While all brands want to improve their email marketing results, there are many small mistakes that can render your efforts useless.
Consumers resent email marketing errors. Others prevent the message from ever reaching them. Also, any email marketing blunder can result in low open rates, click-through rates, and other forms of engagement. Overall, making mistakes with your email marketing can cause you to lose subscribers.
The best way to avoid these pitfalls is to recognize them. Examine this list of eight common email mistakes brands make to see if your messages — and metrics — are included.
1. Lack of Personalization
Personalized emails generate six times more sales than non-personalized emails, yet 70% of brands fail to personalize. That’s a huge missed chance. Consumers today dislike impersonal marketing and don’t have time for messages that don’t acknowledge their existence. If you don’t personalize, you’re probably losing out on a lot of potential sales.
The best part of personalization is that marketing automation tools can tell you so much about your subscribers. Use an automation tool that allows you to see where your prospects are in their buyer journey, as well as their current pain points and issues.
2. Poor Editing
But just because you don’t expect your email marketing message to read like The Atlantic doesn’t mean you can get away with mistakes. Poorly edited copy damages your brand’s integrity and suggests to your subscribers that you lack authority.
Hire a professional editor to fix all your content, including email copy. A free online editing tool like Grammarly can spot errors that you may not see.
3. Bait-Driven Subject Lines
You must fulfill the promises made in your subject lines. While a catchy subject line may entice recipients to open your message, misinforming them about what they will find will undermine their trust in your brand. That’s a risk you can’t afford to take in consumer marketing.
Nobody likes seeing a great subject line, only to open the email and find nothing related to the subject line. That you’ve been hoodwinked. That’s bad marketing to your subscribers.
4. ALL-CAPS SUBJECT LINES
How do you think your subscribers feel when you use all-caps in subject lines? Aside from looking like you’re yelling, capital letters in subject lines imply spam to both recipients and email platforms. So, if you think using all-caps in your subject lines will attract attention, think again.
Use emojis instead of all caps in email subject lines. We’ve found that emojis effectively draw attention to our emails and encourage recipients to open them. Win-win!
5. Long, dull content
Don’t bore your readers with unnecessary copy. Overly wordy, convoluted, or uninteresting content will not entice readers to stay. A sentence or short paragraph can tease a longer piece, which can then link to the larger piece on your site.
Also, most people read emails on their phones, so they may be doing something else or have limited time to read the content. Respect that by keeping your emails short and sweet, which will also help you get better results.
6. Sending at the wrong time
With so much research done on the best days and times to send marketing emails, there’s no excuse to send them at random. Your own data is as vital as the research. It’s a big mistake not to let your conversion rates dictate what day and time you send.
We suggest you research the available data and use it to inform your email marketing schedule. Keep track of your monthly open, click-through, and conversion rates. For better results, try different days and times, track, then re-evaluate.
7. Not Performing A/B Testing
Industry-wide statistics are without a doubt one of the most valuable resources you have for guiding your strategy. But even more important are your own stats, which is why A/B testing is vital. There is no universal email marketing strategy; only one that works for you. A/B testing your emails ensures that you get the most out of your experience and that you can use data to improve your campaigns. Don’t do it and you’re not sending optimized emails.
Create two emails with the same copy but different CTAs or subject lines. Send each email to a segment of your audience on the same day and time. Compare the open and click-through rates. Identify which CTA and subject line resonated with them.
Marketing includes errors. What matters is whether you learn from them. These email marketing mistakes can lead to poor results on emails that otherwise would have performed well. You can’t be perfect (and nobody expects you to be), but you can plan to avoid making mistakes.