15 Email Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2019
Resources and technologies to produce effective email marketing campaigns are scattered across the world-wide web, however, occurrences of mistakes in those email campaigns are still plenty. These email marketing mishaps are not just blatant spelling errors in email copy or misplaced/distorted visual assets which fail the purpose of promotion, but there are those small and noticeable email mistakes that are often left overlooked and always wreak havoc in email delivery, open rate, click-throughs and other areas.
To help marketers avoid these blunders, we have compiled a list of 15 email marketing mistakes that hurt email marketing performance.
1. Baited subject line
The one common email marketing mistake is baited subject lines similar to BuzzFeed style-headlines. Though such headlines attract more clicks, people do not forget the insufficient substance that they may find after clicking on those subject lines and tend to lose trust in brands. People associate email senders with spammy techniques and lose their faith over little substance in regards to the email product/service focus in the email. What is even worse is when the subject line refers to something different than what people find after their click through. These spammy subject line practices kill subscribers’ trust and they start reporting the sender as spam – so will these click baits be worth the click even though these encourage the audience to click?
2. Snubbed message preview
Many marketers and companies consider displaying preheader, the bit of preview text which lies next to the subject line. The preview text is usually limited to nearly 100 characters and is the part extracted from initial lines of email content. Marketers need to test the effectiveness of preheaters to check if the text can improve open rates. Marketers can use these preheaders as an extension of offers that they tease in the subject line as a little more elaborate call-out.
Painstakingly created preheaders can provide subscribers more reasons in addition to subject lines to open email. These texts also play crucial roles in emails on mobile devices to showcase the personality of brands which maintain shorter subject lines by using the combined character length of subject line and preheaders to grab subscribers’ attention within a few seconds.
3. “Noreply” Email Addresses for From Name
Many businesses make this mistake of keeping “from name” generic and include “noreply”, “admin” etc. They should remember that subscribers want more humanized experience, receive email and respond to actual humans, not mailboxes. Brands that send their emails with a “noreply” address or addresses which are often left unchecked translates something like “we do not wish to interact with you” to audiences and missed opportunities of engagement from their emails. Instead, marketers should consider making themselves more transparent and available to subscribers who know whom to reach and respond to from the emails. Therefore, they should rather use “contact” or “email us” instead of “no reply” to encourage subscribers to reach out if they want to inquire or need to clarify a point to start discussing.
4. Email offers lacking appeal to customers
Businesses often send follow-up emails which are of little value to their subscribers. Many times subscribers sign up for solutions with generic instructions such as, “click this” “do this” “pay us” and many others. Marketers should avoid these email marketing mistakes at all costs and focus on giving more valuable information for prospects and customers that they actually wish to read, share or feel interested about the products and solutions. Marketers can simply ask their audience if they find the email content valuable even if they do not make any purchases. Subscribers are not going to make their purchase decisions based on information from one email, therefore, businesses should avoid the mistake of using a “cold sale” pitch in their first email.
5. Sending product-centric emails instead of customer-focused emails
Emails that are more product-focused instead of being customer-focused fail to generate interest from their audience in their products. Often marketing teams forget that the steady growth from emails result from simple, shareworthy and valuable solutions to customers’ problems. Marketers should focus on addressing their customer’s paint-points with simple solutions and asking them to take simple actions instead of overstuffing emails with details which do not explain how those features and specifications can come in handy for the customers and their requisites/problems.
6. Email devoid of a persona
One of the biggest and most common email marketing mistakes that marketers commit is when their emails fail to create a personality for their audience. Businesses need to remember that their subscribers choose to sign up for communications with the brand when they can connect with the voice and persona and share information which is unique in that product segment. Therefore, marketers need to create a unique persona and voice before they start selling products or services to their prospects and customers. Businesses should practice telling more exciting stories relevant to their users’ problems and areas of interest such as, about the brand, how and what their brand is best at, about the team who will attend to customers’ feedback and complaints, real stories to subscribers’ problems and lifestyles, and many others in their email content. Marketers can also ask their subscribers to send direct emails with their perspectives, feedback and share their stories, to be able to connect with customers’ goals.
7. Too much use of CTA’s in emails
Marketers often try to include too many call-to-action (CTA) in a single email marketing campaign in hopes of increasing the likelihood that the customer will click through. However, they end up incorporating too many links and CTA instructions in one email that readers find it confusing and too much information to process. Hence, making the customer abandon the email completely. Make sure you are sending just one call-to-action link that takes them to one landing page that clearly explains the benefits of offer and how to use or redeem the offer, which also increases the rate of conversion. Also, a CTA must be clear and define goals such as, lead generation, customer engagement customers, blog engagement, subscribers, or any other goals you may have. Emails with relevant content and a clearly communicated CTA make it easier for audiences to grasp, process and use information and help marketers achieve the goal behind the email marketing campaign.
8. Emails having no text links
Email marketing experts suggest that subscribers prefer text links in emails – hence, absence of text links in emails could displease and even drive them off. That’s why it is vital to add one text link in the first fold and another to place below the fold. Marketers also see that the text link is placed on a single line.
9. Too lengthy emails
Many businesses cram too much information and content into a single email that it becomes too long and tedious to read. Creating these emails take hours and, in some cases, days to craft, and are filled with many topics, ideas and news which would take more than 10 minutes of unremitting reading. Some of these emails might look visually rich with multiple sections of rich graphical presentation of information, however, fail to yield the performance email marketers want from their campaigns. Instead, these lengthy emails decrease engagement from emails and worse still, consume massive amounts of time and resources and end up becoming mundane.
10. Limited email personalization
Often marketers make email personalization mistakes such as sending emails with a basic level of personalization with just the personalization tag in emails. Since the huge amount of emails are automated and are sent in bulk, audience might lose trust in batch and blast emails with bare minimum personalization. However, good marketing automation platforms enable marketers creating emails with an extensive level of personalization and let them test emails to ensure they are performing with multiple areas of personalization so that marketers can expect greater a level of open rates, click throughs and engagement.
11. Image-only emails
Marketers creating image-only emails might be blocking their users from viewing their emails. These all-images emails are not optimized since many email clients block visual email content from appearing when users choose the settings option “images off.” When these images do not appear when emails load on opening, recipients miss the clickable links, thus marketers lose click-throughs from these emails and zero engagement unless they manually reload images in emails.
12. Ignoring plain-text emails
No marketers should undervalue the impact of the plain text emails alongside HTML emails. Beautifully designed HTML emails created for product updates and newsletters can boost sales and conversion rates, however, the first onboarding email can be created as short, plain-text emails from a marketing person of a team to augment open rate of up to 60%.
13. Too Few or numerous emails sent in a week
One major email frequency mistake that marketers commonly commit is not practicing a well-planned strategy of sending a stipulated quantity of emails that subscribers want to receive their emails. As a result, customers and prospects often complain of receiving too many emails from brands or even too less emails instead of the frequency in which they wish to receive emails. Businesses can avoid this mistake by setting up email preference centers wherein subscribes will mention how often they wish to receive emails and then segment subscribers based on the insights found from email preference centers. Marketers will greatly benefit from more open rates, clickthrough rates if they start paying attention to subscribers’ preferences of email frequency.
14. Rarely nurtured email list
Many brands make the mistake of not nurturing their email list and often leave them unattained by not sending a single email after product launch. Therefore, thousands of stale email addresses might be left without being nurtured and diminishing the prospects of getting more success and responses from the product launch. Businesses might hesitate sending emails that are not launch emails but they do need to find something which would interest them and nurture subscribers with valuable, to keep the list nurtured, loved and keep them up-to-date over the course of time.
15. Not segmenting your email database
Some businesses make this mistake of not focusing on email list segmentation or classifying subscribers based on their feedback. For example, if having a website that has basic, intermediary and premium level solutions may ask their visitors to sign up for the email list. In that case, businesses should be aware and segment the data based on prospects who have signed up for which level of solutions and they can simply send messages to prospects that they have received the sign-up request and their customer experience and email communications will be designed based on that information.
Do you find these email marketing tips useful and think they would safeguard your email campaign from these mistakes? Let us know if you want any specific information and tips on any aspect of email marketing, marketing automation, personalization, use of AI in email marketing etc. – we love your questions and assisting with everything you need.