Avoid These 12 Email Marketing Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Business
Email marketing campaigns are important in today’s business marketing. They are a great way of gaining new customers and promoting your products and services. Yet, if executed poorly, you run the risk of wasting time, energy and losing money and sales. Your email marketing isn’t just about gaining subscribers, it’s also about converting them into customers.
If you are having trouble attracting new subscribers, retaining subscribers, and/or converting subscribers, there is a high probability you are going wrong somewhere with your campaign. While it’s ok to make mistakes, it’s also important to learn from them and try not to make them in the future. Here are 12 mistakes that you need to avoid making altogether.
1. Stop forgetting about your new subscribers
It happened, finally. You landed a new subscriber, but now what do you do? If you answered wait a few days and then hit them with an email outlining your great product, you are doing it wrong. This is a huge mistake. The first email you need to send is a welcome email. The first email you send tends to be the most read email. Why? This is when your readers are most engaged with you and your brand. They just signed up for your email marketing. You are fresh, new, and exciting in their minds.
There is no right or wrong way to write a welcoming email really. Some can be humorous, while others no-nonsense and straight down to business. The thing that matters is that it represents you All welcoming emails should have the following:
- Welcome the reader
- Introduce yourself or the business
- A good lead into what will follow
If you want to keep your subscribers’ attention then leading with a great welcoming email is essential and since it sets the tone for all of your other emails, it paves the way for future sales.
2. A mismatch between your campaign and reader expectations
Your subscribers are there because your brand and company intrigue them, and you are offering them something they need or desperately want. So, if your email content doesn’t back up their expectation, they are going to click unsubscribe pretty quickly.
“The content you send out to your email list needs to be well thought out, of high quality, and consistent with your company branding. You will lose money and subscribers if your email marketing doesn’t live up to your reader’s expectations.” explains Ray Schmid, a tech blogger at Paperfellows and Coursework Writing. If you lose a subscriber, the best email copy won’t matter because they won’t be reading it at all.
How do you fail at meeting expectations? There are two key things that cause a mismatch:
- Not sticking to your promised schedule-if you said a weekly email, then deliver on it.
- Not sticking to your chosen topic: If you promised to blog tips but are sending emails on weight loss tips, then they are going to bail on you pretty quick.
Keeping these two points in mind when you are crafting your email content will help you avoid creating a customer mismatch.
3. You Forgot to include the Call to Action
The CTA is a crucial part of your email campaign and forgetting can cost you money. Whether the content is a blog post or landing page or an email, a call to action needs to be included. The Call to Action encourages your subscribers to engage with your content. Your audience is likely highly intelligent, however, without a call to action, they might overlook what you want them to do with your content. You have to give them some guidance in the right direction and a CTA is a way to do this.
Before you write the first word of your email, have a clear vision in mind of what you want your reader to do. Are you promoting your content? Selling a new product? Providing a service? Then focus on the email contents, leading them to the outcome you want for them.
Then, make the call to action easily recognisable and relevant to what you want your outcome to be. Your CTA needs to be the following:
- Easy to find
- Using the right words
- It’s message needs to be clear and concise
- Repeat the message when appropriate to do so.
4. Forgetting about your mobile users
If you want to send your email conversion rates plummeting, this is the mistake to keep making. Up to 70% of your email content will be opened on a mobile device, thanks to smartphones and tablets. If you are not ensuring that your emails are being formatted for multiple devices, then you need to start doing this.
When you format for mobile devices, think simple and clean, with images and text that is easily readable on a small screen. Single column content, with images no bigger than 600 pixels is the best design here.
Bear in mind that if you don’t have the ability to optimize your content for mobile devices in yourself, there are services available that can do it all for you, so you are freeing up precious time.
Always test your emails on several mobile apps, so you can troubleshoot any errors, and make sure that your content is coming across the way you meant.
5. Lack of professionalism
If your emails look too amateurish or worse, dodgy, you will lose subscribers. “If your content is coming across like a scam instead of a legitimate offer, then you will lose subscribers and ultimately, sales” says Patricia Bonner, an email marketer at Eliteassignmenthelp and Lia Help. Here are several things to stop doing to help your content look more professional:
- Bad spelling/grammar– There really is no excuse to send out copy with spelling and grammar mistakes. It makes your email campaign look unprofessional and it can cause confusion, especially if your message becomes ambiguous. Always utilise a spellchecker and consider checking your grammar in a program.
- Leave out attachments- the professionals leave these out and so should you. Unless of course the reader specifically signed up to receive a PDF, just don’t have attachments.
- Stock images- Bad stock images that have been recycled over and over again hurt your chances of retaining subscribers and making conversions.
- Avoid swearing- Most market niches won’t be impressed by your colourful language so if in doubt, leave it out.
6. Using cliches and heavy sales wording
People don’t like heavy, syrupy sales pitches. If you come on too strong, you will more than likely turn them off and they will surely unsubscribe. The same will happen if you use the same old cliches.
Your readers are subscribed to other email marketing campaigns and chances are even though you think your business or product is unique, they won’t see it in the same way, and it will look like every other ad campaign in their inbox.
If you want to avoid sounding like everyone else, try these easy tips
- Personalise your emails-Write your copy like you were writing to a friend, not a salesperson.
- It’s about them, not you- You are trying to sell your product or service to the customer, not to yourself. Talking about you and your needs all the time won’t make sales conversion. Instead, focus on what your subscribers need and want. Focus on the benefits your subscribers will get from using your product or service.
- Good subject lines matter-Write clear and unique subject headlines instead of recycling the tired old formula that other marketing campaigns use.
7. Too Many Images
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but too many pictures and stock images can hurt your email campaign.
“Stock images make your email marketing seem impersonal and don’t really reflect your brand and your company vision. It’s best to include original photography where possible, or if you are going to use stock images, be sure to think carefully and make sure it fits into your overall branding,” advises Elias Riddles, a writer at Boomessays and Essayroo.
It’s common for email users to read emails with images turned off. The two biggest reasons for this are for security against spammers. The second reason is speed. So, if people turn off images, does this mean you shouldn’t use any images? No, definitely not. But it does mean you need to use images sparingly.
One way to get around this is by using alt text, which is a text that replaces an image when it fails to load or is blocked by the service. Good email marketing services let you add alt text without having to know HTML code.
8. Waiting too long to start your email marketing campaign
In today’s fast-paced, digital world, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that email is just a bit old-fashioned and therefore shouldn’t be a marketing priority. This is simply not true. There really is no time like the present when it comes to starting your email campaign.
Email marketing campaigns pair nicely with SMS marketing strategies. You can even use your SMS marketing to send subscribers reminders to open your marketing emails, making sure your subscribers never miss an email. This eventually will lead to more conversions and up your overall sales.
9. Making it about the numbers
A lot of people these days focus on waiting until they have the right number of subscribers or views or the right number of sales. This is a mistake when it comes to email marketing campaigns. The focus needs to be on the following:
- Company goals
- Audience’s awareness and overall need
- Using every email to bring the customer to a point of meeting that needs and making the sales conversion
If you are waiting for the perfect opportunity you are missing out on potential subscribers and that means customers and sales.
10. Letting negative criticism dictate your email marketing campaign.
You send out an email. Then you get a response of “Stop selling to me” or “Your product is lame and too expensive; I am not interested.” These responses stick in the back of your mind and create a negative mindset and before you know it, you shy away from emailing your content at all. You start trying to change it, or worse don’t even send your emails out anymore. People don’t like what you are selling, so what is the point?
Remember, not everyone will like or need your product. It’s ok to lose the subscribers who do not want or need what you are selling. If you have a good email campaign that is getting decent conversion rates, then don’t try and fix something that isn’t broken because a few people responded negatively.
11. Using broken links.
There is nothing more frustrating for an email subscriber as when they go to click on the provided link, and it doesn’t work. This is a fairly common mistake that you really need to avoid. It looks really unprofessional, and you will come off as not taking your content seriously.
Part of your email editing process, as was mentioned previously, needs to include making sure all your links work. Otherwise, your campaign will utterly fail, and you will have wasted time and ultimately money.
12. Not tracking your email campaign.
How will you know if your efforts are successful if you are not tracking your email campaigns? The answer is you can’t, and that is a huge problem. You could be wasting time, resources, and money, as well as losing existing customers and subscribers.
When you design your email campaign, incorporate tracking programs that will identify what messages work and get your subscribers’ attention and which ones end up straight in the bin.
Many CRM software systems include email tracking tools, which great marketers use.
These are the 12 mistakes to avoid making in your email marketing campaign. These mistakes can be easily rectified by investing a little more time and attention into creating email content and using technology to help where possible.
Emily Henry is a writer at Law Essay Help and Thesis Writing Service. She writes about email marketing. Also, she is a tutor at State Of Writing.
Personal Qualities You Need to Have a Successful Email Marketing Career
Do you want a career in email marketing? It is essential to have certain qualities if so. We will discuss these qualities and why they’re necessary for success in this blog post.
These personal qualities help you be successful because they allow you to be more creative with your work while also helping you think critically about the problems that come up. They also enable you to research independently without having any complications arise or get stuck when doing something like using new software. These qualities make it easy for others around them to communicate with marketers and listen to the audience. So, let’s see what personal attributes a person should have to become a successful email marketing manager and have a great career!
Attention to Details is Crucial For Email Marketer
You don’t need to be pedantic and waste time on everything, but you need to pay attention to the nuances that contribute to the promotion of the product. Becoming an email marketer will be complicated for you if you’ve ever given a gift without a pretty package, aside from its cost. You have to think holistically and see the whole picture, and it doesn’t matter if it is about the brand as an entire or a specific product. Everything should be interconnected. Striving for an ideal that cannot be achieved will force you to improve your work every time. Missing one small detail can negatively impact the result.
Responsible Attitude to the Process
Many people have various ideas constantly spinning in their heads, remaining in their infancy. A person can see a similar project from another person and is soon left face to face with your disappointment. Let’s be honest, which reader didn’t have a great business plan that never saw the light of day? It is essential to realize that starting your own business is quite tricky, so you need to be responsible for those who already have this business, moreover, who trust you.
Ability to Plan
Many people know how to come up with exciting moves, but not everyone succeeds in implementing them. There are simply no guarantees of success. Many details need to be met to achieve positive performance, and you need to feel the situation and plan your actions carefully. Punctuality in work adds pluses to this skill and focuses on productive activity.
Constant Self-development
It is essential for all professions, not just marketers. The specialty constantly reminds us that data is out of date. For example, an email marketer makes a lot of edits when writing a dissertation because every time a new product, players and methods of attracting consumers appear on the market. A person is limited in professional growth if you do not see the point in constant training, and therefore, are doomed to lose to more robust competitors.
Currently, the discipline of email marketing is transforming dynamically. The profession is enriched with new technologies used to study the target audience, analyze its interaction with brands, communicate with it, and analyze its performance. Moreover, consumer behavior patterns are being revised and changed more often than ever before. It obliges the modern email marketing specialist to develop an external environment where people carry out their professional activities.
We can say that the top quality is the desire and ability to constantly learn, improve professionally and regularly take inventory of their skills to abandon the outdated and replace them with new ones.
Organizational Skills
Since every email marketer communicates with all company divisions and begins to implement his strategy from the inside, they must correctly plan and prepare everything to offer the market an already formed brand, product, service, etc.
Foreign Language Skills
Being a good email marketer means always keeping your finger on the pulse of the global situation in goods and services. A private English teacher in a short time will help you build a professional vocabulary, thanks to which you can study fresh materials on the Internet from primary sources.
Knowing the language, an email marketer can:
- create an excellent career;
- apply for a place in a large international company;
- conduct marketing campaigns in English and present them favorably;
- work with foreign clients.
Ability to Listen and Risk
An email marketer can lose the point by skipping a snippet of what you said and end up doing extra work. Each stage should be recorded on paper, in memory, in a file, and anywhere. The main thing is that you can reproduce the information at any time.
These skills can help act clearly and competently in unplanned situations. It will help when you are on a deadline or lose control for a while. A person can simulate a specific episode to not panic in the future when there is a real threat of a project failure.
Social Skills
Social skills are crucial for a great email marketer. Someone is given this skill from birth, but you should not give up hope if it is not there. Develop it in stages, fighting with your nature and going against the inner voice of doubt. The result is worth spending your time and energy on.
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It is one of the many qualities that come with experience. Of course, you can and should strive for this right now, but you will gain real momentum only after years of experimentation.
Performing Good Under Pressure And In Team
Here is one more valuable quality for all professions. The ability to overcome setbacks with your head held high distinguishes a true professional from an ordinary employee. Regardless of the company’s setbacks, a marketing professional should not lose faith in himself and his ability to work. It’s even better if you know how to find opportunities for a quick recovery to maintain the desired level of productivity.
Another critical skill is collaborating with other people in a team, but this is a moot point. Is it possible to learn this? Having all these qualities does not guarantee you a job as a marketer. You need to understand that everyone’s start is different, and it is easier for one, but it is more complicated for the other. The main thing is the desire and desire to be realized in your favorite profession.
Ability to Focus and Adapt
The ability to adapt to frequently changing conditions is also essential. The email marketer should not be attached to experience and act according to a template, even once thriving. The specialist must be open to new circumstances, knowledge and take the challenges of change with interest.
The ability to focus attention on achieving goals is crucial as well. There are so many distractions in the era of information oversaturation that it is not difficult to get carried away by something secondary. Still, like an icebreaker, the email marketer must confidently go and lead the company’s business to achieve its goals.
An email marketing manager must use different approaches and be open to new technologies and new views on familiar problems. They also should be able to abandon the chosen course and switch to other work methods if existing solutions lead to failure.
Creativity
Be energetic and set the right mood for your colleagues. Email marketers are at the forefront of any company, and they lead the way to customers, and the rest of the organization follows them. Marketing efforts largely determine the outcome of the entire company, so the marketer must inspire colleagues to win.
Creativity is necessary to make attractive advertising communications and to search for non-standard moves in conditions of a limited budget, which is always not enough to implement everything conceived.
Literacy
A single grammatical mistake can change the meaning of advertising communication, and all preparatory work and budgets can be wasted. The point is not that literacy is needed, like any person, when writing their texts. Every email marketer has to coordinate and approve advertising materials and layouts at work. They put their signature on them, which means they are fully responsible for the correct execution, including grammatical errors.
Multitasking Skills
Today, an email marketer is obliged to combine many competencies required of them at any time – for example, copywriting, design, web design, targeting, analytics, etc. A great email marketer still needs to understand the essence of these works even if the marketer is lucky and bypasses this duty. To demand the desired result, you need to know how it is achieved.
Final Thoughts
Certain qualities can help you if you want to be a successful email marketing manager. These include being creative and analytical with how you approach campaigns, having good communication skills to coordinate the digital team well, managing your time wisely so that it all comes together at the end of the day, and more.
Once you know what these qualities are for yourself or if you’re looking for someone else who might have them already, then focus on developing those traits to make sure they come through in every campaign.
7 Brilliant Ways a Mass Email Service Will Benefit Your Business
In the United States, there are over 6 million businesses in operation.
If you want to outperform your competition and stand out in a crowded field, a mass email service can help. If you’re looking for every advantage available, don’t miss out on what mass email services can do for you.
A mass email service can help you bypass your standard business email limitations. You can get unlimited opportunities to connect with and communicate with your audience.
A mass mailer comes with many advantages, but let’s take a look at the top 7 advantages that will benefit your business.
1. Best Email Practices
In the modern business sphere, emails play an integral role. Following best practices can make a difference between informing customers of new offers, ideas, or products and outright failure.
A mass email service is set up around emails. They know how to use the platform constructively.
Following best practices can also help keep your emails from going on a “blacklist”. This is when your email goes to a spam or junk folder.
That can have a huge, detrimental effect on any marketing attempt. However, for emails, it can be a death sentence.
If you want someone who can understand your needs and knows how best to meet them, consider a salesforce campaign. You will have access to the knowledge and practices that will net you the largest return on your investment possible.
2. Audience Reach
If you want to expand your reach and include those who have purchased your products or services before, mass email is the way to go. Not only does this give you access to a huge list of new potential customers, but you also stay in touch with your current audience.
The cost of expanding your reach via a mass email campaign is also far less than that of other, more traditional marketing approaches. If a company wants to expand its reach without breaking its budget, a mass mailer can revolutionize its marketing.
3. Access Customers Directly
Sending an email out to your customers allows you to connect with them. Modern marketing requires the humanizing of a business, making it more pleasant to do business with. A big way to do that is to foster increased and close connections to your customers.
Customers want to feel like they matter, and know that they are heard. An email gives any communication a bit of a personal touch if it is crafted the proper way. Never underestimate the loyalty of a customer who has positive, friendly feelings towards your business.
4. Easy To Track
Of all the ways to communicate, emails are among the easiest to track. This allows for a stable platform to study analytics from. It will fast become clear what is working and what is not when you study the results of your email marketing.
Depending on the mass email service you use, you will often get help in this area. Being able to track the results of an email campaign can help you in all aspects of marketing. If a great maxim is to “know your audience” then there are few better ways available.
A fine-tuned email will be more useful to you than relentless spam of mails will. One way helps you to connect with customers while also building up an understanding of who they are. The other way will relegate your work to the trash bin.
5. Formatting Emails
A mass email service can help you by optimizing the format of your emails. This can make them easier to read, or more familiar to the right people. Keeping up to date with the latest formatting isn’t always easy, so a professional in this field is essential.
The proper format can also determine how your business is seen by customers. You don’t want to seem like you’re stuck in the past.
Break free and express yourself in different ways. A mass email service is capable of helping you achieve those goals.
Remember, just because mail looks good on paper, or sitting on your word processor, doesn’t mean that translates onto the email. Respect has to be given to how translating a document from a word document to an email can change the way it looks and feels when read.
6. Single Emails Won’t Deliver Results
If you try and build up a mailing list and send out a single email to your list, the chances of success are low. A much more effective method is to send out emails every so often.
These emails should remind customers that you exist and what you offer. Consistency in this regard is key.
It can take a lot of time to set up multiple emails, which is why services exist to handle it. Ditch the limitations of sending out single emails. Instead, embrace the ability to connect with your customers at the same time.
7. Proper Font and Type
While most of us have modern systems either at home or in our pocket, not everyone does. Emails are designed so that anyone can view them on almost any system. This means that they don’t have all the new features and fonts that modern smartphones or other systems do.
This is one reason why it is important to work with someone who understands email specifically. It is easy to make a mistake with your email.
If that happens, no one will want to read it. In fact, it might even be unreadable to some people.
Choose a Mass Email Service That Works for You
In the modern business place, it is no longer enough to just produce a good product. Marketing via email is a great way to build up the essential connections that go along with modern advertising. Ditch the old way of operating mail campaigns, and switch to a mass email service.
If you have any questions about our mass email marketing services, or want specifics on what benefits we can offer you, contact us. We are ready to get started working for you and to deliver the products and services that you want.