If you likely receive a lot of emails. Start spending some time noticing what gets your attention and what turns you off. Make a list of those aspects and see if you might apply them to your own email marketing campaigns. There’s a ton to be learned from all that spam. If you don’t have the time to analyze the data yourself, we have listed some of the most common email marketing mistakes out there. Hopefully, you’re not doing any of these:
The 5 Most Common Mistakes of email Marketers
Your email is coming from a big box
Subject and sender are the two biggest reasons people open your emails. If you’re using a generic contact name, people won’t open it. Make the sender as human (sounding) as possible, unless your brand is so popular that it alone is the reason they would open it.
Not explaining who you are
Most people get a lot of webinar invites and spam. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which is which. If your business has a generic name that is not industry specific, it can be difficult to understand who it’s coming from. For instance, if you’re a consultant and your company is named after you, you may assume your recipient will know who you are but that’s also assuming you have a distinct enough name that they will remember you months after subscribing to your email list or downloading a freebie. That’s unlikely unless you have consistent interaction with them.
If you want to be successful in building a relationship over email, assume they don’t know you, and give your recipient a clue as to which part of their life you’re involved in. Use content like, “Hope you enjoyed yesterday’s webinar about ___” or “Sometimes people call me the ‘happy money manager’ because…” That provides context.
The trend these days is a casual tone but that drives people nuts when they can’t remember how they interacted with you. Worst of all, if they can’t place you, they won’t take the time and ask. They’ll simply delete, disconnect, and ultimately, unsubscribe.
Not using personalization
Come on. Mail merge technology has been around since DOS days. It’s okay to use a first name in a subject line. Believe it or not, it does draw attention.
Not cleaning your database
There are some email marketers that I get 2-3 emails from every time they have an offer. Why? Because I receive ads or emails from them asking me to sign up for a webinar or a freebie and I don’t realize which email they have so I accidently give them a second (or third) one. That’s on me. But they can run dupe checks on their database periodically, especially if they’ve collected something other than a name and email.
Sometimes I get duplicate emails when I’ve given them the same email because they’re treating each freebie or event as a new list of names. In email marketing, it’s important to remember some of us are return visitors who like the content. Don’t keep adding us to your email list as a new contact each time we interact.
If you’re thinking that cleaning your database takes much time, understand it’s time well spent. When you double (or triple) send, it skews your open rates. They may open one email but the likelihood of them opening the duplicate is next to nothing. Clean your database for dupes.
Not making the unsubscribe button visible
All emails need an easy way to unsubscribe. Otherwise, people will get frustrated and hit the spam button, affecting your send rating. If you make people hunt for it, they will choose the easiest route, which will also be the most unpleasant for you.
So, do these mistakes sound familiar? Are you guilty? It’s easy to overlook these common mistakes when you’re trying to get your message out. Just remember, email is about connections. Anything you can do to improve that will help you become a better email marketer.
