The Email Marketing Mistake You're Making (And How To Fix It)

Hello, this is a friendly welcome line. Are you tired of feeling like your emails are falling on deaf ears? Many mistakes can be made in the email marketing universe, and chances are, if you’re doing any email marketing at all, you’ve probably made them.

In this article, we will take a look at some of the most common mistakes made by marketers and offer solutions for what to do about them. By the end of this article, you’ll have a fresh new perspective on how to write emails that people want to read.

Common email marketing problems. How to solve them?

Takeaways
Learn common email marketing mistakes.
Understand the impact of mistakes on sender reputation.
Discover strategies to identify and rectify errors.
Implement best practices to prevent future mistakes.
Gain insights on maintaining subscriber trust.
Improve overall effectiveness of email campaigns.

Table of Contents

1. You don’t have a laser-focused goal in mind

Before you start sending out emails like crazy, you need to take a step back and ask yourself: what is the point of this email? What are you trying to achieve with your email marketing? Are you trying to drive traffic to your website? Are you trying to generate leads? Are you trying to improve your SEO? Do you want to increase social media engagement?. Or maybe, it’s a combination of these things.

Whatever your goals are for any marketing campaign, make sure that they are specific, measurable, and attainable. You also want them to be relevant and time-bound.

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2. You’re Not Thinking About Your Audience

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about your email marketing efforts from a mindset of “What do I want to say?” or “What do I want to sell?”. But that won’t get you very far in building a successful campaign that effectively connects with your recipients. The key is to take your perspective out of the equation and focus on what others want instead.

To do this, you need to know as much as possible about your audience: their needs, their pain points, their interests and goals, and even things like their values (if those are relevant). These insights will help you create emails that truly resonate with them and, in turn, increase the likelihood that they’ll open your emails in the first place.

3. Your Emails Aren’t Optimized For Mobile

If your email marketing strategy is to bombard your customers with offers, you’re doing it wrong. The best emails are those that keep your brand front of mind without being too salesy.

That’s where email newsletters come in. They offer a great way to share useful content with the people on your email list, and when done right, they can humanize your brand and build long-term relationships with customers.

But designing and executing an effective newsletter is no easy feat—especially if you don’t have any experience in the field of marketing or design. That’s why we’ve assembled this list of nine tips for creating engaging newsletters that’ll help you boost customer engagement and increase sales for your eCommerce store.

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4. Your Emails Are Too Long

Your emails should land between 200-300 words. If you’re doing a good job of keeping the above points in mind, you’ll probably find yourself writing less and less over time because you’ll be focused on being concise. Here are some tips to remember when it comes to the length of your emails:

Keep your paragraphs short. As much as possible, keep each paragraph to one or two sentences at most (especially in shopping cart abandonment emails).
Use images or gifs whenever possible. Use images or gifs to help convey important information, like showing an outfit worn by someone in an outfit email, or highlighting key features of a product in a shopping cart follow-up email remember that they’re both informative and entertaining!
Don’t forget to use bullet points and subheadings; Bullet points make it easier for your customers to scan through your content and subheadings break up the content so that it’s more digestible for recipients who read their emails on mobile devices (and maybe even for those who don’t!).

5. Your Emails Aren’t Personalized

Your customers will ignore generic, irrelevant content in their inboxes, no matter how valuable it is to your business. Personalization makes them feel like the message was created for them, and that you understand who they are and what they want from your brand. It also increases open rates by 26%, click-through rates by 14%, and conversions by 10%. To personalize your emails, you should:

Address the customer by name. This will make the customer feel more familiar with your brand because they’re not just one of many faceless recipients on a mailing list anymore; they’re someone special!

Only send targeted messages to customers whose needs align with the contents of the email. For example, if you sell inflatable pools for dogs, don’t send an email about how great these products are to someone who doesn’t own a dog (even if you know that person has a cat).

The point here is making sure that every recipient finds value in each message if not today then perhaps at some point in the future when circumstances change

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6. Your Subject Lines Are Boring

Saying something like “Newsletter #2” or “The Latest News From Our Company” is not going to cut it. Your subject lines are the first thing recipients see, so make them great. They should be short and catchy and tell your readers exactly what’s inside the email in a way that piques their interest.

Instead of saying “The Latest News From Our Company,” try something more compelling like: “How our customers saved $1 million last year by using this strategy.” If you want your subject lines to stand out in people’s inboxes and have a better chance of being opened, use these tips to write catchy subject lines that get opened:

7. You Don’t Use Engaging Visuals

People tend to process information better when visuals are introduced. That’s why you’ll see a lot of infographics or images within articles on this site (and why you should use them in your articles). At the very least, however, you can use a visual to help explain a concept.

For example, if I’m writing about how to improve your email marketing performance and want to highlight the importance of segmentation, I might include an image of someone throwing emails into different groups. Or if I’m talking about how much time it takes to read an email on mobile devices, I could include an infographic that shows how people reading on their phones are more likely to skim content than those reading on their desktops.

If you’re going to break up your content with visuals (which is recommended), think about including images that will help readers understand what they’re reading or remember it later.

8. You’re Sending Too Much Or Too Little

You’re sending your emails too often, or not enough. If you bombard your subscribers with emails, they’ll unsubscribe to avoid spamming their inboxes. If you don’t send emails frequently enough, they may forget about you and go elsewhere. The trick is to find the right balance between too much and not enough.

However, there are a few general rules of thumb for when to send emails:

Don’t send an email on weekends or holidays unless it’s something that absolutely can’t wait until Monday. If people are out of work or school celebrating these special days (or simply taking time off), then chances are they don’t want to read business-related emails from companies that aren’t even open at the moment.

But if it’s a transactional email that needs immediate attention, like confirming a purchase or shipping information for an item ordered for Valentine’s Day, an exception may be made based on urgency and context. When sending promotional/marketing/sales emails (meaning any email that has anything to do with selling something), only do so during normal business hours (9 am-5 pm) Monday through Friday in the recipient’s respective time zone

Otherwise, you risk sending it while they’re asleep because your local area is still awake at 9 pm on Wednesday due to a different time zone than where the recipient lives; if someone receives this kind of email after 7 pm on a weeknight, it will likely annoy them because they were probably relaxing at home with family and friends at the time instead of working late into the night preparing marketing materials like you were doing at 9 pm when you hit “send.”

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How To Fix The Email Marketing Mistake You’re Making

Now that you know some reasons behind your low open rates, you can start making adjustments to get the most out of your email marketing strategy. Here are a few things you should consider:

1. Create a Segmented List System

You can target emails to specific audiences based on customer behaviors, such as their purchase history or pricing tier. Insights from a customer’s past behavior can help you determine what kind of content they’d be most interested in. When you segment your lists, every email they receive should feel more personalized and relevant to them.

A targeted message is more likely to be opened than a generic one. Segmentation enables you to track how effective your emails are at reaching different types of customers, which will inform future email campaigning.

2. Be Creative in Your Messaging

To alleviate the stress of making your email marketing more engaging, do this:

Use Video: If you’re not using video in your email marketing, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to connect with your audience. According to research from Forrester, including a video in an email can increase click-through rates by 200% to 300%.

Use Images: The stats don’t lie: colorful visuals are essential for improving engagement. According to HubSpot, people are said to process images 60,000 times faster than text, and visuals improve learning retention by 400%. And according to Social Media Examiner, colored visuals increase willingness to read content by 80%.

Use GIFs: A GIF is a moving graphic that gives context or illustrates the message better than words alone can. They can be fun and playful or provide more information about what you’re selling. GIFs help break up walls of text and keep readers interested just make sure they support the message you’re trying to convey!

Use Emojis: Emojis are tiny visual representations of feelings and ideas that allow us to express our emotions without having them misconstrued in written form. You should use emojis wherever possible especially when it comes to subject lines or previews! For example, if one of your blog posts was titled “How To Win Friends and Influence People? Avoid These 5 Words Like The Plague!”

3. Use Data and Analytics to Help You Find Patterns

Analytics and data are important when it comes to email marketing. Analytics allows you to see who is receiving your emails, how often people open these emails, what they do once they get the email, whether they click on any links in the email, and much more.

This can help you increase your email deliverability rates and increase engagement with your customers. Through analytics, you can find out which of your emails are getting opened most often, which types of content get the most engagement from each particular customer segment, and where people click within the content of your email to go back to your website or social media pages.

Analyzing data will give you a better understanding of what is working for your customers and which things are not working so well for them. You can use this information to make changes to improve the customer experience with your brand overall.

4. Test Your Ideas Often

You can’t make the right decisions for your customers if you don’t know what they want to read. Make sure you’re testing a few ideas at any one time, so there’s always room to improve your results. Here are some things you can test:

The length of your subject line (“Welcome” vs “Welcome to Acme Industries!”)
The content in the body of your email (personalized vs not)
Where you place a link within the email (beginning vs end)
The creative design of the email (images or no images, different headlines, etc.)
The day and time that you send an email (Tuesday at 2 pm vs Thursday evening)

5. Focus on Actionable Messages Rather than Asking for Interaction

You may believe that asking your customers to engage with you is the best way to get them to do so, but this is incorrect. You must tell them what to do and be confident in doing so!

With actionable messages, you are being direct about what you want your audience to do, and you’re increasing the likelihood of them doing it. Studies show that audiences are more likely to follow directives when they perceive a direct request as an assertion rather than as a question.

If you insist on asking your audience for engagement (against our suggestion), don’t try and be coy about it ask clearly. Just don’t ask at all if possible.

6. Use Human-to-Human Interactions in Automated Messages Where Possible

This is another simple way to make your emails feel more human and less robotic in a hurry. By adding a friendly greeting, including the person’s name (if possible), avoiding spammy words and phrases, keeping sentences short and to the point, using paragraphs sparingly, making sure emails are brief enough for quick scanning, and writing like you’re talking to a real person, you can instantly improve your email marketing campaigns.

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7. Study the Results from Your Efforts and Adjust Accordingly

The next step is to make small adjustments based on the data from your last email marketing campaign and then test again. If a change makes a big difference, great! If it doesn’t, try something different. Remember that these changes don’t have to be permanent or huge you can always switch back if you need to.

When you see the results from your testing, you’ll know what’s working and what isn’t in your email marketing strategy. You might find that something that worked for a competitor hasn’t translated well for your own business. That’s okay! Don’t be afraid to tweak the process until it works for you and your customers.

Final Thoughts

After reading this post, it’s clear that you can’t simply cut and paste your way to an effective email marketing campaign. Every piece of your messaging must be tailored to your audience, their wants and needs, and their previous marketing communications if at all possible. The thing is, though, an effective email marketing campaign is well worth the effort involved.

For example, email is a valuable asset to brands on Twitter while also building strong relationships with customers that lead to engagement and sales opportunities both in-person and online. And the chances are good that most of your competitors have access to some kind of email list or another. So go ahead, roll up your sleeves, build those relationships, and get ready for the benefits.

The Email Marketing Mistake You’re Making (And How To Fix It)