10 Email Marketing Mistakes You Should Stop Doing Now

Email marketing is a powerful tool that brings numerous benefits to modern businesses. However, it is only effective when done right. Often, the price for the slightest error in e-mail marketing is too high. Making an email newsletter, you probably send it to thousands of recipients, so in case of a failure, you may lose all of them. Thus, the stakes are too high. Fortunately, in this article we have gathered the top 10 obvious but still common mistakes that marketers make with practical advices on how to avoid them.

Mistake 1: Unclear Subject Of The Letter

Still, a huge number of marketers don’t follow this rule. The subject of your letter should clearly correspond to its content. It is very important to avoid ambiguity.

Statistics claim that emails with a concise and clear subject generally receive over 500% more clicks. As you can see, although abstract subjects may sound better, they are way less effective.

Tips:

• Add numbers – for example, “Top 5 Tips On…”
• Tell recipients what you are going to talk about
• Focus on all indicators, not just on open-rate
• Make sure you grab readers’ attention
• Check if your subject encourages people to open and read your email

Mistake 2: Sending Emails Without The Recipients’ Consent

Although cold emailing works in some cases and can be a good tool for numerous purposes, you shouldn’t use this marketing trick too often.

In most cases, you should send letters to users who actually agreed to receive them from you. Otherwise, recipients may mark your messages; and once someone does this, you have lost them forever. Besides, this may hurt your reputation. Before investing time and money in a marketing campaign, it is important to get the consent of each reader to receive electronic mailings. This will give you increased open and click rates.

Mistake 3: Weak Call To Action

A call-to-action is your secret weapon, and it will only work if you make it powerful!

How to make a good CTA? Start with asking yourself the following questions and giving honest answers to them:

• Why should someone subscribe to your newsletter?
• What can subscriber expect from you?
• How often will they receive your letters?
• What topics, ideas, or types of content will you send to the reader?
• What benefits will your newsletter give them?

Remember, your subscribers’ mailbox is a valuable space. You should not occupy it without a good reason. You can only exchange your presence for something useful and interesting.

Tip: a perfect call to action doesn’t just ask people to do a specific thing; it tells how a person will benefit from this. Give your recipients interesting benefits, and they will willingly do what you expect from them!

Mistake 4: Unsorted Email Lists

Today, capturing recipients’ interest is no longer the hardest part of email marketing. The hardest thing is to ensure that your letters actually reach the addressee. There are many things to consider in order to get into the Inbox folder.

When it comes to the effective model of interacting with customers, many take their cue from Gmail. Gmail divides emails into three separate categories: primary, social, and advertising. Getting into the category of “primary” is a real headache for marketers since Gmail evaluates a whole range of factors:

• The open rate of the letters sent by a particular user
• Scroll
• “Clicks” within the email
• Unique “clicks” inside the letter
• Frequency of interactions with the content as a whole (i.e., whether the recipient regularly opens letters from this sender)

Tip: to bypass spam filters and ensure your letters reach the recipient, you need to earn a good reputation and deliver valuable information to your customers.

Mistake 5: Not Having An Email Signature

Do you have one? If no, you should change this as soon as possible! A well-designed email signature performs several tasks:

• It makes you stand out, and your letters become more memorable;
• It makes recipients trust you more because you look much more professional;
• With links to social networks, blog, and website of your company included in a signature, you get another powerful marketing tool.

Tip: creating same-styled signatures for the whole team will give you even more benefits! This contributes to the professional image of your company and attracts more prospective customers!

Mistake 6: Using Someone Else’s Base Of Contacts

On the Internet, you can find a bunch of offers to buy a completed database with contacts. This may be tempting to buy one and save lots of time developing your own base. However, it is better to avoid this. This can be a waste of time and money as you can never check the quality of the database in advance.

Mistake 7: Non-Unique And Uninteresting Content

If your goal is to interest the subscriber, and not to fill their inbox with unread letters, you have to deliver high-quality texts. Valuable and useful information is hard to ignore. In conjunction with the segmentation of the audience and the active base, developed useful texts provide a very tangible result.

Tip: regularly analyze the results of your newsletter and adjust your approach depending on the received data. Always remember that analytics is an important part of marketing.

Mistake 8: Not Testing Letters Before Sending Them

You should keep in mind that your emails may look different depending on numerous factors. Thus, it is always a good idea to test how it works.

Tip: create multiple email accounts with different services and don’t forget to test the letter on different devices.

Mistake 9: Sending Letters From A Personal Address

Unless you want to look unprofessional, do not send messages from personal email address. Emails sent from a business address receive more trust from the recipients and are opened more often.

Mistake 10: Not Checking The Text For Mistakes

Do we even need to discuss the importance of this point? All sorts of mistakes and typos ruin everything. Thus, you always have to check what you’ve written before sending it.