Are you sending or planning to send email marketing campaigns to your subscribers?
Then you should know these 7 all too common mistakes that can cost you money, time, and subscribers.
For your newsletter to become an effective conversion tool, avoid repeating them!
1. Not segmenting your database
For a long time, marketing strategies were based on a simple idea: the more people you reach, the more you win. And it was true.
Consumers are bombarded with advertising messages every day and pay less and less attention to the messages, especially if they don’t feel involved.
For the past few years, we have been turning to one-to-one strategies, much more personalized. And this requires a segmentation of the databases.
In email marketing, think of sorting your contacts, by gathering a maximum of information on them, in order to target your campaigns in a precise way.
The idea is to always send campaigns that correspond to the expectations and profiles of your recipients.
If you don’t do this, you risk being declared a spammer, receiving complaints, and deteriorating your deliverability, not to mention your brand image…
2. Not managing unsubscribes
This is probably one of the major mistakes in email marketing and the most damaging for the sender. From a legal point of view, you are obliged to place a link in your email allowing your recipients to unsubscribe from your database.
But the most important thing is to take these unsubscriptions into account. There are still some advertisers who do not allow their contacts to unsubscribe. This kind of practice can have many effects, very harmful for your business:
- A brand image tarnished by word of mouth, “bad buzz” on social networks, and discussions on forums
- Degradation of your reputation as a sender: indeed, if your recipients declare you as a spammer or complain about your actions to their email provider, your deliverability will be impacted. This means that your future campaigns will arrive more and more often in the “junk mail” box of your contacts.
- A significant loss of money: your email campaigns will lose profitability. You will pay to send costs for nothing, will lose traffic on your site, and will end up deteriorating your reputation on the web.
3. Using Outlook, Gmail…
Some of you may recognize yourself here. We have often seen small companies with small databases send their emailing campaigns by hand in packs of 100, via Outlook or other email services.
This practice should be avoided. There are now many email marketing softwares that are perfectly adapted to small and medium businesses like Mailchimp to allow them to send real professional campaigns.
A service like Outlook is not able to correctly route mass emails. It doesn’t manage unsubscribes, it doesn’t allow you to create aesthetic and responsive newsletters… And above all, you can’t get post-campaign statistics. So in addition to wasting time, you will have no follow-up on your mailings.
4. Sending too many or too few emails
Email marketing is not just sending a lot of emails per week to make a maximum of money. And conversely, it’s not sending just a few emails a year when you think about it.
It’s a serious strategy to implement and the pace of your email campaigns should not be chosen at random.
If you send too many emails, you risk tiring your contacts. And on the contrary, send 2 emails per year, and you will be quickly forgotten!
It’s all about finding the rhythm of sending that corresponds to your market and the expectations of your recipients.
5. Make emails that are not responsive designs
A “responsive design” email is an email that will automatically adapt to be read on a mobile device. Today, 81% of email campaigns are opened and read on mobile devices. If your email is not responsive and can not adapt to mobile devices, users at about 80% will delete them immediately.
If you don’t use responsive design, you’ll be leaving out a large part of your recipients and therefore potential customers.
So get an emailing solution able to adapt your emails automatically for mobile supports, like Mailchimp. The campaign creation via the email editor integrated into the software automatically allows you to do responsive design.
6. Not using the pre-header
The most often forgotten element in email marketing is the pre-header. A preheader is the line of text just below the subject line in the inbox preview.
In the vast majority of cases, it is used for the famous mention “View this email in my browser” (the web-copy), because it contains the very first sentence of the email content.
However, it is a very useful element to trigger opens.
Use it as a complement to your subject line in order to encourage your recipients to open more! To do this, simply write a sentence in your email to be placed just before the web copy.
Please note that the pre-header will not be displayed on all inboxes, but in general, it will almost always be displayed on mobile.
Don’t forget to place the most impactful words at the beginning of the pre-header, as the number of characters displayed varies greatly depending on the medium!
7. Forgetting to test your email
We can’t say it enough, testing your email is not an option! And we’re not just talking about sending it to yourself and checking for spelling mistakes.
You must test the compatibility of your email on different inboxes to be sure that :
- The email does not go to spam
- Images are displayed correctly
- Fonts are compatible
- The whole email is balanced
Indeed, all inboxes have their own characteristics and they will not display emails in the same way, especially when a graphic effort has been made.
Also, take the time to check your links and make sure that they redirect to the right place!
Even though it may seem obvious to some, these 7 typical mistakes are still seen too much today in the email marketing world and stain its image.
It is bad practices like these that tend to create confusion between spam and classic email marketing.
It’s up to you to make a difference!