Email Marketing – 10 Mistakes You Should Avoid

Email marketing has long been embraced as a quintessential way to keep your captive audience updated on products, services and general changes within your business, albeit its frequent use has led to some poor utilization of the medium more likely to cause consumers humor or even cringe. Read on for 10 of the key mistakes you should avoid when email marketing. 1) Subject Line Hence the name, the subject line is intended to contain little else other than the subject of the piece. Too often has the subject line been utilised to provide copious amounts of information rather than discerning the direct subject of the content, keep your subject line short and concise to boost engagement and understanding. 2) Sending a Test Email Your audience will use a plethora of devices to read the email and thus the email needs to be checked, the best way to do so is to send out a test email to visualise its appearance on different size screens and operating systems. This is also a good way to ensure the functionality of your links, buttons and images. 3) Proof Reading Sending an email only to find a minor spelling or grammatical error within is a source of frustration for many, it’s such a simple mistake to make and yet it may severely harm your standing with clients. Getting an external source to proofread is a timeless technique and mitigates the chances of finding a minor error, unfortunately this does not mean that some errors may not get through the net, ensure that several people read through your work if possible. 4) The Personal Touch A personal connection goes a long way in business and something as simple as citing your client’s name can make the impact in making sure they stay with you; email automation allows for many customizable options and its likely that with a bit of playing around a way to make your emails more personal will become apparent. 5) Generic Email Addresses Using a generic email address such as one that features info@ or enquiries@ can reduce your open rate and will more likely lead to it being filtered into Junk Email folders or ignored entirely. A particularly vigilant email security provider will make it difficult to get your emails through regardless but by keeping your address relevant you can increase the chance of being seen. 6) Missing Call-To-Actions Your email needs to link back to your site or provide some other form of contact back to you, without a call to action they may not know how to get in contact with you even if they do decide to use a service or buy a product. 7) Skipping the Pre-Sending Checks Pre-sending spam checks can be the difference between going straight to the spam folder and getting an enquiry, making sure you do this before sending an email is sure to help you boost your engagement over the long term. 8) Information & Graphics Information and Graphics are critical when utilised correctly and their use is likely a dominant factor in your current email marketing, their use is heavily encouraged but when they are used in excess your email becomes too long, turning away consumers with little time. 9) Target landing page links within your Email As mentioned in the ‘call to action’ section, giving your audience a call to action is important and will often come in the form of ‘click here to visit …’. Using this is vital but it can be easy to put many links into the email turning it into a mess of hyperlinks and confusing interconnection. Using only several links keeps the email simple and easy to navigate. 10) Follow up on Click Reports The final and one of the most important tips is the use of click reports, you may be familiar with click reports if you use external tools such as google analytics to measure your website reach and a click report will provide you with the same essential information. By using click reports you discover what elements of your email attract engagement leading you to better optimize future content. By using these email marketing tips you ensure that your audience gains a positive view of your business and allows you to keep building on the content that you create.

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