6 Email Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Every business worth its salt uses email marketing to reach customers and target audiences. For well over two decades, email has been one of the best performing marketing tools available for businesses of any size. Email allows you to build a personal relationship with customers and, of course, to generate recurring revenue.
While email is one of the most affordable marketing tools there is, there are some common email marketing mistakes you need to avoid with your email campaigns, especially when sending marketing materials. Because although email is relatively inexpensive, improper use could cost you in lost revenue and potential fines. Here’s 6 email marketing mistakes you need to avoid.
#1 Not welcoming your subscribers
If you are not welcoming a subscriber who just joined your email list, you are making a big mistake. Make a good first impression by sending a welcome email. Welcome emails should be triggered immediately after a sign-up as the first message in your series. Since a subscriber must go through numerous steps before signing up, you should let them know how much you appreciate them. Be genuine and likable. Do it right and your subscribers will be excited to read both your content and marketing materials. It’s been shown that using welcome emails lead to 320% more subscriber revenue than if you don’t.
#2 No call-to-action
The primary objective of sending a marketing email is to guide your subscribers to a landing page where they can learn more about your products or services and buy something. If your email does not include an appropriate CTA button, your emails won’t work. It is vital to write your emails with a clear purpose and bring value to the customers. Even a single CTA button in an email can boost sales by up to 1617%.
Make it easy to buy something. If you’re sending a long-form email, include several CTA buttons and locate them in different parts of your email that fit into the natural flow. However, don’t overwhelm your subscribers with CTA’s that seem desperate or unnatural.
#3 Lack of personalized approach
No one wants to be treated like a number. Subscribers signed up to your offer because they liked it. Return the favor and treat them as individuals, not simply another number. Personalization is essential for your subscribers since it makes them feel special. By segmenting your lists, you can target audiences based on their interests or buying habits, hobbies or geography. Customers are more likely to be interested in messages that are tailor-made, highly relevant and include their names.
EmailOversight offers a data enrichment tool that can help you better personalize your email sends (full names, location and more). Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates and increase open rates by 26 percent. With triggered email campaigns, personalization helps double the transaction rates.
#4 Not segmenting subscribers
If all your subscribers are receiving the same content, you are making a big mistake. For instance, some subscribers may only be interested in new information from your company, while others may want promotions and coupons. Instead of bulk sending the same content and offers to all subscribers, divide your audience based on segments such as geo-location, industry, hobbies, purchase history, language, content engagement, and stage of the funnel.
For instance, if you operate an electronics store, you will want to segment your lists by recent purchases-by-product. Folks who just purchased an OLED TV should not be sent an offer for an OLED TV. Instead, send them an exclusive email announcing the arrival of new gaming consoles or surround sound systems. EmailOversight’s data enrichment tools can help you segment your lists in a very granular manner. This will lead to far more revenue generated on your offers, and greater ROI for your business.
#5 Over-sending emails
It’s very common to see marketers bombarding subscriber inboxes with offers, especially during the holiday season. But bombardment can easily lead to your emails ending up in the junk box. If you don’t keep a check on the frequency of your emails, your customers will eventually unsubscribe, or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Email Service Providers (ESPs) will simply dump your messages in junk.
It’s been shown that up to 46% of email subscribers have flagged an email as spam because the company sent emails too often. A good rule of thumb is to send at least 1 content email for every offer email. Be sure to keep a regular content and marketing schedule and stick to it.
#6 Sending to Harmful Addresses
The easiest way to ruin any email marketing campaign, and potentially your entire email business, is to send emails to harmful addresses. It’s a mistake that many email marketers make. You see, if you look deep enough, nearly every email list contains mal-formatted addresses, invalid email addresses, bots, spam-traps and known complainers (people that are known to hit the spam button).
Sending emails to these types of addresses will cost you. And cost you big. Not only will your sends end up in junk folders, leading to revenue drying up, but if you hit enough spam-traps and get enough spam complaints, you could be in for some big fines from the FTC. Your business could go kaput.
The best way to remove all these malicious addresses is to use EmailOversight’s Email Validation tool. EmailOversight can remove these bad addresses in just moments, allowing you to hit subscriber inboxes and generate more revenue.
But better yet, our API can prevent these bad addresses from ever entering your list in the first place. Right at the point of acquisition, our API filters out any malicious addresses. This leaves you with clean deliverable email addresses. Email addresses that lead to more sales.
EmailOversight has made email marketing a snap. By avoiding these 6 Email Marketing Mistakes, you’ll see higher open rates, higher deliverability rates, higher engagement rates and more revenue!
