Email Marketing Mistakes

Email marketing is one of the most popular ways businesses can reach more consumers. A complete email campaign can help increase conversions to a site, bring in additional traffic, and share new items, products, or services.

Many companies believe they have a great email marketing campaign, however many are making mistakes. Companies may be throwing away money with the following mistakes in their email marketing campaigns.

No Plan

It’s vital to have a plan when developing an email marketing campaign. This includes creating emails that go out at certain times of the year. If you are selling outdoor gear you will mention snowboarding in winter months, and hiking during summer months. Establishing this plan will help businesses determine how often they want to send emails and what content will be included in the emails. Monitoring current events can help businesses figure out what should be included in the emails.

Not Building an Email List

You can have the greatest content, best deals on the web, but if you don’t have an email list to send it to, it won’t help you much. The trick here is to give people the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter. Have a newsletter signup form on your website, give people an option to sign up once they’ve made a purchase, create a call to action on your social media accounts. The options are a plenty.

Inaccurate Subject Lines

Now subject lines can be tricky, obviously you want to create something intriguing that gets people to click, however you want the subject to represent what the email is about. A good rule of thumb is to avoid spammy style, click-bait ads. Sure these often get people to click, but they often bounce from the email, unsubscribe, then delete the email. All of which you do not want to see. When you create the subject line of your email be straight-forward with what the reader will be seeing. Tell them about the content attached or the deal being offered, chances are if they signed up for your newsletter they will be interested in what you are offering.

Emails Being Sent at Wrong Times

Sure you can send an email at midnight, which may be local time for the recipient, and hope they see it the following morning. The problem with this approach is the email can easily get lost among the other hundreds of emails the person is receiving. Best practice is to schedule emails to be sent at hours where people are likely to read them. There has been multiple studies done on the best way to do this, and MailChimp has provided some excellent points.

No Clear Call to Action

Once a user opens your email the plan is to get them to click an ad, then go to an appropriate page to make a purchase. This is why every email needs to have a clear call to action, showing users where they can get the product, service, or content. Like any call to action this should be clearly visible and near the top of the page, where users can easily find it. On the other hand, it can be detrimental to have too many call to actions, it’s important to find middle ground between the two.

Email is Too Long

Your email should be short and sweet, just enough to catch the reader’s eye of your ideas and products. Best practice is to limit the email so viewers do not have to scroll, or show any content below the fold. Now this is not a necessary rule, but it can help conversions. Within your email only highlight a few points, avoid going into too much detail or mentioning too many products.

Lack of Images

Users like to see the items and products, this is why your campaign should utilize images and video. Don’t limit the emails to just text, this will often bore the reader resulting in them deleting the email. Your images should highlight what you are offering, be colorful, and catch the viewer’s eye.

Not Mobile Friendly

As mentioned above, it’s important to have images within your email, however, too many images can often mean it’s not mobile friendly. Test your emails before they go live. In many cases the programs that offer email marketing will allow you to view the email on multiple platforms. If this is not the case for your campaign, there are sites where you can test pages.

Not Tracking

Like any campaign it’s important to track your progress. Try sending emails at different times of day, different headlines, and different deals. Track these emails and see what is working or not. This can be done through the email marketing program or through Google Analytics.