Why a post on email marketing mistakes? Because chances are that you are doing every mistake in the book, as you read this (I know as I am doing it too).
Email Marketing Is still effective, the use is on the rise, and it’s still the de facto mode of communication. As a business, it’s all on you to use the good old email the right way and make email marketing work for your business.
Thanks to the fact that most emails are now checked, while on the go, on smartphones, the Adobe Email Survey 2016 proves once again that email has moved from “frequently checked” to “always on”.
On an average, people now spend 7.4 hours per day on email (that’s more than Facebook + Instagram).
But there are annoying habits marketers and businesses have, with regards to email marketing, and that should change. It’s time to give email marketing the respect it deserves and take necessary steps to make emails as valuable as they should be for your subscribers.
Your subscribers are gold. You better treat them as such. Here are a few tips to make sure you don’t screw up the potential your email marketing has for your business:
Don’t Send emails too Frequently
I can understand that as a business, all you want to do is to send emails to make sales. But sales won’t come in if your subscribers don’t like you in the first place or if you try to annoy them.
By now, there have been enough surveys to point to the obvious: Don’t send emails too frequently. Like, sending 2-3 emails per day or sending email every single day? Please, give those subscribers a break, will ya?
If you send emails too frequently, you lose value. You lose respect. You come across as desperate. You don’t respect your subscribers enough. Your subscribers will know that all you care about is a sale and not them.
Simply put, you suck.
Long emails don’t work
When you send an email to your subscribers, get to the point. Quick.
Don’t write a super long blog post and turn it into an email so that your subscribers would read. Don’t write a book. Don’t publish a thesis. Don’t send in a white paper.
No one wants to read email for too long. If they ever had to, it’s certainly not “your email” that was going to be read.
While on the subject of writing emails, ensure that you keep your emails well-written, use simple words when you write your emails, and don’t get too fancy with your creativity.
Personalization, Segmentation, Tagging, & Automation: Use With Caution
One of the most recurring annoyances subscribers have is when marketers and businesses go overboard with segmentation, tagging, automation, and personalization.
These are certainly powerful features. You should be using them, but not to a point that you begin to play “God”.
Get the wrong data about your subscribers and every email you’d send is a wrong email to the right person. Over personalize (often by assumption) and you’ll end up being too creepy. Tag your subscribers wrong and you’ll be sending emails you shouldn’t be sending.
If you don’t get your marketing automation right, you’d then be sending “Buy Now”, “Buy Now”, “Deadline ends tonight, so please buy Now” emails to customers who already Purchased from you.
It’s precisely for this reason that you’d need a powerful email marketing automation tool such as Drip or ConvertKit so that you have proper control on Personalization, Segmentation, Tagging, or Marketing Automation.
Design Gone Bad
Either you have an entire team of email design specialists working for your business to make sure your email design is flawless or you revert to simple emails that don’t even need design in the first place.
Most subscribers can’t see your fancy images when your email lands in their inbox (Ever see those “Display Images?” thing in Gmail, for instance?). Let’s assume your subscribers do “allow” images to be displayed, you then have an email that incinerates the entire visual experience just because someone in the marketing team (or worse, in the IT team) decided to get adventures with CSS in email design.
If you can’t manage to break your back with email design best practices, just revert back to simple, humble text-based email (be sure to use a font size large enough that your subscribers can read, even on a smartphone while moving in a vehicle).
Use Video With Email
You might or might not be able to actually let subscribers play video right within the email message you send, but using video in combination with email is a winner.
Let’s admit it: reading is boring (while it’s another thing that people who read are successful).
But video is easily consumable, and packs in a punch. Use video with your email marketing and you are guaranteed to kick up some smoke.
If you haven’t already, try to bring in video (even if you are linking to one of your own videos on your Youtube Channel) within email.
Things just get interesting that way.
What are you going to do with your email marketing?