You’d never begin a project that you knew was going to fail, would you? Yet every day, email marketers doom their email campaigns to failure simply by not taking the time to learn about and avoid common mistakes. When you build safeguards against the most commonly made email marketing mistakes, you can ensure that the highest possible percentage of your emails are received, read, and acted upon by your target audience. Let’s take a look at the top four mistakes email marketers make.
Failing to Plan
Do you know who you’re sending to? Have you decided what you want to accomplish? Have you developed a procedure for how to accomplish your campaign goals? The answers to these questions will be the basis for your email marketing strategy. Without a cohesive strategy in place, your messages will fail to keep your target market engaged.
Purchasing a List
Not only is it unethical to send marketing messages to people who have not requested to hear from you, but it can also land both you and your email marketing service provider on a blacklist. Purchased lists also have high bounce rates due to invalid addresses, and any messages that do get through often go straight to the spam folder. In the end, not only have you violated the trust of the recipient, but you’ve gained little to show for it.
Taking Permission for Granted
Even if someone gave you their email address when they made a purchase, that doesn’t mean they want to receive your daily, weekly or monthly email offers. Keep your transactional email list (emails used to send receipts and order confirmations) separate from your marketing list. Marketing lists should be built using double opt-in procedures and should be carefully maintained to ensure unsubscribe requests have been honored immediately. I would recommend using an email service provider (ESP) like eConnect Email that has built in list cleansing tools that automatically handle hard bounces and unsubscribes requests.
Acting Like Spam
If you think that using capital letters and exclamation points will help people notice your email, think again. All they’re likely to earn you is a trip to the spam folder. In general, avoid hyping up your subject lines and content, and instead focus on providing useful, genuine information to your readers.
Avoid these four common mistakes make by email marketers and you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful email marketing campaign. As you work toward developing a plan and keeping it on track know that if you have any questions we’re always here to help.