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.

Purchasing an email list can sound like an easy solution to the problem of how to begin a new email marketing campaign or how to breathe new life into a campaign that’s not performing well. But the truth is that email lists are more likely to undermine your marketing efforts and your company’s customer relations reputation. If you’re trying to justify a list purchase with any of the following arguments, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

“I’ll get a brand-new list of fresh contacts for just a small outlay of cash!”

Sure, you may get a new list of addresses, but how many of those addresses can truly be classified as “fresh contacts?” Most of the addresses in a purchased email list have been gathered by malicious software of automated scripts and haven’t been checked for deliverability. A high percentage of those addresses will be non-existent, expired, or otherwise undeliverable.

“I’ll get 10,000 new viewers”

Average open rates for email lists hover between .01% and .1%. That’s anywhere from one to ten viewers out of a list of 10,000 email addresses. An email list comprised of targeted, high-quality subscribers who opted in specifically to receive your communications, on the other hand, can yield open rates of 50% or more. Was the $300 you shelled out for that list really worth it?

“They opted in to receive third-party offers”

This may be technically true, but most of those opt-ins consist of fine print buried in a user agreement that rarely gets read. For your company, this means that those readers will still hit the spam button when they see your message or worse, your email sending IP’s could be blacklisted.

“The seller promised a well-targeted list and proof of permission”

The reality of email marketing is that it takes a lot of time and effort to build a high-value email list in which subscribers will open and read messages. For this reason, no self-respecting company would ever sell a high-value list because the moment it’s sold they lose customer loyalty and the list loses its effectiveness. No matter how well-targeted the list is, even if it technically has the permission of senders through fine print agreements, people will still consider messages they didn’t know they were signing up for to be spam.

“I don’t know how to build my own email list”

That’s where eConnect Email can help you. We are always working hard to ensure the highest deliverability possible and will closely monitor your account for blacklisting. If you’re ever blacklisted, we’ll work to correct the problem as quickly as possible. Build your list with our built in social sharing feature and monitor user activity with statistics tracking, testing, and suppression lists. With the help of eConnect Email, you can organically build an email list that supports your marketing campaign and increases sales without the negative associations that come with purchased email lists.

Conclusion

Slow and steady wins the race.  There’s no point in sending emails to an uninterested market.  No matter how compelling your text or offers might be, if it’s not in front of the right audience, it’s a waste of your time (and theirs).  There are many creative ways to get opt-in subscribers who are interested in what you have to offer; I would explore some of those options and stick with marketing to individuals who are interested in what you have to say.