E-mail marketing is easy particularly now with an abundance of email providers and platforms available most of them at a really decent and attainable price point – some like Mailchimp is FREE. It is however of critical importance for businesses to be strategic with their use of email marketing and stay clear of the TEN (10) most common mistakes as explained further below:
1. Strategy?!??! What Strategy?!?!? You must have a strategy detailing reasons for the e-mail, content, audience, key messages and desired objectives.
2. Age of your list. You need to ensure your list is current, active and one where recipients have provided their permission to be contacted. Many businesses have large database lists but have not taken the time to look over the performance from previous campaigns to check on deliverability etc. Remember: if recipients have not opted in to receive your email marketing, then there is a chance you could be reported for spam and prohibited from sending future emails.
3. Relevance of content. Your message must be important to the audience you are communicating with. E-mails with the highest open and click thru rates are often thought leadership, personal insights and interpretations as to industry trends and or compelling offers that are relevant to a recipient.
4. Subject line is key. Your email marketing efforts will tank if you don’t think carefully about your subject line. It has to inspire, prompt, motivate, compel and illicit a response to open the email to read further.
5. Being too wordy – or image heavy. Don’t misunderstand me here, I am all for adding images to improve appeal, but you need to find a balance between images and copy. Too much copy can be overwhelming if not supported by interesting graphics to clearly support the main points, theme and message of your copy.
6. Being too “salesy”. If your readers sense a heavy handed sales pitch, your results will be poor. Being too salesy will often see a high unsubscribe rate and possibly lead to a recipient reporting you for spam.
7. Forgetting to drive your Web traffic. Editorial oriented newsletters are best developed by hiving the recipient back to a website – that is, not providing all content within the email but offer enough to entice. Include an extract of the article with a link to “read more” and have contextual links relevant to specific pages on your website.
8. Testing only a browser or operating system. No one email will look the same. So, test thoroughly before sending your email. We would always recommend testing across PC /Mac and Internet Explorer versus Chrome. Considerable brand damage can be done if testing is overlooked.
9. Sending at the wrong time. Even if your contacts are domestic or international, you must always think about recipients’ time zones and business hours. As per the Recent data its usually suggest that the higher open rates occur on Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 10 am and 2 pm.
10. Ignoring metrics. Metrics reveal whether your email send has been successful or not. An initial report will show bounce rates so you can clean your list to avoid those that bounced next time. It is however recommended that the final report should be generated no less than 48 hrs post the send as this will provide you the best and most meaningful data from which to analyse performance.
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