Email Marketing Campaign Killers
The scope of an email marketing strategy is obviously less broad than a social media marketing strategy. The audience of an email marketing strategy really is only limited to the list of email recipients. However, because of it’s smaller scope, every email marketing tactic should always must be done right. Email marketing has its own set of challenges. Due to the exclusive and personal nature of emails, people scrutinize their inbox in an almost non-forgiving manner, especially in the age of autoresponder services. The last thing any email marketer wants, is to send content that gives the recipient every reason to not read it and would rather delete it.
Here are 5 common mistakes in email marketing.
Forgetting To Subscribe To An Autoresponder Service
Before you even start planning on what content to create, you should first subscribe to an email autoresponder service. Forgetting to do so means that any email service out there (Gmail, Outlook, and etc.) might list your emails as spam. It can be very time consuming and difficult to consistently end up in your recipients inbox if you mail on your own. With email autoresponder services they have extensive safeguards and are considered legitimate couriers so your emails will usually land in your recipient’s inbox.
Examples Of Email Autoresponder Services
- Mailchimp
- Constant Contact
- Active Campaign
- AWeber
- iContact
Making Your Emails Too Long
Newsletters should never be long. Not only is it time-consuming and unproductive to create a long newsletter, but your recipients are likely to be less interested in opening your newsletter if they expect it to be a long read everytime. They might even unsubscribe from your email updates all together, thereby losing brand loyalty and affecting your company’s image. What recipients expect and want to read from newsletters are precise, informative, and relevant content.
Using Generic Subject Lines For Emails
If you've been using generic subject lines such as “*Company A’s* February Newsletter”, then it's about time to stop. Being generic is not what an email marketing strategy is about. Give your recipients an important reason to read your newsletter. People do have the tendency to judge the value of an email by its subject line. If the subject line appears too plain and uninteresting, then you’ll might be losing valuable customers. A strong subject line should be eye-catching with relevant keywords. Also make sure to check for spelling and syntax errors. The probability of your emails being read, almost entirely depends on an effective subject line. It does put a great deal of pressure on just a few words. But learning how to make effective subject lines is one of the crucial steps in email marketing.
Using Your Mailing List Only For Sales Pitches
Recipients subscribe to your email service for the specific reason of getting exclusive and valuable information. If most of the content you’re sending them are just sales pitches, then they might lose interest in your email service. If you think about it, you already have other marketing strategies to do that for you. Instead, you should keep email marketing as it's own thing. You can occasionally send sales pitches but for the best email campaigns sales pitches are the exception and not the primary content.
Forgetting The Human Element In Emails
Your recipients probably know that they're not the only ones in your email is. Even though, they’re not asking for generic emails that appear to be crafted from an emotionless automated machine. Use casual language and even add punctuation marks such as exclamation points to a evoke sense of natural emotion. Since emails are inherently an exclusive form of communication, create your emails in a personalized manner. Puns and injecting humor is also a great tactic of engaging with your recipients on a personal level.
Final Word On Email Marketing Mistakes
Some of the mistakes listed here seem rather straightforward but executing a proper email marketing strategy does take practice. It pays off to remind yourself of what you should and shouldn't do. Don’t be afraid to hire a digital marketing consultant that also specializes in email marketing to make sure you don’t make the aforementioned mistakes. Like all skills, just learn from your lessons and keep practicing until you get it right.
