Email Marketing Mistakes That Are Killing Your Campaigns

Email Mar­ket­ing mis­takes are the last thing you want in your cam­paigns. Sal­vage your email cam­paigns by learn­ing to iden­ti­fy these mistakes.

 7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing

Email Mar­ket­ing can be your most valu­able out­bound mar­ket­ing tool. With a well-craft­ed strat­e­gy, you could make $51 for every dol­lar you invest in email mar­ket­ing. But with over 280 bil­lion emails being sent on a dai­ly basis, you have to com­pete for your prospect’s atten­tion. And with com­pe­ti­tion so high, to error would be prac­ti­cal­ly equiv­a­lent to sin.

But be rest assured, we have your back. Here are the 7 worst email mar­ket­ing mis­takes. Learn how to avoid them.

Same old, same old

You’ve been at email mar­ket­ing for a while now. You should be evolv­ing. If you’re con­tin­u­ous­ly using the same email mes­sages and con­tent, with­out ever switch­ing it up, you’re miss­ing out.

Change your emails up every once in a while. Con­duct A/B tests to see which mate­r­i­al works best for you. But don’t stop yet. This has to be a con­tin­u­ous process. The ones that refuse to evolve die out.

Email mar­ket­ing played a very impor­tant role in for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s 2012 cam­paign. They made a large num­ber of vari­a­tions to the sub­ject lines of the emails and sent them to sam­ple audi­ences. On the basis of the results, they could cal­cu­late the amount of dona­tions that they could expect to receive when the used spe­cif­ic sub­ject lines. The dif­fer­ence between the low­est-per­form­ing sub­ject line and the best one was an amount of $2 mil­lion. Test­ing makes a difference.

Nothing personal

You can’t expect to catch your prospect’s atten­tion if you nev­er even men­tion their names in your email. It is esti­mat­ed that 70% of brands don’t both­er to per­son­al­ize their emails. Make sure you don’t fall among their ranks. Rise above the crowd.

Per­son­al­ized emails deliv­er sub­stan­tial­ly bet­ter results. A 2.6% increase in open rates has been not­ed in emails that include the prospect’s name in the sub­ject line.

Nobody wants to feel like anoth­er face in the crowd. We all want some­thing made espe­cial­ly for us. We crave per­son­al­iza­tion.

This goes beyond mere­ly includ­ing your prospect’s name. A lot of brands send their prospects offers and news that they have no inter­est in. Make sure your con­tent is per­son­al­ized too. Fail­ing to do so could cause frus­trat­ed view­ers to flag your emails as spam.

Mobile what?

By July 2019, 61.9% of all email opens took place on mobile devices. It does come as a sur­prise though, that half of all the emails sent are not opti­mized for mobile.

In March 2017, prac­ti­cal­ly 4 mil­lion adults in the UK did not uti­lize a desk­top or lap­top to access the inter­net. Par­ents, women and younger audi­ences were con­sid­ered more like­ly to be mobile-only. 3 out of 5 peo­ple check their emails while com­mut­ing, which means that they’re doing so on mobile.

Fail­ing to opti­mize for mobile devices is an email mar­ket­ing mis­take that you should seri­ous­ly try avoiding.

Mixing it up

The great­est mil­i­tary lead­ers, through­out his­to­ry, have always tried going for a divide and con­quer approach. It’s a well-estab­lished tech­nique. It works.

Take a cue from these lead­ers. There’s no point try­ing to tar­get every­one at the same time, with the same approach. Seg­men­ta­tion is key. You have to divide your email list based on a few fac­tors. Demo­graph­ics and psy­cho­graph­ics come into play here. When you curate your email con­tent based on these fac­tors, your audi­ence responds better.

About 89% of email mar­keters do not even both­er seg­ment­ing their data­base. No won­der most of them end up with their cam­paigns get­ting marked as spam. A seg­ment­ed data­base allows for con­tent that the read­ers are actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in. This would make them feel more open towards read­ing your emails and could be help­ful in get­ting them to con­vert into pay­ing customers.

Choices…too many choices

Ever receive an email with what felt like 50 mil­lion CTAs? Let’s be hon­est, you didn’t even act on a sin­gle one of them. Way too many calls to action can very eas­i­ly trans­form into one big call to not take action. What you were expe­ri­enc­ing is a phe­nom­e­non that psy­chol­o­gist Bar­ry Schwartz calls, the ‘Para­dox of Choice’.

Schwartz says that the gen­er­al­ly accept­ed notion of more choic­es lead­ing to greater wel­fare is a bla­tant lie beyond a cer­tain point. Hav­ing a dozen dif­fer­ent CTAs sprin­kled through­out your email is essen­tial­ly overkill. It’s way too much. Instead of hav­ing a lib­er­at­ing effect on your read­ers, it has an over­whelm­ing effect.

This email mar­ket­ing mis­take can par­a­lyze your read­ers. It’s such a huge turn off that many of your read­ers would avoid open­ing your emails in the first place.

More talking, No listening

Have you ever been in a con­ver­sa­tion and felt like the oth­er per­son is not talk­ing to you, but AT YOU? That’s what your read­ers are going through when you reach out to them from an email address that they can­not reply to.

Those ‘no-reply’ email address­es are hurt­ing your email cam­paigns in more ways than you can think of.

First­ly, it straight off the bat ruins your chances of devel­op­ing a rela­tion­ship with your read­er. No rela­tion­ships = Low­er Con­ver­sions. Bad idea, wouldn’t you think?

Sec­ond­ly, it just sounds like you don’t care about what they have to say. If you don’t care about what they have to say, why should they care about what you have to say?

Third­ly, it’s just rude. It sounds like you’re telling them to talk to your hand. Don’t do it!

Can’t buy me leads

Let’s be hon­est. Buy­ing an email list can be a very tempt­ing idea. It does away with the has­sle of hav­ing to indi­vid­u­al­ly find leads and reach out to them. But it also does away with all your chances of mak­ing conversions.

Email lists that you buy off the inter­net are incred­i­bly unre­li­able; A. There’s a very good chance that the peo­ple those lists have absolute­ly no inter­est in the product/service that you’re try­ing to mar­ket; B. There are a dozen mar­keters using the exact same list, and C. It’s quite like­ly that the peo­ple on that list have not even con­sent­ed to be on that list. That’s some­thing that can get you in seri­ous legal trouble.

A great alter­na­tive to that would be to gen­er­ate your own leads (that actu­al­ly have a chance of con­vert­ing) with a mar­ket­ing automa­tion tool like Lead­mi. It makes it real­ly easy to gen­er­ate leads that are a good fit for your prod­uct or ser­vice. All you have to do is define a buy­er per­sona, set your match score and you’re good to go!

Rectifying these mistakes

If you’ve found your­self mak­ing any of these mis­takes, you’d prob­a­bly want to cor­rect them. You’d want to make them right. Our next blog will walk you through the strate­gies you need to put into place in order to rec­ti­fy these mis­takes. Stay tuned.