Email Marketing is a very effective way to keep in contact with both your customers and prospects. If you are using email marketing for your business, you must already know how important it is for the promotional side.
With email marketing being very effective and affordable, there is a lot of competition in the inbox of your recipient. Don’t let these 7 email marketing mistakes put your email campaign behind others!
1 – Sending Out Non-Responsive Emails
Since responsive design is a big thing nowadays, with websites and emails needing to be mobile-friendly, I felt the need to make this the first point.
Don’t you just hate it when you receive an email that you need to zoom-in to just read the content? Well I do.. and it’s likely many other people would agree. Some recipients might not even bother zooming in and just delete the email! Now that’s what you DON’T want to happen. Your emails should be responsive, and by this I mean mobile-friendly. People are also less likely to delete the email if it’s responsive.
As you can see from the below screenshot, BlueInc have a very nicely laid out email which is mobile-friendly and also pretty eye-catching. They have made sure the navigation menu in the email doesn’t looked cramped, stands out and also includes the relevant links.
Did you notice they also have made sure the images they use are suitable for mobiles? They’re not stretched or pixelated; that’s what you need to keep in mind when using images in your emails for mobile-devices. This is an example of a pretty good responsive email.
2- Email Address Is Not Personalised
After experimenting with our own email newsletters, we found personalising the email address boosted open rates really well. Sending from a common email “from name”, such as the usual “admin”, “newsletter” and “noreply”, will not help you keep in contact with your subscribers. Your subscribers want to interact with humans!
When recipients receive emails from companies with their “from name” as “noreply” or something similar, they may get a little annoyed because they won’t be able to talk to a human when they reply to the email newsletter. Think of it this way: it’s basically a way for them to say, “Don’t bother replying to this email because we don’t want to talk to you”. So don’t miss out! Make sure to send from an email address that gets checked.
We personalise our email address for sending out newsletters. As you can see below the open rate increased and plus we had a few more people get in touch with us.
3- Not Including Social Media Links In Your Emails
If you’re not adding your social media links to your emails then you’re missing out. By adding your social media links, your recipients will be able to “follow”, “like” and engage with all the social media content you post.
Not only that, but if they also decide to share your newsletter then they may include your social media account name – sort of giving you a free shoutout/ share.
As you can see in the below snippet of our email newsletter, we include our social media icons at the top of our emails. This is because they stand out, and it’s one of the first things the recipients will notice. This may then lead them to following and giving us a like on the social media platforms, along with engaging with our posts.
4- Bad Image To Text Ratio
Having lots of images and little text can be very bad in various ways. First of all, if you’re sending out an email with just images and hardly any text you’ll most likely see your open rate drop. The reason why: most email clients block images for security reasons, resulting in your images not being shown. Secondly, there might be a slow loading time for your image to actually display properly, and by this time the recipient has probably already deleted your email.
And, lastly, the most important one: they aren’t mobile-friendly! Images may look great on your desktop, but nowadays more and more people are checking emails on their phones. Mobile devices, such as iPhone, resize emails to fit properly on the screen, which means images in the email are then resized too. This results in that big font being hard to read after being resized. Some mobile devices don’t even resize emails! So that means zooming in and scrolling across the screen to find out what the rest of the text said.
If your email takes a lot of effort to read then your subscribers may not bother and just delete the email. Don’t make it hard for them to read the email! Use images, but don’t use too many and never use just one image with no text.
5- Sending At Bad Times
Like I mentioned in a previous article I wrote here, timing is important. It’s all well and good having that amazing marketing email you are ready to send, but if you don’t send it at the right time then…well…it’s not going to be very successful. Depending on your business, the emails you are sending and your targeted audience, you may find you receive more opens on a particular day, compared to your competitors and other businesses.
For example if you’re going to send a B2B email, you may find sending on a Monday morning the perfect time, whereas with a clothing company they may prefer to send midweek or maybe at the weekend. This is the time when their subscribers will most likely be able to open the email as they may not be working, and may be more likely to purchase at the weekend.
Once again, it all comes down to the type of email you are sending, your nature of business and your target audience.
6- Not A Very Good Subject Line
If your email has a boring subject line that isn’t very eye-catching then what you are doing is wrong. Like I mentioned in previous articles, if your subject line is not engaging then your email is likely to be ignored and possibly deleted.
The best way to prevent your recipients from deleting your emails is to A/B test your subject lines! Depending on the email you are sending, you will want it to be eye-catching and make the recipient want to know more.
Topman have done a great job with this. They sent out a marketing email reminding their recipients about new roll necks they are selling. The subject line caught my attention and made me think, wanting to know more. “How do you roll?”
7- Sending Out Content That’s Not Interesting
When you receive an email that doesn’t seem interesting from reading the first line or two, do you leave/ delete that email and proceed with checking the next few emails waiting to be read? Well, if that’s the case, you’re pretty much saying the content you received in that email wasn’t very interesting to you, or was off-topic. Well either way, you don’t want that to happen to your recipients!
Make sure you send relevant content to the subscribers that want to receive that particular content. If they signed up to receive your social media tips newsletter, then send them social media related emails, not fashion tip emails! Maybe that example was a little extreme, but I’m sure you understand what I mean when I say don’t send them non-interesting/ off-topic content. You won’t gain much except for a couple of unsubscribers and, most likely, a lot of deletes/unread emails.
Even if the content you are sending is relevant, you may be including too much information or the first few opening lines aren’t very eye-catching. If that’s the case, you’ll want to change it and do some A/B testing to find out the best, most suitable and most effective opening lines.
Have you made any of these mistakes? Or maybe some mistakes that aren’t listed here? Let us know and tweet them to us, @mailingmanager (Also maybe even give us a follow)
