The key to running a successful email marketing campaign relies on many different factors. Even with the simple goal of getting emails to convert, many marketers fall victim to mistakes that affect metrics like open and click-through rates. Here are 9 of the most common blunders that you will often see in marketing emails and how you can avoid them.
1. Not personalizing your emails.
Failure to personalize emails that you send to potential customers may result in a lack of interest in your content altogether. Here are the elements that you could be missing to make your emails more personal.
- Addressing the recipient by their name.
- Basing your email content on their most recent online activities.
- Giving tips or suggestions about a product or service they most recently received.
An email designed to appeal personally to a subscriber or potential customer is the one that they are most likely to remember or revisit, possibly turning into a conversion.
2. Not mobile optimizing your emails.
Have you ever opened an email on your phone and noticed that the content was a little off? Perhaps the text was incorrectly sized or an image. That is a classic example of an email that is not mobile optimized, meaning that the recipient can only effectively view it on a desktop. According to marketing software company Hubspot, at least 50% of all email opens happen on mobile devices. Optimize your emails to display well on mobile, and it could lead to more engagement and conversions for your business!
3. Not segmenting your contact list.
Your contact list will consist of different types of people, depending on demographics, geographic location, recent purchase activity, browsing history, and interests. Sending all of them the same email is a mistake because while the message may be relevant to one recipient, it may not be suited to many others. The result of this would be most of your emails having no appeal to potential customers. What’s worse is that you risk losing contacts who may no longer feel like your messages are giving them enough value. Segment your contacts into specific groups to ensure that each recipient always gets the email specifically adapted to their needs.
4. Not making your CTAs (Call to Actions) clear or forgetting to include them altogether.
The absence or lack of a clear call to action could mean the difference between a forgotten email and aa conversion.
The goal of email marketing should always be to convert leads or to build a community. For this reason, your emails must directly invite the recipients to engage with your content through a call to action. Make your intent clear with words or phrases that are great calls to action, such as “Sign up”, “Buy now”, “Learn More”. Embed them in your emails as plain text links or clickable buttons, and position them in a few places where they are easy to see and straightforward to follow.
5. Only sending promotions without giving any value to the subscriber.
The goal of email marketing is to advertise your products or services to potential customers. However, failing to provide value is a one way ticket to a cold, unengaged list. The contact at the other end of an email address is a person, and they may only continue to pay attention if you have something of value to give them. Instead of just asking them to buy something or sign up for a service, preface your email by describing the benefits that they could enjoy from it. Include informative tips that they could apply to make a product or experience more effective. Value based emails keeps a customer engaged in a way that a promotion could not.
6. Not sending welcome emails.
A potential customer has shown interest in your product and has signed up or given their email address on your website. What do you do next? Your first order of business should be to capitalise this interest by beginning communications with a welcome email series. On average, welcome emails have an open rate of up to 82%. Newly interested customers want to know what you have to offer and are more open to your content than they will be afterward. So don’t miss out on the chance to keep the conversation going, especially when the likelihood of engagement with this type of email is so high!
7. Emails that are too image heavy..
Your email needs to have a balanced amount of both written and graphical content. Images like infographics and pictures grab attention, but some users often choose not to load them in their general email settings. Too much imagery in an email may fail to load and relay relevant information. Some email recipients are readers and tend to scroll through the graphics to get to the written content. Focus less on images and more on the written material in the emails you send out, and the engagement rates will be much higher. What’s more, a high image to text ratio may cause your emails to be flagged as spam by many of the major email providers!
8. Not paying attention to performance analytics.
You can never know how to improve if you never know what you are doing incorrectly or ineffectively. That is why bettering your email marketing campaign may hinge on how well you study and apply the data you get from the emails you send. These include open rates, spam complaints, click-through rates, bounce rates, list growth, and so much more. Understanding how users interact with your messages could help you tailor your emails to meet their many different needs, improving your overall performance in the process.
9. A weak, or overdone and unrelated subject line
The subject line is the first thing your recipients will see before they even open your email. It needs to be impactful, but many email marketers struggle to get this part of the process right. Weak subject lines do not offer much information, sometimes just the promotional material. Others may even contain information that is irrelevant to the recipient of the email. On the opposite side of the spectrum, an email may have too many words, excessive exclamation points or emojis. Readers may immediately associate this overhyped presentation with spam, and this could kill your open rates. Remember to be brief, personalize the text where appropriate, and create a sense of urgency, all without seeming too overbearing. It is a delicate balance, but one that keeps your email recipients engaged.
Take careful note of these mistakes, see if you may be making them yourself, and rectify them. The success of your business may rely on the efficiency of your email marketing and don’t allow blunders like these to set you back.
