Email Marketing Mistakes You Need To Avoid

So, it’s safe to say that email marketing is alive and well and is still one of your best bets for business growth. Unfortunately, email marketing isn’t as easy as it seems. You can’t just send an email to your audience and expect instant conversion. Reality is, email marketing can be quite complex, thanks to the sheer number of variables and factors that affect it. So to help you avoid the pitfalls that most marketers fall into when utilizing email marketing, we have outlined the most common email marketing mistakes and gathered some tips for you on how to avoid them. 

1. Not Having A Clear Call To Action 

As you’ve undoubtedly read a time or two or ten, your content needs a call to action (CTA). This is true whether you’re talking about a landing page, a blog post, or an email. Without a call to action, you’re leaving it up to your audience to figure out what you want them to do. So before you compose your email, start with a clear vision of its purpose in mind. What outcome do you want?

Do you want to promote a piece of content you’ve written? Do you want to inform the reader of an upcoming launch or event? Do you want to make a sale? Focus your email’s text, images, and design to guide your readers toward this outcome. Then, before you send the email, make sure your call to action is clear, enticing, and points the reader towards the outcome you hope to achieve.

2. Not Sending a Welcome Email 

Let’s say a new subscriber who was navigating through your website realized the value of information shared in your email newsletters and decided to sign up. If you were planning to immediately send them regular newsletters after they sign up, you are making a huge mistake.

Unlike regular marketing emails, welcome emails have the highest open rates and offer a fantastic opportunity to connect with your customers. This is the main reason why welcome emails should be sent immediately after signup instead. The revenue generated by welcome emails is 320% more than regular marketing messages. Besides, these emails have a stunning 196% click rate and 336% transaction rate higher than other emails.

3. Overdesigning or Overcrowding Your Email 

When it comes to email messaging, keep it simple. The days of cluttered email newsletters are almost behind us, if only today’s email marketers would just let them go. 

Stick to one main message in your content – and tie that message directly back to your subject line. You can have secondary and tertiary offers lower in the email, but make sure your hero image is the main focus. You should also check to make sure the email loads quickly and looks good on mobile devices – even when the user is off Wi-Fi. This way your customers won’t get frustrated by bulky email images.  

4. Forgetting the Power of Segmentation 

Another big mistake when it comes to email marketing is blasting the same email to everyone on your list. Segmentation is when you organize your email list into smaller, more focused groups based on specific interests or shared characteristics. It’s a way to drive more engagement with targeted, personalized messages. With segmentation, you can tailor content based on a contact’s location, demographics, purchase history, and preferences. 

5. Not Personalizing Your Email 

Firms also fail to personalize their emails, resulting in the same message being sent to everyone on their list, regardless of who they are or what they are interested in. Unrelated emails make the readers more complex to connect with the message. As a result, it increases the likelihood that they will delete your email without responding. Personalize your emails by mentioning the recipient’s name or segment your list so that you may send more focused communications.

  1.  You’ve never cleaned up your list.

By “cleaned up,” I mean you’ve got subscribers on your list who have never, ever opened or clicked an email. Or you’ve got people on your list who haven’t done that in the last year or so. The time frame for when to “purge” inactive subscribers can vary – anywhere from six months to 18 months seems to be about the norm. But you do need to clean up your list every so often. Otherwise, your deliverability rates will get hurt, and you’ll just get poor results. It’s better to have a smaller, more engaged list than a huge list of people who don’t care.

Want to take your email marketing to the next level? Parachute has a team of digital marketing experts with over 40 years of collective experience who would love to help you. Get in touch with us.

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