10 email marketing
mistakes to avoid:
Email gives marketers a great way to connect with current
and potential customers and make one-on-one contact that drives revenue growth.
However, email marketing is also a crowded field, and businesses must do their
best to stand out and get their messages opened, read, and acted on.
From spam filters to list attrition, there are a number of
obstacles that can get in the way of a campaign having a positive impact. Here
are some of the most common mistakes that hurt marketers’ chances of success:
1. Focusing on sales,
rather than useful content
One way to make sure email open rates stay low and
recipients quickly unsubscribe is to constantly blast out nothing but
sales-focused content. While recipients do want relevant information about your
company’s products or services, few people volunteer their email address so
they can be bombarded with sales pitches. Rather, they want and expect useful,
interesting, engaging content.
Creating great content requires knowing your customers and
their preferences and behaviors. Surveys are a good way to find out what kinds
of content people are most interested in.
Another important tactic is to watch what recipients are
doing. Keep track of what’s getting opens and clicks and offer more of that
content. In addition, try new things and test how they perform so you can
expand what kinds of content you are offering.
2. Failing to target
the message
As marketers strive to understand their audience and what
kinds of content they want, it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone in
the recipient list will have the same needs. For some businesses, it might be
best to segment the list into specific groups and target them accordingly.
One of the most important steps for marketers to take is to
move away from thinking and talking about email campaigns as a “blast” to an
anonymous audience. Email is a good way to connect with customers individually,
so businesses should think of email as more of a one-on-one conversion tool.
To develop those segmented lists, one strategy could be to
ask what people are most interested in reading when they opt in. Some companies
also maintain separate lists based on which channel recipients used to sign up.
3. Getting caught in
the spam filter
Just because someone signs up to receive your emails doesn’t
mean they’ll ever actually get anything that you send. Many emails end up stuck
in recipients’ spam filters because marketers don’t understand how those
filters work.
And you can hope as much as you want that people will add
you to their address book after they opt in to ensure the messages are
delivered, but the fact is that most people don’t do that.
Today’s spam filters are complex and it’s easy to trigger
them by accident. Marketers should pay particular attention to their subject
lines. While all filters have their own algorithms and behave differently, here
are some of the most common reasons subject lines get blocked, according to
Charles Wallace, Director of Marketing for Frost & Sullivan’s Events
Division:
1.
Using too many capital letters compared to
lowercase letters
2.
Repeating too many capital letters in a row
3.
Including words with gaps in between letters
(for example, “s*a*l*e”)
4.
Repeating letters and/or symbols
5.
Overusing special characters like $, #, %, ?, !,
etc.
6.
Using a special character to start the subject
line
7.
Using too many punctuation marks
8.
Including too many blank spaces, and
4. Not understanding
the laws
In addition to running afoul of spam filters, many email
marketers may be unintentionally violating the laws regarding commercial email
communication. Regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act regulate how those messages
can be sent, and businesses that fail to comply can face financial penalties.
·
Using false or misleading header information, including
the “from” and “reply to” addresses
·
Failing to honor opt-out requests promptly – the
law says you have 10 days
·
Making the opt-out process difficult or
confusing – emails should include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how to
stop receiving emails, and
failing to keep an eye on service providers –
even when another company handles your emailing, your business will still be held
accountable for violations.
5. Sending too often
– or not often enough
Sending too many emails is one way to drive customers away
and make them unsubscribe. And if companies send emails infrequently or only
sporadically, recipients may forget they even signed up and the business likely
won’t be getting enough numbers to get value from the email campaign.
How much is the right amount of email? That depends on a lot
of factors, such as the audience and the content. A good rule of thumb: Email
as frequently as you can while still offering real value to recipients.
Businesses can watch key metrics such as open, click,
unsubscribe, and conversion rates to get an idea of whether or not their
recipients think the emails are adding value. It may also be helpful to segment
lists by engagement and send more frequently to recipients who are highly
engaged.
6. Missing a call to
action
Of course, getting the audience to open emails does little
good if those recipients don’t actually do anything. Emails should always
include some kind of next step, whether it’s making a purchase, downloading a
white paper, joining a social media group, etc.
When presenting this call to action, it’s important to
create urgency and focus on the value it adds for the recipient. For example,
copy such as “Click here to download our email marketing best practices white
paper” can be reworded to something like “Take your email marketing to the next
level by reading our white paper.”
7. Making it hard for
mobile users
One of the keys for great email marketing is that messages
must be easy for recipients to read. That was hard enough before with the
variety of email clients in use, but now emails are read on totally different
devices.
A lot of people read email primarily on mobile devices, and
that number is only going to grow. For those recipients, if emails are difficult
to read on their device of choice, they simply won’t bother to look at them.
That means businesses must optimize their emails for mobile and test on a
variety of different devices.
8. Relying on images
While Gmail recently changed the way images are handled,
most email clients still block images by default, and many users don’t change
those settings. Therefore, marketers should make sure their emails don’t
require images in order to make sense or be effective. For example, a call to
action link shouldn’t just be an image – it should also be supported by text
that all readers will see.
Relying on images is also becoming problematic as more email
is being read on mobile devices. Images are harder than text to scale properly
on smartphones and tablets, and images may appear too small for mobile readers
to comprehend.
9. Neglecting to test
and refine
Even if businesses get great results right off the bat, it’s
likely that there’s still room to improve. That’s why marketers should always
be using response data to tweak their approach and test new strategies.
Some of the elements businesses should test include:
·
Subject lines
·
Frequency of delivery
·
Day and time of delivery, and
·
Types of offers and calls to action.
10. Following others’
lead
Email marketing is a popular strategy, and that means people
get a lot of emails in their inboxes and businesses must work hard to stand
out. Therefore, one of the top email marketing mistakes a company can make is
to sound and look like everybody else, says Gary Robbins of Frost &
Sullivan’s Integrated Marketing Solutions practice.
For marketers to stand out, they need to lead, rather than
follow. The strategy must go beyond doing what’s worked for other businesses or
doing what’s worked for your organization in the past. It’s important to also
come up with new ideas and test them to find better ways to connect with your
audience and get meaningful responses.
About the Author:
Sam Narisi is the publications editor and lead writer for
Frost & Sullivan’s Integrated Marketing Solutions practice, which helps
companies through all stages of the customer buying cycle. For more marketing
information and insight, visit
Frost & Sullivan’s IMS Knowledge Center.
