6 Mistakes in Email Marketing Campaigns

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Email marketing is one of the most effective methods in reaching customers and creating sales opportunities. It provides online marketers and entrepreneurs a way to easily communicate promos, deals and announcements, and generate new leads for their businesses.

Launching a successful email marketing strategy can help increase sales; however, not doing it right may not only prevent you from meeting your email marketing goals but can eventually ruin your brand.

Besides the email itself–the mailing list information, design, delivery mode and how the email content is targeted are all crucial to email marketing. So to help brands launch the best email marketing campaign, today’s blog post will show you six mistakes that should be avoided by all email marketers.

Sending out unsolicited emails

Before sending that email, ensure that you have your customer’s explicit permission that they want to receive your emails. If you send a commercial email to customers who did not subscribe, you will definitely be tagged as a spammer.

Whether or not your message is indeed a spam, don’t do it. Doing so will have a negative impact on your brand’s reputation, and will push annoyed customers to unsubscribe. Not only is this illegal (check your country’s laws on unsolicited emails), it will have a little return on your investments. Ethical email marketing campaigns, even in small volumes, will generate even higher returns.

RELATED: How to Stop Spam Emails

Targeting the wrong customers

Not all customers are the same, so sending out a generic message to all your customers will be ineffective in delivering the right message and eliciting a response from them. It’s recommended to send the right email to the right recipient by first categorizing customers according to target demographics, offers or the the context of the emails. The extra work in segmenting customers will eventually pay off with the most effective results in your email campaigns

Boring or unrelated subject lines

With so many newsletters that customers receive on a daily basis, there’s no guarantee that everyone can read your emails so you need to put extra effort in creating eye-catching subject lines to capture their attention. An effective subject line must be brief, descriptive and encourage readers to continue reading. Irrelevant and boring subject lines will most likely get you ignored. A great example is a blog post from CopyBlogger, “6 Steps for Writing Simple Copy that Sells”, which can be used as the subject line. A post like this already describes what the message is about and if it’s properly targeted, there is a good chance someone will click it.

Purchasing an email list

Perhaps you’re still a new company and you don’t have a huge customer base yet. Purchasing an email list seems like the easiest and cheapest way to boost your business but there are grave consequences that can do more harm than good.

In fact, these purchased email lists are against the Terms of Service of email marketing software like ConstantContact and MailChimp. These companies might remove your account or even worse, tag your domain on their blacklist. There’s a big possibility of low response rate because a huge number of these emails are likely unused or not working.

Not providing opportunities for engagement

A good email is just like a good tweet or Facebook post. If the reader likes it, they are going to share it to others. If you want to increase the chances of having your emails shared, write content that will spark interest with your audience. Ask your readers what their thoughts are about the content. A good conversation that started in an email campaign can easily pass on to social media.

Ignoring your email campaign statistics

So you finally sent a batch of emails to your recipient–so what’s next? Do you know how many opened it? How many emails have bounced back? If you don’t know these information, there’s no way of knowing if your campaign was successful. Metrics allow you to analyze and compare numbers, determine the best time and date to send emails and the most effective content that your audience interested in.