Here are five common mistakes email marketers make along with helpful tips for making your campaigns more successful:
1. Poor Content
A poorly-written email will damage your reputation with your audience, making it unlikely you’ll ever see the light of their inbox again. Before you send, ask yourself the following:
- Is the content personalized for my target audience?
- Do I have a concise, engaging subject line?
- Is the email free of typos and grammatical errors?
- Does the email provide value to my audience?
Stumped for ideas? Here are 12 Ideas for Fabulous Email Content
2. Design Fails
Email messages render differently in each mail client (i.e. Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo), so be sure to test your design in a number of clients before you send. Avoid wild-n-crazy color choices and fonts that are hard to read. Many email clients have images turned off by default, so make sure to also include any text included in the images in the body of your email too.
Check How To Make Your Emails Stand Out In The Inbox for tips on creating visually appealing emails.
3. Mailing To Old Lists
Sending a well-crafted email campaign to a poorly maintained list is like throwing money out the window. People don’t stay in the same position at the same company for as long as they used to, and some industries have higher rates of change than others. Your list needs to be cleaned and updated regularly. Sending to email addresses or domains that are no longer valid can hurt your mailing reputation and damage your relationship with your email service provider.
Read more about A Few Things To Watch For When Emailing An Old List and The CAN-SPAM Act & 5 Basics To Follow
4. Not Segmenting Your List
Sending one email to your entire database may not provide value to your individual subscribers. When you segment your list for the specific kind of people you are targeting (i.e. past customers, potential customers, current customers, customers that like dark chocolate) you will see higher open and click-through rates.
5. Ignoring Cadence
How often you send will depend on how much you have to say. Flood the inbox and your readers will unsubscribe, send too infrequently and your readers will lose interest and fail to take action with your campaign. When a subscriber opts into your email communications, be sure to set an expectation of how many messages they will be receiving.
Read Email Marketing vs SPAM for tips to increase your email marketing success.