Top Ten Mistakes to Avoid in Email Marketing

You want to see results if you put significant resources into your company’s email marketing efforts. However, many companies that pump out masses of emails to potential customers reap limited results that don’t seem to justify the effort.

With long-term expertise in developing email marketing campaigns, Naples, Florida-based Moxxi Marketing knows how to craft engaging emails that capture leads and help build customer numbers. If your email campaigns struggle to gain customer traction, it could be due to any number of the top ten email marketing mistakes we’ve listed below. By correcting any of these common mistakes found in many email campaigns, your company should see a noticeable improvement in customer engagement.

Pushing the Hard Sell

While the goal of your email campaign might be increased sales, lead capture, or a boost in website traffic, your emails should prioritize building a relationship with customers over the other goals. If every email solely delivers a sales pitch, many customers will quickly start pitching them into the trash icon without reading them first.

Instead, use your emails to deliver helpful content combined with soft-sell product/service offers and information. This will increase the likelihood of engaging with your customers, build trust, and help establish you as an industry thought leader. For example, if you’re marketing medical spa services, provide innovative home weight-loss tips in an email that also introduces a new weight-loss treatment you’re offering.

Failing to Optimize for Mobile

You’ve undoubtedly updated your company’s website to optimize it for mobile devices, but are you optimizing your emails for mobile? If not, you are surely losing a significant portion of your potential customer base. While statistics vary on how much failing to optimize email for mobile devices affects marketing efforts, they are all negative. It doesn’t really matter whether 50% or 75% of the population now view their emails primarily on mobile devices because that’s a percentage of potential customers you cannot afford to miss.

Thus, you should always check your emails to ensure that they deliver the right visuals from all perspectives whether on desktop or mobile device. Oh, and if you don’t, consider that some statistics suggest that seven in 10 mobile device users delete emails that don’t display correctly.

Unclear Messaging

Is your email clear and to the point? If not, it’s probably going into the virtual trash bin. Give your customers one or two bites at a time and clearly detail the nutrients you’re giving them. If you cannot verbalize your messaging with relative ease—check out these great at-home weight-loss tricks, and, by the way, our medical spa is now offering this novel weight-loss treatment—you’ll lose most of your potential audience.

Not Looking Professional

As a marketing tool, you want your emails to convey the same professionalism as your business does in person. Thus, ensure they look professional with proper formatting and correct spelling and grammar. Additionally, unless your email recipients specifically signed up for an informational PDF or other attached materials, do not include attachments in emails. The inclusion of an attachment may cause some recipients to worry that a scammer or spammer sent your email.

Relying Too Much on Images

While a picture might be worth a thousand words, in emails, too many pictures might disrupt your messaging. Know that some email recipients block email images, so whatever message you’re trying to make with pictures will get lost. Thus, keep your email imagery down to a couple of pics and ensure they are spaced evenly with the text.

Poor Subject Lines

If customers do not open your email, the success of your campaign is doomed. And guess what? According to the email experts at Mailchimp, the average email open rate among all industries is only about 21%.

The first thing your customers will see on an email is the subject line, and if it fails to pique their interest or otherwise capture their attention, that email will likely remain unopened. The best subject lines are short, concise, and engaging, and a rule of thumb among email marketers is to keep them under 60 characters.

Hitting Send at the Wrong Time

Back to statistics again, did you know that more mobile device users check their email in the morning first rather than their social media feeds or a specific website? According to some analysts, the percentage going to email first could be close to 60%. Thus, timing could greatly affect your email campaign’s success.

Some email marketing pundits have tagged 11:00 a.m. EST as the best time to send out marketing emails and Tuesday as the best day of the week. However, we suggest experimenting with different timeframes to see which delivers the best engagement with your specific campaigns. Based on available research and our campaigns, we believe morning deliveries work best.

Failing to Welcome Your Subscribers

When you get a new email subscriber, the first thing you should do is send them a welcome email while your business is still fresh in their mind. Along with reminding them of who you are and what your business offers, your welcome email helps set the tone for future engagement. A well-crafted welcome email helps make it more likely that the recipient will open future emails from you.

Waiting Until There are enough subscribers

Some companies put off initiating an email campaign until they’ve garnered what they think is a reasonable number of subscribers. While this intuitively may feel like a correct approach, by waiting too long, the subscribers you do have might forget that they signed up as a subscriber, to begin with. And this tends to lower customer engagement when they finally get an email from you.

Failing to Let Customers React

Building a business relationship is a two-way street requiring actions from the customer and the business. If your emails don’t include a call to action (CTA) to prompt your customers to engage with your company somehow, then you can’t build the relationship. Every one of your emails should have some CTA, whether a link to your website, survey question, or actual purchase.

Consult with Moxxi Marketing on Your Email Marketing Campaign

We trust that reviewing these top ten email marketing mistakes will help you improve the success of your email campaigns. For more help on your email marketing efforts or other digital marketing solutions that engage customers and keep pace with technological change, contact us today at 239.330.6236.