7 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
03/11/2019 | Share:
Marketing emails are a great way to spread awareness of your brand because they appear right in your recipient’s inbox and push notifications. It’s getting your prospects to open their emails and then click through to your landing page, that is the struggle.
To help with that struggle for engagement, here are some common email marketing mistakes that you should avoid.
Poor preview text
A successful email campaign starts with good open rates. People will only open your emails if they look interesting. Most people will put a lot of focus into their subject lines, but did you also know that you can edit the preview text too?
It’s highly recommended to customise your preview text, otherwise, recipients will see default text from within the email which can sometimes ruin your copywriting efforts.
Have you ever received an email where the preview text states something like: Can’t read this email? Click here to view as a webpage. Has this ever made you want to open an email more? Exactly. It’s not a great use of the space you have. Use your preview text to elaborate on the subject line hook, providing more detail about the content of the email.
No Clear Call to Action
Every email marketing strategy should have clear call to action(s). The whole purpose of the email campaign is to direct your leads to your website. If there’s no clear and simple way to do this, then you are wasting an opportunity and potentially irritating your customers with pointless spam.
Too many words
Ever heard the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”? With email marketing, this is very true! Let your images do most of the talking and keep the text to a minimum.
Use the text to set the tone of the email and to complement the images with a persuasive call to action. The text can also be used to educate, inspire or entertain to better connect with your lead.
Not segmenting your emails
Segmenting your emails is crucial to your campaigns, otherwise, you’re speaking to the wrong audience. Imagine you’re selling pets accessories. You don’t want to send a promotion for dog toys to cat owners – you’d be barking up the wrong tree, literally! Make sure you use the data provided by your email subscribers to separate your contacts into appropriate groups.
Sending from a donotreply address
There’s nothing more alienating an impersonal than seeing an email from a stranger called donotreply. Some email marketing services allow you to change the name and/or address from which the email is sent. Changing it to your company name or a subdivision of your company such as blog@mybusiness.com is a simple solution. A popular trend at the moment, to generate intrigue and familiarity is to use a real name.
For more tips on personalising your marketing emails, check out our dedicated blog post.
Not optimised for mobile devices
Nowadays, people use mobile phones more than desktop to read their personal emails, in fact, the mobile figure is almost double the desktop according to some sources. With that in mind, it’s impossible to ignore the importance of mobile-friendly emails. If an email is glitchy or non-functional, people won’t waste their time with it.
Preventing people from unsubscribing
If people want to unsubscribe, it’s a good idea to let them do so. It’s sad to see someone leave you, but there are several silver linings to this cloud.
Firstly, if you hold information about someone against their will, it is a breach of GDPR legislation.
Secondly, if the person cannot easily unsubscribe, they’ll simply dump you in their junk or spam folder. This is actually more detrimental to your emailing efforts as it increases your chances of becoming blacklisted with that email client.
And finally, people leave because they’re not interested or no longer your ideal audience. Maybe they’ve purchased exactly what you wanted them to, and now marketing to them would be a waste of time. By allowing people to unsubscribe, it actually helps narrow down your core audience.
