Sending an email takes no time, but what if you finished sending it and found the email content was wrong, there are tons of mistakes in email marketing to avoid.
I understand how easy it is to make mistakes that can significantly impact the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. However, avoiding these mistakes is critical to achieving success in email marketing. Many email marketing campaigns still fail because of common mistakes. When surveying marketers and researching websites, researchers pointed out some of the most common email marketing mistakes. Knowing and avoiding these mistakes can help businesses achieve high efficiency when using Email Marketing, increase conversion rates, and achieve sales goals.
Read email marketing laws you should know.
In this blog post, I’ll be sharing some of the most common email marketing mistakes to avoid, so you can create effective email campaigns that engage and convert your target audience.
Mistakes To Avoid In Email Marketing
Avoiding the following mistakes will give you better open rates and will avoid you from losing your subscribers because they got bored with your emails and unsubscribed.
1. Not Paying Attention to GDPR
The world of email marketing has changed dramatically since May 2018, when GDPR appeared. In order to comply with GDPR, businesses must show proof that they are not spamming and must be able to provide a user’s email subscription. This is also good for businesses when only interacting with people who care. Therefore, this is an absolute principle that cannot be ignored.
2. Write the email subject line too long
Currently, many businesses prioritize product marketing via email, so choosing an email subject that is too long will definitely not be effective, even though this often causes emails to “sink” in numerous emails from other businesses.
According to specific statistics, the percentage of marketing emails that are opened the most is usually between 6 and 10 words. The longer the title, the more rambling, and the lower the rate of being opened. Therefore, try to concisely write email marketing subject lines that still convey the message to customers.
Businesses that want to make a special impression on customers, and make a difference from other marketing emails, should choose the method of capitalizing the entire subject line. This can help your email to stand out, but the effect is not necessarily high because many customers will find it offensive or uncomfortable with such completely capitalized subject lines. In addition, capitalizing the entire title also easily causes emails to be put in the spam box, not reaching customers.
3. Forgot to Send a Welcome Email to New Customers
Are you sending an automatic welcome email every time a new user registers? Otherwise, you should craft welcome emails that generate four times higher open rates and five times more clicks than standard promotional emails.
Welcoming subscribers with a welcome email helps establish trust by showing that you really appreciate them when they sign up for your business.
And that’s not all. Besides giving new subscribers an idea of what to expect from future emails, encourage further engagement by targeting other content on your website.
4. Don’t look from the receiver’s perspective
We can’t get far with promotional emails
Let’s use A mobile phone provider for a detailed example.
When someone new subscribes to the newsletter, they will only need information about a new phone model and mobile phone for a very short period of time. Once the customer has purchased the product, they may not need it. That information will be for at least another 1-3 years. It makes no sense to continue sending promotional emails. The more sensible option would be to contact them with helpful messages about the services available to provide added value.
Other email marketing mistakes in this section include:
- Sending messages that are too long and rambling
- Sending newsletters too often
- Send multiple emails every day
Talk about yourself too much: don’t just talk about the business. Some reference examples are blog posts, tutorials, Ebooks, etc.
5. Send newsletter without the consent of the recipient
This is a risky move considering the reputation of the business. No one likes spammers. No one wants to hear from strangers.
I recommend focusing all your attention on asking permission with a Welcome Email or Open Letter. This means not buying email lists and only emailing contacts who have given you permission to do so.
6. Inconsistency in Email Marketing
Inconsistency is as big a mistake in email marketing as sending emails too often.
Sending occasional or sporadic emails creates distance between your business and your audience. If it takes too long, some subscribers will forget they signed up and mark your emails as spam. This puts your sender’s reputation and future campaigns at risk.
Let your recipients remember your brand by sticking to regular email marketing times. For example, send it on the same day every week. As always, ensure any content you share adds value to your readers and has a clear call to action every time.
7. Send error message
Other uncommon errors include:
- The personalization line is not correct
- Broken/incorrect link
- Forms filled out but failed to submit
- Typo, no alignment.
Always check this before you send it. If you’re unsure, check again, especially when you’re tired and just want to finish it quickly. I recommend you always send the test to yourself or internally before sending it to customer data.
8. Don’t Use Social Media Buttons
Today’s trend among users is to turn to social media to connect with their favorite brands. Including share buttons in the newsletter helps to drive email subscribers to become followers on the brand’s social platforms or refer and share with their friends.
Cross-promotion on different social networks will attract consumers to your marketing campaign on many fronts. In addition, it can increase customer lifetime value: the value a customer contributes to your company over their lifetime.)
9. Send an email with an error in the subject line
The subject line will often determine whether the recipient opened the email in the first place. Here are some mistakes you should avoid:
- Write the subject line too long (it should be between 6 and 10 characters)
- Focusing too much on the text – it’s almost always better to keep it real and to the point
- Include special characters not displayed properly (be careful with €, ™, ©, etc.)
The best way to work out the optimal length is to run tests on various email clients (don’t forget that a lot of people will read email newsletters on their phones)
10. Send HTML newsletters that are not displayed properly
Please check if the HTML is displayed correctly by sending a test on Gmail and outlook to make sure there are no errors
The embedded video is hardly an affordable option. Use an image and link to a website where the video can be found.
11. Contains too many images
Emails with lots of images are prone to some ads, so make sure there’s a good balance between text and images, typically 80% text and 20% images. Otherwise, the email might even end up in the junk folder because spam filters won’t be able to check the image. Please read our guide on how to prevent your email from going to spam
12. Sending newsletters at the wrong time of day or week
Report multiple reports about the best time to send. According to my experience:
- Newsletters are never sent out at midnight. No one watched. Email Marketing software needs to have an email timer function.
- If you are working in B2B, sending out your newsletter on Fridays is unnecessary.
- In addition, you need to analyze the best time to send your own business, industry, and what is your product/service. Who is the customer file?
For example, A second teacher is often very busy. Office workers often check email during working hours, students often check emails in their free time, etc. There is no one best time for everyone. Please analyze. Client file type and send time breakdown for each file.
Please read our full guide on when to send a newsletter.
13. Not optimized for devices
Marketers need to consider what devices their customers usually open emails with laptops, tablets, mobile phones, etc.
The trend of using smartphones among customers is increasingly popular. Therefore, businesses need to design emails to fit the phone screen size.
Reports show that most people are reading emails on desktop or mobile devices. So your email marketing post, before reaching customers, needs to be thoroughly tested by sending tests to see how it displays on all types of devices. Avoid content that is too long to cause readers to scroll to see, or is the font size large enough, your images, videos are appropriate, etc.
It can take some extra time to perfect your email format, but it’s worth the effort to ensure your emails are optimized for mobile devices. If your email doesn’t display properly on mobile devices, 3/4 of people will delete it in seconds.
14. Not segmenting your contacts
Segmentation is necessary to target the right people at the right time. You can use demographics like geographic location and age to segment your list or go deeper by segmenting by buying habits and gender.
15. Do not include clear calls to action (CTAs)
A call-to-action is content intended to entice viewers, readers or listeners to take a specific action, good content without a CTA is too wasteful.
For example:
Each newsletter should include a clear call to action. Make it easy for recipients to navigate and use one button. What to avoid is too many links, distracting the recipient.
Please read our full guide on Call To Action.
16. Sending unprofessional emails
Unprofessional email content can make viewers not want to read the entire email. Plan, outline, and write email content. Please put it in some spell-checking software. Reread the email body many times. Inappropriate spelling, slang, and formatting will give a bad impression of your business.
Imagine you receive an email from a luxury brand trying to sell you a $2,500 watch. But email notifications are filled with typographical and grammatical errors. Are you going to buy that watch? Sure is not. It’s like a poor reflection of that company as a whole.
You should also A/B test all your emails for different purposes and formats. All of these will ensure that your email looks as professional as possible.
17. Do not prioritize the registration form
Your email marketing campaigns will only be effective if you have a quality subscriber list. Suppose you have great email content and mobile-optimized messages with perfect CTA and professional design but don’t have a large email list to send. In that case, your email marketing campaign won’t work either.
Acquiring a quality email list can take a lot of time, but it’s something you have to do. Your “email signup” form should be prominent and conspicuous, with a compelling offer for users to sign up and leave an email. Customers need to have a good reason to provide their email information.
By offering a discount in exchange for an email subscription, you can essentially hit two targets with one arrow:
- More incentive to buy.
- Get email subscribers.
When a guest signs up for email information, it is essential that they are greeted with an immediate discount.
Even if you don’t have a store and only sell online, you still need to prioritize signups and add value to potential email subscribers. Offer them free downloadable ebooks, video tutorials, or other exclusive content for users to opt-in to email lists.
18. Not tracking analytics
Many people make a big email marketing mistake: not tracking campaign metrics.
If the open rate is low and there are a lot of unsubscribes, think about why it is and find a way to fix it. Test and optimize your call to action if your open rate is high, but your click-through rate is low.
Please read our guide on the 18 important metrics you should track in email marketing.
19. Skip A/B Testing in Email Marketing
Once you’ve established an email marketing strategy, it can be difficult to think about making changes. But remember, strategies will improve over time. A/B testing and iteration will help you do exactly that.
Not sure what to check? Try different submission times, subject lines, and deals or offers to improve open rates. Experiment with different email designs and sensible call-to-action buttons for better click-through rates.
Regular A/B testing to determine what drives engagement and create similar content remarketing Email campaigns for high-performing results next time.
Tools like Sendinblue or Mailchimp, .. provide useful A/B testing features without you having to put in too much effort.
Conclusion
The general concept of Email Marketing is being affected by a lot of irrelevant newsletters sent every day, some email spam parts are affecting the overall face of the Email Marketing channel, but that doesn’t mean we will be lost.
Our job is to do our job well and build a good relationship between the business and the email recipient or potential customer. To do that, you need an effective Email Marketing tool but still ensure a stable cost for your business. It would be better to have a support team with knowledge of the platform
