Email marketing is a tricky business with lots of potential pitfalls you need to watch out for. By simply learning to avoid making these email marketing mistakes you’ll be way ahead of most other email marketers. Here are a few of the most critical mistakes you could make, and a few tips on how to avoid making them in the first place:
Email Marketing Mistake #1 – Not delivering valuable content
In many ways the terms ‘email marketing’ and ‘relationship marketing’ are practically interchangeable. It’s all about building trust and acting more like a friend than a marketer. The best way to do this is striving to always send valuable content and offers to your subscribers. Don’t hammer them with promotions thinking you’ll make a quick buck – sure, you may make some money that one time, but the longevity of your list will suffer.
Email Marketing Mistake #2 – Not sticking to a regular schedule
The most successful list owners are those that email their subscribers regularly. Whether that’s once per day or once per week doesn’t matter, as long as the frequency is kept up. What do you think would happen if you, for example, were to email your list every week for 6 months, then all of a sudden take a 3 month break? The answer is that most of your subscribers will have forgotten about you and your list, practically forcing you to start from scratch again.
Email Marketing Mistake #3 – Not being mobile friendly
These days a lot of people are reading their email primarily on their smartphone or tablet, and you need to make sure your emails look as good as they do on a PC. Depending on your email marketing service software, you will have a way to view your email on mobile in addition to a computer.
Some services even allow you to see what they potentially could look like on the various email clients, such as, Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird. But always, always send yourself a test email and view them on your own computer and mobile device. Also keep formatting beyond standard tags like bold and italics to an absolute minimum.
In addition, keep images small and fast loading. Any images you use should be compressed before adding them to your email by using a image compression service such as Imagify Their free plan renews each month and gives you 25mb to bulk upload images and download them individually or in bulk.
If you require more than the free account allows, they have several paid plans that start at only $4.99 Imagify also has a free plugin if you use WordPress for your website. Just download the plugin, install it on your site, connect your Imagify account and compress all of your images in your WordPress Media folder. Easy, peasy!
Email Marketing Mistake #4 – Not allowing people to unsubscribe
Many new marketers make the mistake of trying to hide the link that allows people to unsubscribe. That is definitely a big mistake, as most people will just flag the emails as spam when that happens. In the long run, being spam flagged too often can cause you to get banned from your email service provider and ruin your business reputation. Definitely not good! Stay compliant and make the links easy to find, you’re not going to lose any valuable subscribers anyway.
Email Marketing Mistake #5 – Not using stats to your advantage
Finally, a common mistake that even experienced marketers do is not looking at stats and reports and figuring out what people respond to. Usually it’s easy to tell just by looking at open and unsubscribe rates, so don’t neglect doing this! BUT, those are not the only stats to pay attention to, you also need to watch your link click through rates and number of purchases or website views. At first, trial and error is the name of the game but when you find the formula(s) that work for your subscribers, you will be able to speak to them more effectively.
I published another article a while back on Emailing Your List: 3 Things To Avoid and Email Deliverability that are still very pertinent today. If you haven’t read these articles, check them out to ensure your email marketing efforts are successful.
