Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes Uncovered by Experts

• Updated on: 2018-11-27
• Read original article here

Email Marketing Mistakes
UNCOVERED BY INDUSTRY EXPERTS
Email marketing is part art form, part science. And like anything in the world of business, it takes years, and many mistakes, to perfect. Luckily, there are plenty of people who have come before us. Though these people are masters now, they started out like the rest of us, tripping, slipping and scrambling to fix their mishaps. To save you from some of the growing pains that come along with inbound email marketing, we’ve reached out to the pros to hear about mistakes they’ve made and how they fixed them. Do you have your highlighters ready? Because you’re not going to want to miss any of this crash course.
1. The Dreadful Broken Email Link
Including links in emails is a common practice. After all, the whole point of email is to drive traffic to your site. Internal links to blogs, product pages or just your homepage help engage users and get them involved directly with your site. This is great…if the links work, that is. But, messing up a link is as simple as one mistyped letter, or one incorrectly placed paste. Say you’re advertising a discounted product that fits right in with the buyer’s spending patterns. The user is so excited about this product, they know they need jump on the reduced price. When they click on it, however, the link leads them to a completely different product. The result? An incredibly frustrated customer who no longer trusts your emails.
By: TREVOR HOWARD
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2. Don’t Forget to Test…and Test Again
You’ve crafted a beautiful email template . The images? Attention grabbing. The content? Relevant and engaging. Now it’s time to press send! Right? NO. It’s tempting to think that something you’ve worked so hard on must be perfect and ready to send out to your list, but that would be a devastating rooky mistake. Just because the email is perfect on your design screen, just because all the links check out as you put them in, doesn’t mean the product will look the same once it reaches your customers’ computer screen or phones.
Before you send out your campaign, you need to send a trial email to a tester list. This way, you’re able to experience the email as the user experiences it. More people check their email on their phone than on their computer, so make sure the email looks and acts the way you want it to both on mobile and desktop. Be sure you’re checking all links and any other content that users should be able to click on and engage with. Something not working right? Great. Make any changes needed and then test it again. The goal here is to make sure you know exactly how the email will look and feel when you send it out to users. This way you can feel confident that your email will work well for all your users.
By: MITCH TARR
CEO/Founder
Zin Marketing
It’s one I’ve made more than once and everyone has made the same mistake once. The mistake is sending an email message with a mistake in it. I don’t mean a mistake like a typo, or formatting error, or bad grammar. I mean you send an email with a link to a great offer… and the link doesn’t work. Click. Nothing. That makes people mad. You’re expecting to make sales and instead you export anger. Try and prevent a mistake like this. Create a summary of the things you will proof and test before you release your message to everyone. Send a test message to a test list of email addresses. Then slow down and read for clarity, spelling, grammar, formatting, click on the links, check it on a smart phone, and make a purchase if it’s a sales email. Then check your reporting to make sure all your tracking is working. While you’re doing this testing, someone (probably your boss) will make changes. If that happens, you absolutely, positively must test all over again. I guarantee if you don’t, something that worked before will not work this time.
3. Unfamiliar Software Can Cause Chaos
Technology is constantly changing. To stay up to date and exciting to your users, chances are you’ll face some unfamiliar software a few times in your career. While these changes are necessary, they can also be a little bit dangerous, especially when it comes to email. Using a new software or program within your campaign is a big learning curve, and if you don’t fully understand the changes, mistakes can be made. Sometimes these mistakes will affect the entire email, wasting the time, money and energy of your marketing team. Not to mention frustrating your customers, potentially causing them to unsubscribe from your email list entirely.
Staying up to date and informed on how each of the products and software used in your email campaigns work, can help make sure your emails come out as beautifully as you intended. This is another place that testing an email before you send it out becomes important. By testing the email, you’re able to ensure the email works well, regardless of any changes or updates made.
I was Director of an email marketing team that was making technical changes to our email delivery platform. One of the system admins forgot to turn something back on, and when a pre-scheduled client campaign went out it sent the same email to each recipient several times before we shut down delivery. We quickly crafted an apology email and sent it out. While it did generate a handful of unsubscribes and some negative feedback, it resulted in a better QA process and a closer client relationship, both of which paid dividends in the long term.
By: ADAM HOLDEN-BACHE
Digital CRM Manager
Taylor Guitars
After frantic calls to support for both the ESP and the survey platform, I was eventually able to discover that what had happened was that the survey provider had made an update on their side which then caused any redirect links from the email platform to the survey provider to break. There was no real way I could have caught that, because it had just happened earlier that day. The ESP was only just becoming aware of it because the survey platform was so rarely used that only a couple of bug reports (including mine) had come in…Really, there are some email marketing mistakes you can’t avoid or foresee - even the best-laid plans can fail. The nature of email marketing means that there are rarely opportunities for take-backs. However, what you can do is work diligently to fix any mistakes and be proactive about how you are going to respond.
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Email Marketing Manager
Instaclick, Inc.
One of the biggest mistakes I have made in email marketing was being complacent and running the same offers continuously to the same data, the database needs to see fresh offers daily and the rotation of offers need to be unique and if you run the same offer more than once a week, that is a huge mistake. I have corrected my errors by doing split a/b/c/d/e/f/g testing, to a multitude of offers. Working with many unique offers in the Marketplace and finding what works best for my data sets based on user engagement. It is easy to get caught up in running the same advertisements too many times. Find a unique offer, make your revenue and move on to the next advertisement, as it will perform just as well and even better as your data is seeing something unique. Your revenues will increase.
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CEO/Founder
Zin Marketing
The surprising fact? Split testing is king… and queen. Don’t argue over which subject line will win. Send two different subject lines and compare the results. Here’s a small sample of things you can split test. A vs B. Test subject lines, from address names, length of email, body copy, offers, formatting, number of links, type of links, color of link buttons, images, images with captions, number of images, calls to action, signature lines… etc. You can’t really test everything in one series but over time your split testing will teach you about your audience and how your audience reacts to things. Here is an example of this surprising fact in real life. Some email marketers will swear that using the reader’s first name in the subject line is guaranteed to increase open rates. Another email marketer will claim it doesn’t matter. They are both right! Run split tests and find out for your own self.
9. Timing is Everything
We’ve all been there. Things haven’t gone quite according to plan, projects ran late and now here you are with an email that is just finished on the day you had hoped to put it out. Before you start thinking, “Well it’s not an ideal time, but it is the day on the calendar I was hoping for. Let’s just send it!” Stop yourself. You have worked incredibly hard on this campaign. You want it to be seen. But if you send it 8pm on a Tuesday when the scheduled time was 5pm that day, will your email have the same effect? Chances are, they won’t. No matter how catchy the title, if your users aren’t active when you send it out, you run the risk of your email getting lost in the inbox.
With most things in life, timing isn’t perfect. And while emails can’t be sent the exact moment your user is looking at their mailbox, eager to read your email, you can narrow down that gap a little bit. Through testing, you can figure out when your target user is most active and most likely to open your email. Missing this chance and sending emails just whenever they’re done, puts you in the email slush pile, unlikely to be seen or opened.
By: STEPHANIE
MARKADONATOS
Email Marketing Manager
I would say one mishap I made when I first started out was sending an email early. I was testing subject lines to increase our open rate and split our audience up 20/20 with the “winning” email going out to the rest of our email list (60%). I proceeded to set the time I would like the winning email to go out. I didn’t realize in order for the email to be sent out during my specified time, I had to select a small box (I wasn’t familiar with the platform yet). I ended up not doing this, resulting in the winning email going out right when the test completed. I didn’t realize this is what happened until I received a copy of the email earlier than expected. There really was nothing to do to fix the problem. I saw this as more of an internal issue as our audience didn’t have any clue what time they were supposed to receive this email. On a plus side, we noticed a slight uptick in open rates with an earlier send time. This pushed us to conduct an A/B test to learn more about our customers.
10. Don’t Wing It
This point should be a given, but for new emailers, it’s not. When you don’t know where to begin, slapping some content together, crossing your fingers and pressing send seems like a pretty good option. While that’s understandable, pump the breaks. Diving in head first without a plan can get your email campaign off on the wrong foot. Recovering your image with your users is difficult, and if you’ve already been sent to spam, it could be impossible.
The solution here is to create a plan. You can start out small with a simple welcome campaign. Figure out what type of emails you want to send, the message you want to get across, and how you want the user to react. Then, as you start to send emails out, track your progress and how your users are interacting with your content. Then, make changes as appropriate. As you tweak your campaign, make sure you’re updating your marketing plan. The more of a layout you have, the easier your campaign becomes!
The biggest email marketing blunder I’ve made is not making the time to develop a robust marketing plan. Not having a plan has a cascading effect: the marketing and merchandising teams are unclear of your goals, the design team is confused on their tasks and deadlines, and this leads to less time to test which leads to a higher likelihood of mistakes in deployments. We fixed this issue by developing marketing plans well in advance so we have time to explain our goals, tasks, and deadlines to the broader team and have time to properly test before each deployment.
By: STEPHANIE MAASSEN
FREE DOWNLOAD
Don't send off your next email until you sharpen your email communication skills!
Download our free guide on how to effectively communicate with your email subscribers. Communication is the key to success, craft your emails in such a way that they stand out in the inbox. Use an active voice to make a statement about your products and services. This way you are sure to get more opens, clicks and conversions for a successful campaign.
FREE GUIDE: HOW TO SHARPEN YOUR EMAIL SKILLS
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
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