6 Mistakes to watch out in your Email Marketing campaign

When you engage with your prospects, leads and existing customers via an email marketing campaign, you are exercising a privilege, not a right.

If we forget that we are bound to commit other errors that will deem our marketing efforts useless.

Using email as a communication channel is a little tricky because:

• You cannot take the direct contact for granted
• You don’t always know who is on the other side
• It is tough to change strategies during the course of the conversation

So, here are six things that you definitely want to avoid in your email marketing campaigns.

1. Non-Segmented Lists

Keeping an eye on all your mailing lists, rearranging them and reclassifying them might be a tedious task but undoubtedly necessary.

If I am a loyal customer of your brand, I wouldn’t feel okay if I constantly receive your offers and promotions for new signups. And if I am a money saver, I wouldn’t be very impressed with your expensive new product, even if it is proven to be of the highest quality.

You get the idea – think before you send!

2. Unclean Lists

The same logic as above applies here, but with added importance. Unclean lists not only diminish the efficacy of your email marketing campaign, but you are just begging to be labeled as a spammer by the spam filters.

Instead of continuously sending messages and newsletters to your hard bounces and full email inboxes, just remove them from your list and be done with it. Failing to do so will damage your sender reputation, sometimes irreversibly. Failing to do so will damage your sender reputation, sometimes irreversibly.

3. Ignoring CAN-SPAM

CAN-SPAM was the first official set of rules that became a standard for sending commercial email messages. It was first enacted in 2003 and gives you an exact definition of the Can Do’s and Can’t Do’s when you engage in email marketing. For a rundown of its most important requirements, you can check the regulations from the Federal Trade Commission.

4. Wrong Send Times

Send times matter, especially if your list is large. You need diversification. While your EU users are happy, your US users on the other end of the world might not appreciate that and simply ignore the message.

For example, one of our first email campaigns was rolling for some time when we realized that most of the emails were opened at around 5 pm. Meanwhile, we were distributing the messages at 6 pm. Changing this by only an hour showed a tremendous increase in open rates.

5. No Clear Value

This is a trap most often encountered with newsletters. When you have to produce content frequently, there is a chance that sooner or later you will exhaust your ideas or start repeating yourself.

Do not send email content just for the sake of sending it!

Make sure that the people you are reaching will receive something beneficial to them, something engaging – such as content that is relevant to their business, occupation, or lifestyle.

Only send emails to your list that offer clear value.

Remember that the hardest part is to get people to even open your email – don’t lose them just before the finish line!

6. No Attention to Detail

If you are a perfectionist by nature, you may have a head start at email marketing and properly using it for a campaign. The attention to every little detail will ensure that your efforts go the right way.

Starting from the subject line, you are already in the battle of drawing attention. Be too familiar or too pushy and you are just asking the user on the other side to ignore you or mark your messages as spam.

The content itself has to be adapted to your target group. The best option is to present it in both text and HTML formats, and let your recipient decide which is most suitable.

Finish it off with some awesome design to achieve the desired Wow! effect. Keep in mind that responsive design is more important than ever as mobile users already represent a huge share of the market and you don’t want to put them off.

I hope you avoid making mistakes others have already tested for you. Be patient, be logical and always think like you are on the other side of the email you are about to send.

…or simply trust the professionals and check our Marketing Services, delivered by a trained in-house team. Making sure your messages always arrive at their destination!