Email marketing may seem simple and easy to navigate. Don’t get us wrong. If you’re jumping in, sending an email to your mass database and hoping it sticks, it is. However, if you want to master your deliverability, ensure you end up in primary inboxes, boost your earnings and unlock new revenue streams, you can’t take it at face level. The results above require an intricate web of email marketing tactics and strategies that we’ve mastered here at Email By Design.
If you’ve developed a ‘send-and-forget’ strategy or you are eager to take your email marketing further, keep reading to discover common email marketing errors and how you can fix them.
Common Email Marketing Mistake #1 - Not Maintaining a Clean List
List hygiene is everything when it comes to email marketing. We spoke about how you can automate this process in our recent blog: Why list cleaning is so important and how you can use a sunset unengaged flow to make it easier for you.
List cleaning ensures you only have your most active and engaged customers in your database at all times. We get it. You want to email everyone. However, doing so results in statistically lower open rates, click rates and placed order rates, all of which can slowly move your emails from inboxes to spam boxes.
To avoid this from happening, create segments based on your last 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days of engaged data. Find a middle ground of 90 or 180 days for most of your sends. Then, use 30 or 60 for less relevant campaigns. Then use 365 days for those campaigns you want to reach wider, such as a sale email. On top of this, you should be list cleaning quarterly, if not monthly to ensure you’re not paying for profiles that are no longer interested.
Need help with list cleaning? Book this service!
Common Email Marketing Mistake #2 - The Over and Under Email
Email marketing is about balance. Imagine if a brand called you every day and asked you to purchase. You would be annoyed, right? Now, imagine they only called you once a month. You would begin to forget about them, stop picking up their calls and may even block the number. While email is a less intrusive platform than phone calls, the logic is the same! Too many emails will lead to unsubscribes. Too few, and customers won’t build a relationship with you strong enough to purchase.
To strike a balance, experiment with cadence. Start with a campaign a week and see how customers respond. If they seem to fatigue, bring this to one campaign a fortnight. On the inverse, if they’re responding, up the numbers to weekly campaigns. You’ll know you’ve hit the sweet spot when your open rates, click rates and placed order rates remain balanced and your negative metrics (bounces, unsubscribes or spam rates) don’t grow too drastically.
Common Email Marketing Mistake #3 - Forgetting their name
Emails are a very personalised way to communicate with your customers. So, forgetting to add their name can automatically cause them to dissociate from your emails. Fortunately, there is a very quick fix for this, which involves greeting all of your customers as soon as they open your emails. Think of every email as a letter!
You don’t have to limit the first name metric to the greeting only. You can also include it on buttons, before product recommendations or even within your paragraph content.
Remember to collect their first names on your sign up form!
Common Email Marketing Mistake #4 - Not branding your copy
Your brand has a voice. You’re reading ours right now. Is yours conversational, friendly, formal, standoffish, sarcastic or comedic? Better yet, does your voice carry itself through your website, emails, socials, marketing materials and all other messaging?
If not, it may be time to consider why. Take the time to read your copy throughout your various mediums to spot the differences. If they feel too separated from one another, imagine the experience your customers are getting. Online, they signed up to your email marketing database as they perceived your brand one way. But, once they started receiving your emails, this perception was altered.
The Email By Design team can audit your account.
Identifying what may be going wrong with your email marketing is tricky. If you’d appreciate a second set of eyes to help you pinpoint where things may require improvements, our team is here to help. Discover our audit service to get started.
