5 Common Mistakes in Email Marketing – Are you Guilty of Any?
According to our friends at Autopilot HQ, for every $1 your spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $32…
Sounds pretty great, right?
Well, we hate to be the bearer of bad news, but some common pitfalls are holding businesses back from achieving these great results.
The good news is, by reading the following email marketing pitfalls, you can understand the key things to avoid, and what to do instead!
Email marketing pitfall #1: The Wrong Approach to List Building
Successful email marketing starts with a great list. And no, a great list does not mean a big list. While volume is still important, a smaller list of quality, ethically generated leads will ALWAYS perform better than a large list of low quality leads.
Segmentation, or lack thereof in list building is another common mistake. Sending out blanket emails with little consideration of who your customers are and where they’re at in their buying journey is not an effective approach. Like your target market, your email lists should be segmented into specific customer groups, each with a representative ideal customer avatar.
Email marketing pitfall #2: Neglecting Headlines
Often so much time, energy and thought is put into a beautiful piece of email marketing content, and then the headline is quickly thrown in before it’s sent out.
*Nooooo the LKO team screams*
A HUGE portion of your email marketing success is determined by your headline. It is quite literally the sentence that will decide whether or not your customer opens your email, and therefore continues to your offer.
We recommend using a mixture of blind and direct headlines. Blind headlines don’t give away the offer and use curiosity based techniques, whereas direct headlines entice the audience with the direct offer.
“You Won’t Believe This…” is an example of a blind headline, and “50% Flash Sale Starts Now” is an example of a direct headline.
Whatever headline you choose to go with, make sure you’ve spent some time crafting the copy. You want to consider where you customer is in their buying journey and what will resonate with them the most.
Lastly, test test test. As with the rest of your content in your email marketing – keep split testing your headlines to gain data on what works best with your audience.
Email marketing pitfall #3: No Personalisation
No one wants to receive an email that they know has been sent out to thousands of other people. People admire exclusive, personalised content – and your emails should reflect that.
Here are a few tips for making your emails more personal:
- Use the customer’s name. Most email marketing platforms offer this a merge tag setting.
- Send out emails based on personal user activity. Eg. Abandoned cart sequences.
- Split test send out times, headlines, copy and layout to different customer segments to understand what resonates with them best. `
Not sure how to go about any of the above? Check out our emailing marketing services here.
Email marketing pitfall #4: Too Many Offers
Putting as many offers as you can into one email in desperate hope that SOMEONE will click on SOMETHING can be tempting in times of struggle, but it definitely isn’t effective.
You need to have one clearly defined purpose behind each email, and therefore one clearly defined CTA.
Too many offers will overwhelm and confuse your audience, leading to higher bounce rates and lower click through rates – something we all want to avoid.
Email marketing pitfall #5: Forgetting Your Mobile Users
Most of us create our email content on desktop, but it’s easy to forget that a large majority of our audience will view the email on mobile.
The 2014 Ericsson Mobility Report estimates that mobile subscription and traffic per mobile will have respective annual growth rates of 15% and 25% until 2020. That’s huge!
When you’re creating your email marketing content, make testing the readability and design on mobile a priority. Email marketing platforms allow you to view mobile previews, but do some physical tests to check the emails on IOS and Android.
And there you have it, 5 common email marketing mistakes and how to fix them!
Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective methods of customer acquisition and retention, so putting time into creating and implementing a strong email marketing strategy is so important.