mobile phones. So, not having the mobile interface at the center of your mind when creating an email campaign will cause a colossal hindrance to your campaign’s success.
At one point or two, we received an email that required us to slide our mobile phones horizontally to read an entire line of text. Some even have distorted designs on mobile that may look really great on PC. To prevent this, you should consider testing your email campaigns on your phone before sending them out. Otherwise, 90% of the world would only see a klutz for an email. Pathetic!
4. Being too “salesy”
Of course, the ultimate goal of an email campaign is to convert your audience into paying customers. But you need to figure out a way to do that without appearing too pushy or else they will route your emails to the spam folder. Remember, “no one likes to be sold to, but everyone likes to buy.”
Instead of sending out sale-type emails, aim for engagement and value. Craft emails that your audience will find immensely useful regardless of their decision to buy or ignore what you’re selling.
The real purpose of an email campaign is to increase your relevance in the audience’s life gradually. To make them anticipate the next email. And to ensure that they keep opening and reading your emails to the end. Once this loyalty is built, a three-word CTA is enough to do the conversion magic.
5. Creating irrelevant content
The average person receives 121 emails per day, excluding spam. That’s a lot of emails to check out, and every email should better be a good use of their time. Unfortunately, many of those emails lack actual relevance.
So, creating irrelevant content will earn you a regular long swipe to the right on the Gmail app.
By simply creating relevant content regularly, you can fall into the good graces of your reader and earn their long-term loyalty.
6. Spamming Your Customers With Too Many Emails
It’s important to send regular emails. It keeps your existence alive in your customers’ minds. But doing it too frequently, can become a real pain in the rear. Soon, your recipients will be waiting, phone in hand, to delete your email as soon as it drops. That’s if they haven’t had the time to follow the three-page unsubscribe process.
So, what should be the ideal frequency of your email?
It’s advisable to send emails to your list twice a month. Weekly emails would be a great idea if your industry requires disseminating time-sensitive information. More than that and you will be in their inbox competing with newsletters from the New York Times and other news outlets that are barely read past their headlines.
creating irrelevant content will earn you a regular long swipe to the right on the Gmail app.
7. Writing Bulk Copies
Great email copies are short and sassy. Too long and you’d be sending out collect admission letters to your recipients. And as we all know, people barely read past the “we are glad to offer you…” paragraph of those emails.
So, to encourage your audience to read the full message and consider taking a specified action, you have to make it really brief. Ideally, a recipient should be able to read your entire email on a mobile screen (top to bottom) without scrolling.
You can use bullet points, simple words, short sentences, and tiny paragraph blocks to make the email skimmable.
Top Email Marketing Tools to Maximize Conversion
We highly recommend the following tools from a myriad of email marketing solutions for small and growing businesses.
Conclusion
No email campaign is perfect. Some are just more effective than others. But, for all, there is room for improvement.
Your first campaign may not get the kind of conversion that you desire. Tracking the right metrics can reveal key areas that need your focus.
Also, delivering real value and maintaining relevance without being too salesy can make a real difference in your relationships with your email recipients.
While you nurture these relationships, you might make a few mistakes. That’s normal. Just take the time to recognize and fix them. And everything will work out just fine eventually.
