Stop doing these 15 email marketing mistakes

Any business that has its list of emails with quality subscribers or potential customers will have a greater advantage when carrying out their email marketing campaigns. Because those people when they receive an email in their inbox will be more likely to open the message and perform the action that is requested in the message. Email marketing will continue to be the best strategy to generate conversions and increase the sales of a business. Avoid email marketing mistakes. 

15 email marketing mistakes

The most important advantage of email campaigns is that they have a very low cost, so any company can do them to grow your business.

In this article, you will discover the 15 most frequent email marketing mistakes that companies make in their email marketing campaigns. You should not do them for your business if you want to win customers or subscribers.

# 1 Do not plan

The first of the email marketing mistakes that you should not commit in your email marketing campaigns is not to do correct planning, because the absence of this will mean a death announced as in any other digital marketing strategy.

Therefore, make sure you have prepared an annual calendar with the email marketing actions that you are going to want to do because in this way you will have enough time to prepare each campaign.

At the time of planning through the calendar, you must also take into account the seasons of the year with the product or service you are going to use in the email marketing campaign since it is not the same to sell a sweater in summer than during the winter.

Even, it will be of vital importance to consider the dates or special times that there are during the year, because in this way you will be able to take advantage of the opportunity to offer related products or services, and such as:

• Christmas
• Sales
• Father’s day
• Mother’s Day
• Valentine’s Day
• Summer holidays (Easter, bridges, etc.)

# 2 Do not set goals

When you are going to run an email marketing campaign or another digital marketing strategy you should know that you need to establish the main goal. You will only get bad results and no economic benefit for the company.

To define an object in your email marketing plan it will be necessary to decide beforehand what benefit you want to achieve with the campaign, but if you still can not think of anything I can mention some that are quite frequently such as:

After having contributed some ideas, it is likely that now you want to achieve several objectives with the same campaign, but I warn you that it is not advisable, because the only way to succeed is to know how to establish the appropriate priorities and their corresponding execution orders.

Therefore, the second mistake that you should never commit in an email marketing campaign is not having clearly defined the objective you want to achieve with the sending of emails.

# 3 Do not use a suitable platform

One of the most common errors that companies usually make, especially small ones, is to send mass mailings with generic email providers such as Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and justify this behavior by saying that they do not have a high budget to hire a proper tool.

Surely now you have come to mind some mail you received in your inbox with a sender of these providers mentioned, but you will understand that this behavior transmits little professionalism to a person who tries to sell you your product or service.

Well, I’m sorry to say that this only proves to have a total ignorance about the prices that email marketing platforms have since any business can afford to use a suitable tool to send mass emails.

You only have to access the websites of these platforms that offer the email marketing service. This way you will check their prices so cheap depending on the needs of each company.

There is a lots of online software for sending mass emails, but the most prominent ones are MailChimp, GetResponse, and Aweber.

The latter may be silly, but it is a very important detail because I need to use the AP I that the plugin offers to connect directly with my MailChimp account, and thus be able to select the desired email list.

In this way, I avoid having to copy the HTML code of the form created in MailChimp. Then paste it into the plugin configuration.

# 4 Not complying with spam rules

It often happens that emails sent to customers or subscribers end up in the junk or spam folder. It is because the campaign has not complied with the general rules that antispam filters recommend.

If you do not want the same thing to happen in your email marketing campaigns, I recommend reading this article on How to overcome spam filters in email marketing, because I explain how anti-spam filters work and 5 tips to prevent emails from being considered as spam.

Anyone can access the recommendations suggested by spam filters, but there are still companies that make serious mistakes in the mass mailings of their email marketing campaigns.

Some of the recommendations to overcome the antispam filters is not to use certain words both in the subject and in the text of the message, and they are Free, Discount, Save X money, Sex, Offer, abuse of exclamations, and write in capital letters.

# 5 Do not build your lists

Nowadays there are still many companies that spend money to buy lists of emails, but they do not realize that this behavior is going to cause the campaigns to never be successful and profitable, besides that they are committing illegality.

If you want to be successful in your email marketing campaigns, you will have to make an effort to build your list of emails, since in this way you will guarantee success and obtain positive results.

Remember that people are human and not just emails, so if they receive an email from an unauthorized sender, they will proceed to mark the message as spam.

Social networks are also another great way to grow an email list, so I would also like to recommend this article on 5 ways to increase your subscribers with Facebook contests.

After having read these three recommended articles, I do not doubt that you will be able to build a list of your own and capture those emails from people who are interested in your product or service.

# 6 Do not segment the email list

One of the most important conditions of email marketing campaigns is having the clients and subscribers in your list correctly sorted and segmented.

If you do a bad segmentation, you will cause the sending of your messages to reach the wrong people, and therefore, you have wasted all the time you have spent in addition to getting a bad reputation in the main email servers.

For this reason, the best way to get messages to the right people is to apply different criteria in the data obtained such as purchase history, customer categories, or purchase preferences.

Many companies underestimate the great advantages of having a good segmentation in the email list and think that all people subscribed to the newsletter list have the same interests or hobbies.

For these cases, I always put the same example because it helps to understand the importance of segmentation quickly, and that is the following:

Imagine that you have an online store where you sell fashion products for both women and men, you think that a man will be interested in receiving promotional offers on women’s dresses or vice versa.

The answer is not, so it is best to have included in the subscription form several options for the subscription such as I want to receive offers for men or I want to receive offers for women.

# 7 Not having a shipping frequency

Email marketing is not only about sending mass emails when the company wants to sell a product or service during a certain time of the year. On the contrary, it is essential to maintain a constant frequency in the shipments.

It is not advisable to have a very low frequency nor to make too many mass emails since both situations are harmful to the company.

The key to success will know how to find the middle ground, to avoid that subscribers forget or get tired of our messages.

When choosing a suitable sending frequency remember that you can not exceed a maximum of two weekly emails, since making more emails will mean that the messages are marked as spam by the recipients.

When the frequency of sending is established, it will also be necessary to determine which days of the week the mass emails will be sent, although this will depend a lot on the company and its target audience.

That is, emails cannot be sent to companies as well as to customers or subscribers because in the first case they must be made during the working day, and in the second case. It is better to do it outside working hours or weekends.

# 8 Do not customize the mail

One of the most important factors when it comes to attracting attention in sending emails is to personalize the message of the recipients since in this way you can create a more credible, human, and close relationship.

The personalization can be done taking into account three main factors such as: greet with personal names (no surnames), use the second person singular (you) in case of persons or second person plural (you) when they are messages to managers of companies, and other personal data such as purchase history.

In this way, you can captivate the recipient who receives the email because you will feel appreciated and valued by the company since the message has not been sent in a generic but fully customized.

Also, this behavior will make a difference with the competition because there are still many companies that do not take into account the importance of personalizing messages.

To be able to make personalized deliveries before, it will be necessary to obtain information or personal data about the people, and for that, you must use the popular subscription or registration forms on the website.

So, when people receive a personalized email with their name or other personal information such as their birthday they will not ask how you got that information.

# 9 Not making good use of the Subject and Sender

The first information that people read when they receive an email in their inbox is usually both the name of the sender and the subject line. For this reason, it is advisable to make good use of these fields to get a higher rate of openings in email marketing campaigns.

If you want to optimize these two fields to the maximum, it is necessary to take into account the following recommendations:

Sender – There are three ways to personalize the sender’s name to convey a closer and more human message:

• Real name + Surname (example: Carlos Guerra)
• Real name + Company name (example: Carlos from Social Media Consulting)
• Real name + Position of the company (example: Carlos Dpto Commercial)
• Name of the brand or company: (example: MailChimp)

Subject: To avoid being considered as spam and to obtain a bad reputation with the sending of our messages, it will be essential to take into account the recommendations that antispam filters demand.

Another quite important aspect is the email address with which the mass mailings are made since one of the most common faults made by some companies is to use an address that can not be answered (noreply@xxxxxx.com ).

If you do not want to generate a distrust in the target people, I recommend using an address like the following examples:

carlos@socialmedia.com
mail@socialmedia.com
info@socialmedia.com

# 10 Do not write optimized messages

In some cases mass emails are sent that are not optimized, that is, they do not meet the expectations generated with the text used in the subject field of the message.

Also, three frequent errors are often made in messages sent to clients or subscribers: writing extensive texts, using images that do not work correctly, and absence of calls to action.

If you use too extensive texts in messages, you will get bored to the recipient, and cause you to decide to delete the received mail because it is considered spam.

Therefore, the best way to avoid it is to write short paragraphs (maximum 3 or 4 lines) to facilitate reading, highlight the keywords in bold, and maintain an organized structure.

The images added to the message are not loaded automatically for security reasons, and also for questions regarding the consumption of data when they are loaded from a mobile device.

Use only PNG format images. They should not larger than 1 MB.

Finally, it is vital to use some calls to action to cause the recipients to perform a certain action since otherwise, it will cause poor results in the email marketing campaign.

The best places to add a call to action in emails are always in the middle of the text or at the end of the message.

# 11 Not having an email footer

It is mandatory by law to include in the messages all the corresponding information about the company that has sent the email, such as the physical address, name, and CIF of the company, Country, City, and contact telephone number.

As a general rule, this information is always included at the end of the message so that the recipient can easily identify the origin of the message received in their inbox.

In addition to the corporate information, two key elements must also be included to comply with regulatory regulations, which are: link to cancel the subscription, and the reason for receiving the email.

Although most of the tools that offer the service for mass mailings require that you fill out all the information of the sender and include a link to unsubscribe from the subscription, I must say that in my case I still receive some emails from companies that do not comply with regulatory regulations.

In short, if you want to transmit a message of trust and credibility, it will be necessary to take into account these key elements for email marketing campaigns. It will help to improve the reputation of the sending server significantly.

# 12 Do not create a landing page

Although it seems crazy, there are still companies that carry out email marketing campaigns without having created a landing page or landing page where they can capture the potential customers who receive the emails.

They do not realize that it is absurd to want to sell a product or service through an email marketing strategy where the target people are directed to the home page of the website. With this attitude, they only manage to waste all the time and money invested in the creation of the campaign.

So, if you do not want to make the same mistake, I recommend that you include at least a link in the message that directs people to the page of the product or service promoted, so that people can access more information and decide if they need to buy or hire the promotion sent in the message.

However, the most recommendable option is to design and create a landing page or optimized landing page to generate as many conversions as possible, since this way you will get better results in email marketing campaigns.

You have two options to create the landing pages, and they are:

1. Hire a professional web designer and graphic designer.
2. Use a tool or plugin for WordPress.

In my case, and if you do not have enough financial resources to hire a professional designer, I can advise you on a tool that I am using to create fully customizable landing pages called Thrive Content Builder.

# 13 Not having a responsive design

Surely you already know that the new trend in the website is to have a responsive design. The contents of web pages can be adapted correctly depending on the size of the screen of the device.

One of the great benefits of the Thrive Content Builder plugin is that its designs are also responsive, so the landing pages allow viewing from any device such as PC, mobile, and tablet.

Remember that people in addition to using their mobile devices to interact in social networks, send messages through the WhatsApp application, and search the Internet, also access the email to check if they have new messages.

So, it will be vital to have landing pages optimized for those who open the mail through their smartphone or tablet because otherwise, you will be missing a great opportunity to generate conversions and increase sales of your business.

# 14 Do not make a trial shipment

Before proceeding to send the campaign, it is advisable to send a text message to a personal email to check how the recipients will see the message, and verify that the links included in the message work correctly.

It would be ideal to make these test shipments with the different email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo because each of them has a different way of displaying the received messages.

In this way, you can confirm that the messages sent will be received without any problem and you will avoid getting bad results in the opening rates.

In most platforms that offer the service to carry out email marketing campaigns, you can use this functionality called Preview Test after having designed the message, and just before pressing the Send button.

The great advantage of using this function is that you can detect possible errors that have occurred in the message, either the content of the text or the attached links and thus have the possibility to correct these errors in time to avoid bad results in the bell.

# 15 Do not analyze statistics reports

To end with the most common mistakes that companies make in their email marketing campaigns, and which is of great importance, is the analysis of statistical reports with the results obtained.

All the email marketing tools offer their reports to analyze the behavior of a certain campaign and thus determine if the campaign that has been carried out has been a success or failure.

In email marketing campaigns you should take into account some data to know if the campaign sent has had great acceptance by the recipients, and that they are the following:

• Opening rate
• Number of clicks on the links
• The number of subscribers that have been removed from the list.

Once the report and its most relevant data have been analyzed, you will be able to draw your conclusions about the email marketing campaign that you have carried out for the promotion of a product or service. Always remember this phrase to improve digital marketing strategies: measure and conquer.

Conclusion

If you want to be very successful with your email marketing campaigns, you should take into account all these errors. Otherwise, you will lose a great opportunity to increase sales of your business, and you will lose the time used to create your mass mailings. And you, have you made some of these email marketing mistakes? Would you add one more to the list?

About Post Author

Robi

Robi@cyonwo.com