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email marketing mistakes

7 Common Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Every single day, more than 293 billion emails zip their way around the world into people’s inboxes. It’s no surprise then, that email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods in today’s business environment.

Yet email marketing strategy isn’t always clear cut. There are some very common email marketing mistakes that can wreak havoc on an otherwise flawless campaign.

In this guide, we’re going to take a look at some common mistakes that befall email marketing campaigns and how you can avoid them. 

Are you ready to start building better email campaigns? Then keep reading, and let’s get started!

1. Not Allowing a Response

When you send someone an email, they should be able to respond. A marketing email that doesn’t allow for a reply is essentially a one-way conversation, which is no conversation at all.

Put yourself into your customers’ shoes. How would you like to be emailed regularly and not be able to reply?

A lot of marketing emails get sent from do not reply email addresses, which means that questions can’t be asked or feedback given. 

You want to appear friendly, so you should send your marketing emails from an address that allows for responses. If that isn’t possible, then include a link to your socials at the end of your email and encourage readers to contact you.

2. Bad Subject Lines

Before your customers see anything else, they see your subject line. If your subject line is poor, no one is going to click on the email and read anything else that you’ve written. In many ways, the subject line is the most important part of your email.

So how can you craft a good subject line? What should it include? Here are a few tips:

  • Tell the recipient what’s inside
  • Adopt a friendly tone
  • Personalize the subject line
  • Be concise

If you want to tempt people to click on the email, you can also use the subject line to pose a compelling and interesting question. In short, use the subject line to the utmost to make people click on the email.

3. A Lack of Personalization

We touched on this when discussing the subject lines but you should also use the customer’s name in the email body. If you don’t use their name, the customer has little incentive to read the email, as it feels very impersonal.

You can use a variety of programs to personalize your emails with tokens, so there’s no reason not to personalize the emails. They will make the customer feel far more valued and give the email a lot more weight than an anonymous email.

4. A Lack of Segmentation

You shouldn’t send out all of your emails to every one of your customers. Send your customers too many emails that aren’t relevant to them and they’ll start to see all the emails from your brand as irrelevant to them, even when they aren’t. Clogging up their inbox is not the way to win them over.

You should have separate mailing lists for different market segments. A basic example is to not send the same email to B2B customers as you would to B2C customers, but it goes much further than that.

Depending on your company you may want to segment your audience by gender, by socioeconomic class, by location, or more. Only send your customers emails that are going to be relevant to them, and you’ll get a much better click rate.

5. A Lack of a Call to Action

If your emails peter out, what are your customers to do? If it ends in a dull sentence with no call-to-action, your customers are going to do nothing at all. They will, potentially, read your email and then go on about their day.

A call to action can be simple. You can tell people to click on a link, view a new product, or get in touch with you, for instance. 

It isn’t overly important what your call to action is, so long as you tell your customers to do something, rather than leaving them to ponder their next move. Encourage them, and you’ll be rewarded.

6. Sending Too Many Emails to Your Customers

Your customers are busy, too. If you send an email every single day, you’ll achieve nothing except clogging up their inbox and creating ill-feeling towards your business.

At the very most, you should be sending emails to your customers once a week. Any more than that and they’ll start to associate your company with spam, rather than great content or inviting offers.

7. Not Formatting the Email for Mobile Users

Many of us check our email on our mobile devices throughout the day, yet many email marketers still craft their emails for desktops first. What this means is that the email can appear terribly on a smartphone, with some content missing or parts of the message cut off.

You should design your emails with both desktop and mobile users in mind, not one exclusively. Preview your emails on a phone or tablet before you hit the send button, and ensure that they look good on these devices, too.

Stop Making These Email Marketing Mistakes

These email marketing mistakes that we’ve outlined all have the potential to cause serious issues for your email marketing campaigns. If you want to create great marketing emails, you need to put the solutions that we’ve outined into play.

Yet our help doesn’t end there. We can help you craft better emails. For more information, get in touch with us today, and take a look at our blog for more tips like these.