Email Mistakes That Kill Your Marketing Strategy

Email marketing is the basis of marketing. Marketers rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel (47% voted for email marketing, 39% for social media, 33% for SEO, and 33% for content marketing). But does that mean that email marketing brings you guaranteed success? No, it doesn’t.

Email may be a powerful marketing tool, however, you need to know how to use it. Many marketers and business owners are unaware of actions that are killing their marketing performance. Such an approach takes their marketing strategy in a downward spiral. To avoid email marketing actions that will hurt your marketing, take a look at these most common and deadly email mistakes.

Failing to Personalize the Message

Lack of personalization will make the recipients dismiss your emails and disregard your business. Personalization plays a huge part in email marketing. If you don’t pay attention to it, your marketing strategy will suffer.
Impersonal marketing is a big pet peeve for customers. People are constantly bombarded with generic marketing emails. You have to be better than that if you want their attention.

Simple actions just like acknowledging who they are can improve your outreach’s effect. Each email has the option to personalize mass emails, all you have to do is to Google it.

Segmenting the subscribers is another aspect of personalization you should consider. Having the same approach to your 21-year-old female customer from New York and a 56-year-old male customer from Nebraska won’t do the trick.

Consider customers’ demographics for starters. Some common starting points are:

Age
Gender
Location
Language
Educational background
Employment status
Preferences
Interests

While we are still on the topic of personalization, it should be mentioned that you can turn for help to automation tools for personalization. They can analyze the customer’s purchasing behavior, browsing preference, follow their cart abandonment products, keep up with their product preference, and habits and personalize your offers accordingly.

Poorly Written Content

Any outreach to your potential customers is a representation of your brand. Low-quality content says that you don’t take your business seriously.

Just put yourself in the recipients’ shoes. Would you trust a business that can’t even put together a simple email?
Even the most basic email such as welcome email needs to be edited and proofread. There is no room for mistakes.
Poorly written content will kill your credibility and destroy your chance to make progress with a potential customer.
Ensure that your emails are presentable by checking them for any grammar or spelling mistakes. Pay attention that the sentences are well-connected and understandable.

Unless you are reaching out to professionals in your industry, don’t use jargon words and terminologies that are not a part of everyday language. You might want to sound knowledgeable but the priority is that subscriber understands your message.

Lengthy and Tedious Content

Emails should be concise, direct, and clear. Lengthy and boring content isn’t what the subscribers are looking for.
Take into consideration the amount of emails people receive. Now add to that the fact that most people read their emails on mobile. Are lengthy emails the best option for such a situation? Not really.

When subscribers open an email from a brand they expect useful information delivered in a concise form. Wordy and complex content will get you to lose their interest. They probably won’t even get to the end of the email.
The goal is to write short and sweet emails. Keep them to the point and provide subscribers with relevant information.

In case you want to share a longer piece with your subscribers, explain in a sentence or two what it is all about and add a link to it. The email will reveal the most important message and subscribers can read the lengthy piece if they have the time.

Not Using Automation Software

Repetitive and tedious tasks can take a lot of valuable time. That is why we have automation tools. Not taking advantage of such digital benefits will be a huge mistake.

The time you spend on tasks that can be automated, you could spend on other aspects of your marketing campaign. You could work on creating better content, improving your social media posts, or making fun videos for your audience.

While you waste time on tasks that could be solved with automation, aspects of marketing that demand your creativity are neglected.

Take advantage of any email advancement tools such as:

Email list building tool
Integrated email marketing automation tool
Tracking and monitoring tool for email
Email testing tool
Email personalization tool
Scheduling tool

The options are numerous and you just have to pick the tools that align with your email marketing.

Sending Way Too Many Emails

Bombarding the subscribers with emails can mark your company as annoying. Once you’ve established such a reputation, there is no going back.

Your approach defines the image of your brand. Sending too many emails won’t have a positive effect. Additionally, people will unsubscribe as soon as they feel like your emails are too much for them.

Rather opt for sending fewer but more effective emails. Once a week is more than enough for customer outreach.
Another option is to customize the email frequency. Within the subscription form, ask the subscribers to share how often would they like to receive emails from your brand. Moreover, use the form to ask them about the type of email content they are interested in.

Don’t worry about making an impression on the subscribers. The best way to make your company memorable is to give it all into producing relevant and high-quality content.

Sending Emails on Weekends

If you want your emails to pass unnoticed, send them on weekends. According to research, the worst open and click-through rates are on weekends.

Consistently sending the email on the wrong days will make your email marketing unnoticeable. All the effort you put into will be in vain.

The weekend is the time when people relax, spend their time with friends and family, and most importantly, forget about anything work-related. Checking the email is mostly reserved for Monday.

By the time the receiver checks his/her inbox, your email sent on Saturday will be lost among tens of other unchecked emails. Most people will just rush through all of the piled-up messages. Therefore, your well-written marketing email will be glanced at and won’t get the attention it deserves.

Reportedly, the best days for emails are Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday. However, to make your schedule on point, analyze your open rate, click-through rate, as well as conversion rate each month to find out which days bring the best results for you.

Image source: Pixabay

Disregarding a Call-to-Action Button

Checking in with the customers without any purpose will benefit neither you nor them. Each email should be sent for a valid reason and followed with a call-to-action (CTA) button.

CTA buttons are important because they clarify to the customer how they can take the action. Besides, they motivate them to do it by giving them a shortcut to the desired action.

Forgetting or neglecting a call-to-action will leave you with a purposeless email that will just make a crowd in the subscriber’s inbox.

Another tip about CTA is to stick to one CTA per email. Marketers tend to make a mistake to add several CTAs which only confuses the subscribers.

Imagine seeing all of these CTAs within one email:

Check out our sale
Sign up for the meetup
Join the customer plus program
Share the message via email
Share the message on social media

With multiple choices on their hand, subscriber’s attention will be divided and they will easily give up on taking an action. Also, don’t forget to make the CTA visible, clear, and short.

Not Thinking of Mobile Users

Over 61% of people open their emails opens on mobile, while only 9.8% of them use their computers. Not using a responsive design for your emails will cost you most of the readers.

Even though a responsive design should be the bare necessity in email marketing, some marketers still tend to fail to deliver responsive emails.

Opening an email and coming across distorted images and misplaced call-to-action is an instant turn off. No one will lose their time trying to figure out how the email was supposed to look like.

Being considerate of mobile users has become essential for marketing. Making your email mobile-friendly is one of the steps of that process.

Some automation tools already have this feature within them. When you are choosing the automation tools aim for the one that has a responsiveness feature. This will save you both your time and money.

Stopping with Building the List

Once you reach a certain number of subscribers you may think that your days of intensively building the subscriber list are over. That isn’t the case. Building your subscriber list should be a never-ending process.
What is the point of email marketing without subscribers? There is none. If you have no one to convert or direct to take action, this whole branch of marketing will be useless.

Don’t fall into the illusion that there is ever a sufficient number of subscribers. The fact is that people often sign off from the subscription. You may not have the ability to change that decision but you can add on new subscribers and balance out the result.

Consistently work on bringing in new subscribers and making the subscriber list longer. The more subscribers you have on your side, your chance for achieving the desired result is higher.
There are many creative ways to collect email signups. Blenders Eyewear showed a great example. When browsing on their website a spin the wheel game pops up giving you a chance to win a discount. All you have to do is to enter the email address and spin the wheel.

Image source: Blenders Eye Wear

The pop up is well-positioned because it doesn’t take up the whole screen but it still is big enough so that you can’t miss it. The aesthetics of the pop up also work in their favor.
Incentives are a powerful tool for attracting people’s attention. So, get imaginative, be generous, and collect the customers’ email addresses in no time.

Not Analyzing the Results

Marketing strategy is the strongest when it is based on data-driven insights. Failing to analyze the results of your email marketing is a mistake that can result in many wrong moves.

There is no general marketing rule that works for all. Each marketing strategy needs to be adapted to the target audience and tactics that have proven to work.

Basing your email strategy on assumptions and campaigns that worked for your competitors won’t get you far. You can’t predict the behavior of your subscribers but you can analyze it.

What you need to focus on is:

Email open rate
Email click-through rate
Most effective links
Unsubscribes
Source of most subscriptions
Effective subject lines
Email content that brought most conversions
Segmented group of subscribers that respond best to your emails

Each segment will reveal whether your current efforts are suitable for your target audience. The information about subscribers’ activity will segment the actions which work and those that don’t have any effect.

These in-depth insights will steer your email marketing in the right direction.

Some Final Thoughts

Email marketing is still a big part of any marketing strategy. Failing to deliver an efficient email marketing campaign will negatively reflect on the whole marketing.

Having awareness of the common email mistakes that can bury your marketing can be of great help. Don’t learn from your mistakes – learn from others and save your nerves and money.

To revise, let’s take a look at the biggest don’t in the email marketing:

Not personalizing the emails
Writing low-quality content or not editing it
Lengthy and unnecessary content
Skipping on automation and wasting time on repetitive tasks
Bombarding subscribers with emails
Reaching out to subscribers on weekends
Forgetting the CTA button
Not adapting emails to mobile users
Giving up on building the email list
Basing your email efforts on assumptions not on data-driven information

If you know or you have experienced an email marketing mistake that negatively affected your marketing, please share it in the comments below