Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Email is one of the most effective marketing tools of our era with most companies depending on email channel for launching marketing campaigns. Email being a dead tool in current advanced world is a common misconception. With right strategy and implementation of a proper detailed plan, it can have substantial impact on your sales. but there are some email marketing mistakes to avoid that can damage your career.

People arguing about email marketing not giving them the desired results are not looking it with the right eye view. It is highly likely that email marketing strategy as implemented by such people is flawed in a number of ways.

We don’t mean to discourage you in any way but there are some marketing mistakes that most of the marketers make.

The good news is that you can identify those mistakes and make some adjustments in order to get more desired results.

You may be getting some success from your email marketing strategy and you can still improve more. Just avoid these mistakes at all cost and hopefully you will be able to attain new heights through rigorous hard work.

We hope that you share your success story with us some day and we feel proud that our little contribution helped you in your journey.

That is our goal with these learning series for professionals & beginners.

Besides email marketing, we have also covered affiliate marketing which you can access here. For more on affiliate marketing from a practical aspect please visit cj.com.

Now, let’s get on with our current topic of most common mistakes in email marketing.

Mistakes in email marketing:

Here are the most common mistakes in email marketing that you must avoid in order for a successful campaign. Limit these mistakes as much as possible.

Selling too hard:

You don’t need to be presenting a materialistic side to your subscribers. Do understand the purpose of your email message. It should not be just sending the client your product details and promotional messages. You have to build a relationship out of this campaign and ultimately increased sales and website traffic.

Don’t be a hard sell by selling products in every email otherwise it will only result in frustration of your subscriber. They may disengage themselves after being bored of deleting your repeated irrelevant emails.

Share tips and some information which may be of use to the subscriber instead of repeating the same product marketing. This relationship building will take its time so don’t jump right away.

Give it some time and it will lead to higher and improved conversion rates. This is one of the most important email marketing mistakes to avoid.

Unclear sign-up boxes:

It is another common mistake while sending emails to prospective customers. Sign up box is either unclear in most cases or put up in the side bar. The major issue is that if your customers are using mobile, they will most probably not even see the sidebar and your sign-up box. You need to alter the position of your signup box where it is more visible to the customer.

More preferred options would be putting a number of signup boxed in the following:

• Homepage
• End of the blog
• Section for ‘about me’
• A new pop up page for sign up
• Anywhere in the content where you feel the need

No opt-in offers:

You cannot survive the vicious brand race in modern world with just sign up boxes. You need to do much more than that. Having no opt-in offers is a big mistake which most marketers take very lightly.

Opt-in offer is a exchange to get customer information by offering a free gift. This free gift can be in any form but it should be of interest to the customer like a mini course or an eBook. For getting that gift, they will share their email information with you and this will help you grow your list.

Start putting your opt-in forms and just see the spike in your email list signups.

Attracting the wrong subscribers:

It is a common misconception that success depends on getting more and more subscribers for your business activity. The rule of quality over quantity applies here as well.

It doesn’t matter how many subscribers you are getting on a daily basis unless they are the right audience for your business activity. Otherwise, what’s the point?

If you gather a bunch of wrong subscribers, they won’t be interested in your stuff and won’t have any impact in your sales conversions. It would just be a useless number. Your open and click rate would fall and chances of sending the right emails to the genuinely interested audience would also shrink. This is another one of the email marketing mistakes to avoid.

At that time, the importance of opt-in forms is realized. Getting the people who are interested in your stuff is the main thing.

No welcome email:

This will not be a mistake but a blunder.

Just image a scenario where a potential customer gets to know about your stuff through your email and decides to sign up. But there you go; he doesn’t get a welcome note from your side. Any further emails from your side with delay of some days will possibly be ignored because of short attention span of the customer.

You have got to ‘Strike while the iron is red hot’.

An immediate welcome note would make the potential customer feel special. This will be a positive start for client relationship buildup. They will certainly remember your fee for days to come. The interest will grow and most probably, sales conversion will happen very shortly.

Not encouraging subscriber’s reply:

It’s quite a neat trick, to make your subscribers reply to your emails.

Now, what will be the benefit of that reply?

You need to understand the basis on which most email providers’ work. How they decide whether your email should be placed in spam or the main inbox.

To avoid your emails from going into the spam folder, you need to have two way conversations with the customer. This will send strong signals to the email provider that you are a valuable contact.

The idea behind all this is that your email should not go into the spam box. If it is in the main inbox, chances are that these will be read and further action may also be taken accordingly.

Not choosing to subscriber your emails:

The main reason of subscribing to your own emails is getting to know how it’s presented. You will be in a better position to access any mistakes or analyze the content if you get to have the full experience yourself.

Don’t forget to subscribe.

Not personalizing your emails:

Bigger companies apply this golden rule of personalizing the emails. No matter how presentable or flashy your emails are, a person will most probably read email of an acquaintance over your email.

That’s because they feel attachment with that personalized email sender.

That is why; you have got to send emails which give appearance that somebody real sent them rather than an automated machine.

Irregular pattern for sending emails:

Consistency is the key here. It makes your subscriber know and expect to receive your newsletter or promotional campaign offers. They look forward to emails sender with regular pattern.

On the other hand, if you are not consistent with your emails, your subscribers would have already forgotten about you. Your emails would most likely end up unread in the deleted folder and ultimately result in un-subscription.

Poor subject lines:

Good subject lines are more important than most marketers realize. Most readers pretty much never open the mail and just read the subject lines. If they find the subject line to be of interest only then the email is opened and its contents read.

Curiosity will play its game at this stage. If your email subject line is intriguing enough then as per the basic human trait, the person will be bound to at least open it once.

For hiring services of market experts, please visit Fiver.

Doesn’t present value to the customer:

You must always consider why the recipient of your email will show interest in your content. What’s in it for them? You have to put yourself in their shoes and access whether your content satisfied their interest or not.

On the other hand, if you offer something of value in your emails, your subscribers will be more responsive to your demand when you ask them something. They will trust you and feel valuable.

Waiting for enough subscribers:

Don’t wait for a certain number of subscribers to start sending content through email marketing. However low number of subscriber you got, you need to start building a relationship with them. They will surely notice if you are not engaging with them and if you start the emails late, it will probably be too late in most cases.

Having a low number of subscribers will be a learning phase for you. Learn to manage them and apply different market tactics to interact with them. This will help you a lot in handling more subscribers.

Also, you can enhance your skill set by visiting Fiver Learn.

Final Thoughts:

To conclude, you must show patience in running your email marketing campaign. As described in detail, try to avoid these common mistakes and your business activity will go a long way in the right direction.

We hope that our tricks and tips to avoid these mistakes would be of value to you.

For more practical information on online store or learning about ecommerce, you can get help from Siteground and Expandcart.

Feel free to send us any queries that you may have.