Is your business using Email Marketing? Well, in that case, this post will be very useful to you. If your business is not using Email Marketing, take my word and start considering it. In either case, you want to avoid Common Email Marketing Mistakes. So, let’s discuss.
What is email marketing?
Any activity of sending electronic mail which contains marketing or promotion messages for a prospect, existing customer or lost customer can fall under email marketing. Such messages can be to build loyalty, trust or brand awareness, gain new customers, cross-sell, up-sell, lead generation, etc.
Avoid buying email lists for marketing
Traditionally, marketers buy the email list and start email blasts. Yes, that is literally a blast. In this approach marketers are happy only about one thing, they have sent thousands or lakhs of emails. But such an email marketing strategy normally doesn’t yield good results.
As you are sending emails to persons who have not asked for the information, it makes your emails less relevant. Further, there are all possibilities of such emails going into spam. As long as people are deleting such emails not a big problem, but if they start marking your mail as spam your domain will be in big trouble.
So, instead of buying an email list or using bulk email services always create an opt-in database and send relevant emails. With such efforts, your email falls in the ‘expected’ category. This means there is higher chance your email will be opened and read by the subscriber.
Avoid emails without a call to action (CTA) in Marketing
Why do you send email? Mostly, you want the reader to take some action. Then I don’t understand why many marketing emails are sent without a proper call to action button.
While deciding your email marketing strategy you must have defined some objectives, right? To fulfil those objectives, the necessary call to action button should be used in your email. If you have a landing page for the special discount offer, use ‘Get Discount’ as the button and link specific offer page.
Sending emails without the call to action button is as good as not sending promotional emails.
Avoid sending only image emails, it’s not Email Marketing
Whether to keep only the Image, only Text or Text and Image in the email body is a highly subjective and debatable issue. Still, I recommend avoiding sending only image emails. Because such emails can trigger spam filters and restrict your email from reaching the inbox of the recipient. Some email clients, such as Outlook, can be configured to block images. In those cases, the user will not see anything, if the alt tag is not defined. Further, the user will be required to take additional steps such as ‘click to download images’. Even after downloading it becomes extremely difficult to read without zoom-in if the image contains content. Further, the download of such images may be slow which can affect the recipient retention ratio. Even if such an email lands in the inbox recipient will not be able to search with a keyword. For all these reasons and from experience I can say, that such emails don’t generate good results therefore avoid them.
Avoid non-personalised emails
How do you feel when you enter a retail shop and a customer care guy welcomes you with your name or a sales guy brings you your preferred product? The recipient of your email passes through the same experience when he receives a personalised email. The simplest personalisation can be to send the email with the recipient’s name. As this adds a factor of familiarity, it leads to better retention of a customer. Ultimately you can expect better conversion from such emails. So, if you are sending non-personalised emails your email marketing campaign may suffer on retention, conversion and usefulness front.
Avoid emails which are not optimized for mobile
Today increasingly people are reading content on mobile. Still, if you are sending emails which are not optimized for mobile you are likely to get disappointed with email marketing results. It’s time for you to change your email marketing tools. Mobile optimized email designs adjust layout automatically and so results in a better experience for the recipient of the email. Such emails have higher open rates and higher click-through rates as reading inconvenience is eliminated. So next time you are sending your newsletter, ensure it is optimized for mobile viewing.
Avoid sending emails without testing, it is the worst thing in Email Marketing
Do you like emails sent to you with a wrong hyperlink or non-functioning forms? In the same way your recipients also don’t like it. An email which looks just perfect in your system may look different in Gmail and Outlook. There can be a difference in padding, margins and space among various elements, sometimes background images are not displayed or CSS is ignored. Such errors in email marketing can be rectified if testing is done. Testing also provides the opportunity to fix broken or incorrect link, incorrect alt text of images and spelling or grammar error, if there is any in your email marketing.
Avoid do not reply email id
When you are sending a marketing email you are expecting the recipient to take action, this action might be a reply to an email. But if the recipient is not able to reply, it will be only one-way communication. As the recipient cannot reply, he will not add this address to his address book. Getting a place in the address book of a recipient is of crucial importance if you want to ensure delivery of your message in the inbox. Further, many people don’t try into finding out unsubscribe links instead they hit the “reply” button. As soon as they learn a reply is not possible they click on spam! This reporting spam can create a delivery issue.
With these email marketing best practices, you can expect more delivery, opening, click-through-rate, and conversions. If you are looking for professional help in email marketing contact Crowd Multiplier, a digital marketing agency based at Ahmedabad.
