Email marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies for converting your target audience into loyal customers for your product and for your brand.
It provides you with all the advantages that any digital marketer would ever need, a high ROI, and it also kind of liberates you from the cruel algorithm of social media platforms.
However, email marketing, on the other hand, is not a thing that can be done by anyone, not only will you face problems in even starting email marketing but once you do that, there will be a ton of mistakes that you will be making without even noticing them.
Those mistakes can ruin your email marketing strategy and can cost you to lose potential customers that you could have been able to convert for your brand if you had fixed those mistakes.
However, it is not a wise thing to just look at the consequences of a mistake and not think about the mistake itself, and not only about the mistake but also about its solution, and how you fix the problem.
You might be thinking here, how would you know what mistakes you are doing in your email marketing strategies, and if you know or do not those mistakes that you are making, how would you be able to fix them, and by which method you will be able to fix them?
Well do not worry as in this article I will not only talk about the common mistakes that you will be dong in your email marketing strategies but I will also tell you how you can fix those mistakes.
There will be a number of mistakes that I will be mentioning here, you may not find all of those mistakes in your email marketing strategy, however, this does not mean that this article will not be useful for some people, as I can assure you, you still will be able to find some mistakes from this article that you are doing in your email marketing strategies.
Not using a good landing page for collecting emails
Mistakes in email marketing also come in collecting emails and not just while doing email marketing since an email list is as important as marketing to that email list.
To collect the maximum amount of emails, you should have the best landing page which can give you the highest conversion rate but many people just focus on traffic and not on conversion and collecting those emails address.
Conversion rate highly depends on the landing page, and to build a good landing page, you will need a good landing page builder which can provide you with good templates which already have a good conversion rate, and that is what Leadpages.
With leadpages, you will be able o make landing pages which will provide you with the highest conversion rate for collecting emails and utilizing your traffic properly.
Not sending a welcome email
Not sending a welcome email to your new email subscribers or sign-ups is one of the biggest mistakes you can do in email marketing, not using its potential and losing potential customers.
Imagine if a new user visited your website and then he signed up for your email list through your website.
Now since you got a new email subscriber, you might take it as a new regular email subscriber which will become a part of your regular emails that you send out to your entire email list, and if you do this, and start sending regular emails to the new subscribers as you send to the entire email list, then stop this is one of the biggest mistakes that you can do and throw the ax on your own foot.
It is highly important that the first email and the immediate email that you send out to your new email subscribers is a welcome email and not a regular email.
You might ask what is so special about welcome emails that you cannot do in regular emails.
Well, there is.
In email marketing, the struggle with open rates continues always, but welcome emails are the emails that have been proven to get the highest open rate out of all the emails.
Then you can use this welcome email to introduce your brand, and your products this welcome email will also be creating some hype around your normal newsletters and emails and will encourage your email subscribers to open future emails as well.
Not only that but welcome emails also have one of the highest CTR which will turn into conversions for you, it is also responsible for way more transactions than with any other normal email.
This leads to welcome emails producing 300% more revenue than the normal email that you will be sent to your email list, this should be enough for you to start sending welcome emails to your new email subscribers.
Not optimizing your email templates for mobile users
The use of mobile for more and more professional tasks has been growing for some past years really fast, and now we have to come to a stage where people have started doing important professional work on their phones too, and one of those things is checking and reading their emails that they receive from brands and companies.
Globally about half of the emails which are opened, are opened on a mobile device, and this data even becomes more shocking in the USA where about 70% of the emails are opened on mobile devices.
A lot of email marketers often ignore mobile devices when writing and choosing templates for their email, and they often send emails that are not optimized for the screen ratio of mobiles.
As you can already see, this can turn terrible for you, if you do not optimize your emails for mobile devices you will lose half of your audience and if the majority of your audience is from the USA, then you will lose about 70% of your audience.
When you will send unoptimized emails to your audience, the ones who will open them on their phone will become frustrated with that email and most probably they will unsubscribe from your email list, or you will make a bad image in their mind of your emails and they will not open your emails in the coming time.
To fix this issue, you should start using email templates that are optimized for all types of devices and ignore those which are not.
Most of the email marketing software like Constant Contact or Mailchimp will help you in making templates that are optimized for mobile devices as well and the ready-made templates which will be provided to you by this software will also be optimized as well.
And if you are not sure whether an email template is optimized for mobile devices or not, then you can send an email to your mobile device using that template, and then see for your mobile devices whether the email is optimized for the screen or not.
Not sending emails at the proper times
In 2022, the competition has become so big that you have to keep an eye on every little detail in order to use it to defeat your customers, or if not for your customers, for yourself to get better results from your marketing strategies and email marekting is no different.
You might have never thought about this but the time at which you send out emails matters a lot and it can be an important factor when you are trying to improve your open rates and revenue from your email marketing strategies.
The emails that you send at different times of the day will not provide the same results, as some emails which will be sent out at a different time will provide you with better results than emails sent at other times.
This is because your email subscribers will be most active at a particular time, and if you send an email at that time, not oy will your email instantly get the attention of your email subscribers but it will also be at the top of the email feed of your email subscribers at the time they open their Emails.
But how do you find out that at what time your email subscribers are most active and you should send emails, well it depends on you?
The general data will not help you much as that data was driven from other niches and your brand and your niche might be completely different from that.
You will need to figure it yourself at what times your email performs better than the others
How do you do that?
Well, there are two things that you can
The first one is to do A/B testing for the different times at which you will send emails, and then by the results, you will find out at what time out to the best results, and then you will need to continue with that time in the future as that will be the best time for you to send out emails.
The other thing that you can do is to look at your previous data provided by your Email service provider or ESP, and then see and analyze the times at which you sent emails as well as the results that those emails brought, you will see a clear difference in the stats and it will help you in determining what time is best to send emails to your audience.
The best time to send emails is also dominated by geography, I mean if your email subscribers are mostly from the US, then the best time to send emails will be completely different than an email list that comprises email subscribers who live in Asia.
Not segmenting your email list
In email marketing, how good your results will be from your email marketing will also be dependent on how targeted your email list is, how much data you have about your email list, and then by using that data, how targeted emails you sent to your email list.
by a targetted email list, I am not only referring to the process of collecting emails where you have to focus on getting emails that can be your ideal customers, but also by targetted email list, I am talking about segmenting your email list after you have built it, to make different even more targetted segments of your email list.
It does not matter how hard you try to make your email list targetted straight to the point, still, your email subscribers will vary very differently from one another, and sending one email to all of them will not only be the best thing to do but it would rather be a disaster.
You should be making different segments of your email list according to different preferences of your email subscribers and now since you will have different small segments of your email list, and each segment will be based on different features of your email subscribers, you will be able to much more customize your emails and make your emails more targetted which will provide you not only with higher open rates, higher engagement rate but also higher conversion rate which will mean more revenue.
If you are a little bit confused that which features and preferences you should use of your email subscribers when segmenting your email list, well then I can help you with that.
Age is one of the best features which can help you with segmenting your email list, If your email list contains different age groups let’s say from people who are now in their 20s to the people who are now in their 40s, you can use this metric for segmenting your email list, and make a different segment of people aged between 20 to 30, and then make another different segment of people who are aged between 30 to 40 years.
age is a basic feature that you can use in making your emails better if for example, if you are selling physical products then a 20-year-old will not be interested in the same physical product as 40 years and vice versa.
You can also utilize other features of your email subscribers as well such as their gender, segmenting your email list according to gender, male and female will also help you to target your email marketing campaigns even more.
Products in which men are interested usually do not get the attention of female customers.
Therefore by segmenting your email list by gender, you will be able to send the right emails to each segment promoting different products to female email subscribers which they will be much more likely to buy, and the same goes for another segment of your email list for the male subscribers.
Using the geography of your email subscribers can also be helpful when segmenting your email list, making a different segment of email subscribers from the US and then making a different one of the email subscribers from Brazil for example.
Below are more features, and preferences of your email subscribers that you can use in order to make different segments of your email list
1 = their time in your email list
2 = their interests
3 = the language that they speak
4 = their purchase history
5 = their engagement rate with your emails
These are some of the most useful features and preferences of your email subscribers that you can use for segmenting your emails successfully into making your email list more targeted and making your email marketing campaigns more targetted, successful and effective which can generate more revenue for you.
Ignoring subject line importance
Ignoring the subject line is one of the silliest mistakes that you can make.
If I ask you that, what is the subject line in the email, you might reply to me by saying that the single line of phrase that the recipient sees after he or she has received our email is called the subject line.
Well that definition is correct by wording but in reality, if you ask me what is an email subject line, then my answer would be something like this ” Subject line is not just the first phrase that the email subscriber will see after receiving our email, rather it determines the whole success of our email marketing campaigns, from open rate to buying things, email subject line plays a role in all of those things and you might be ignoring those other aspects related with email marketing.
Almost half of the email users will decide the quality of the email by their subject line, which means that half of the email users will only open an email if the subject line of that email is good enough to attract them to open the email if you are shocked by this well then wait a little bit another shocker is coming.
almost 70% of email users will decide whether an email is spam or not just by its subject line, and here we are not only talking about the open rate but considering an email as spam which can lead them to unsubscribe to your email list which will mean that you will be loosing our potential customers just because you did not focus enough on your emails.
Just ask yourself, open your Email and see how many of the emails you have not opened yet but received even from one of your favorite brands, you will find that most of the emails will rather be unopened, and yes that is what will happen to you as well if your emails that yus end out to your email list does not have good subject lines for attracting the subscribers into opening them.
You might not realize that it will be these hyped, attractive, and interesting-looking subject lines that will become the reason for your email subscribers excited about opening your email.
The reason that subject lines are so important is that they are the first thing that the email subscriber wills see or read about your email before opening them, so it kind of makes the first impression which goes all the way about judging the entire quality of the email.
By improving your subject line, you will be directly improving your open rates, your engagement rate, and might even your conversion rate.
To make your email subject lines better, you have to keep in mind certain points when writing your subject line.
First thing is first, make your subject lines personalized by using the first name of your email subscriber to which you are sending the email.
Consider it yourself, would you give more attention to someone who calls you by your name specially or will you give more attention to the one who will call a group as a whole of which you are a small part?
The answer will be obviously the former one.
Another important thing to avoid in your subject lines which can also become a reason for you being called out as a Spammer is Using all caps all over your subject line, not only does that look unprofessional but since many spammers often use all caps in their headlines, you will also become a part of that even if you did not mean to.
Also, keep your subject line, you are writing a line and not a paragraph, just write enough to give the subscriber an idea of what your email will be like and some words to create some interest and curiosity in the minds of your subscribers and nothing else.
Also do not forget to keep your subject lines professional as that will make a good impression of your email in the mind of your subscribers.
Sending too many emails
Staying consistent is one thing and sending more emails than you need to is another thing and mixing these two things with one another and seeing them as one single thing is an even bigger disaster.
When you are sending emails to your email subscriber, you’re only thinking from your own point of view, you are not thinking bout others tens of might even hundreds of brands who will be also sending emails to your email subscribers the same day, and neither you are thinking from the point of view of your email subscriber who actually becomes the target of those hundreds of emails sent to him or her every single day.
If you also want to become one of those many brands who send too many emails to their email subscribers and then get unsubscribed, well it’s your choice I guess.
according to a study, an average person receives about 144 emails every single day, and do you think that this number is small? no, and in a year this number becomes more than 40,000.
So, if you start exceeding the right number of emails to send to your email subscribers, you will be increasing the chances of losing email subscribers.
But on the other hand, it also does not mean that you should stop sending emails at all, or just send very rarely and lose your consistency which will also result in your email subscribers forgetting about your brand and you losing the revenue.
So what is the right thing to do, or if better asked, what is the correct number of emails to send?
The number of emails that you should be sending out to your email list depends on the size of your email list as well as the niche you are in, as for eCommerce, the number might be different let’s say than SEO.
If you are not an old email marketer and do not have a big email list, let’s say a number of email subscribers are less than 3000, then you should be sending one or two emails per week, exceeding the number will start causing issues, so you should set your number of email sent between 1 or 2 per week.
However the story is different if you have a larger email list and if you are in a niche like E-commerce, then you can exceed the number and you can even try sending daily emails.
Not analyzing the email campaign results
Analyzing the results of your email marketing compaigns is one of the most important things to do in email marketing, and if you are not doing it, you’re making a huge mistake.
Not focusing and observing the campaign results will lead you to not know whether your compaigns are working or not, nor will you know how you can improve your marketing compaigns.
To get the data of your results, there is not something really hard or impossible that you need to do, rather your rESP or Email service provider will already provide you with such data where it will tell you various stats such as the CTR, Open rate, and various other factors.
Giving it some time, even some minutes can help you in improving your marketing campaigns, and then you will be able to see what is working and what is not.
Conclusion
There is hardly another digital marketing platform that is as rich, as beneficial, and as effective as email marekting which can provide you a direct mean of communication with your audience eliminating the social media algorithm who do not let you control your reach even to your own audience.
Like all the other types of digital marketing, Email marketing also comes with challenges, and while you will be doing email marketing, there will be a great chance that you will be making a lot of mistakes, but instead of regretting the mistakes that you are making, it is more about fixing them.
That is why in this article, I have not only mentioned some of the most common mistakes that you can do in email marketing but I have also told you how you can fix those mistakes.
From not sending welcome emails to sending too many emails, I am quite sure that you will at least find one mistake in this article that you will be making in your compaigns if not all of them.