7 Email Marketing Mistakes You Can’t Make and Email Marketing Tips To Use Instead

Today, email marketing remains one of the best engagement channels for digital marketing strategies. As statistics presented by Hubspot point out, 99% of digital consumers open their email daily and, because of this as well as other reasons, at least 92% of B2B e-commerces leverage techniques to connect with them.

However, these numbers don’t mean that every type of campaign works or that sending emails is a guaranteed "win" for everyone. For your campaigns to go well, you'll need to be careful not to make these top email marketing mistakes we’ve compiled for you.

Read on to identify some common email marketing mistakes you can’t afford to make and learn about some email marketing tips to implement instead.

1. Using cold and untargeted lists#

To start off, let’s talk about one of the most critical mistakes that damage your email marketing strategy: using cold and untargeted email lists. Not only does this technique kill your email open rate and click through rates, but sends all your emails you worked hard on straight to your recipient's spam box. Not to mention, this type of strategy tends to put a damper on your business’s reputation.

Working with cold lists, bought or not, means that you'll be sending emails to people who don't necessarily care about your product, your offers, or have already shown that they aren’t interested in buying anything from your brand.

Solution#

Instead of using cold and untargeted email lists, let’s segment your lead base. That is, gather information from your customers through various channels, such as your customer service conversations and sales funnels, and take them into account when deciding who you target.

Why is this important? Because your target markets are unique and complex. Leads that left your store and have abandoned shopping carts are different from leads that only visited your page once. So be selective, use filters, and send relevant content in your emails that relate to your customers’ profiles, demographics, and potential interests.

2. Neglecting your email subject line#

The truth is that your email subject line should catch your reader’s attention. Depending on your intent, your email should exude enthusiasm, helpfulness, elements of time sensitivity, the list goes on. Using email subject lines that don’t provide a preview summary of the email appropriately, are too long, or are topics that just straight up seem boring, then you may have some copyediting to do.

Solution#

As you can probably guess, the solution is to create email marketing subject lines with intention. Do you need to warn a subscriber of a recent change to your policy? Show concern in your subject line. Is your message a simple, automated email? Make the subject line simple and straight-to-the-point.

Take this into consideration and create subjects that include focus keywords at the beginning of the subject line. Also, invest in high-quality copywriting skills so you can pique lead curiosity and increase your open rate.

3. Information overload#

One of the common email marketing mistakes is sending emails with waaaay too much content! Writing very long emails isn't a sign of quality. Quite the opposite, actually, and you’ll have a harder time targeting leads if you include a lot of information in a single email. Remember that according to Sigstr, email readers will only ever read on average 50% of your content anyway!

Solution#

If statistics show us that only part of of our email will be read anyway, let’s focus instead on the meat and potatoes of your message: the main point.

Simply, to be successful, define your focus for each email, whether it’s to share a special promotion, relay information about an empty shopping cart, or anything of similar nature. Work in a way to condense any information, share your message clearly, and don’t over-stuff your message with CTA’s.

4. Ignoring customer replies#

Today, it’s very common for email campaigns to use the well-known "no-reply" templates. If a customer wants to reply to this email, they will only receive an error (or not even that), and your company won't get notified.

It's true that for some broader campaigns, with well-structured call to actions and well-defined goals, you won't necessarily need customer feedback or replies. However, in other situations and especially for B2B ecommerces, it may be worth listening to what each lead has to say. It could shed light into how you can change any of your processes.

Solution#

It’s easy to avoid these common mistakes with focused content marketing strategies. Evaluate the structure and goals of each email to distinguish if leads and customers are likely to respond and if this information can be valuable to your business to ensure that your consumers don’t feel undervalued and ignored.

Alternatively, within the email itself, guide the customer to service channels, such as JivoChat's online chat at your store or phone, so that they can return the contact through other communication points if necessary.

Besides, you can also invest in a professional email marketing tool to optimize your open rates and ensure you're not missing customer replies. Take a look at our article with a list of email marketing platforms that could help you out.

5. Not Conducting A/B Tests#

One of the top email marketing mistakes is not conducting A/B tests. A/B testing is available to help you validate your choices and find the correct template, layout, or format for your campaigns. Failing to perform this type of test and simply believing that the model you choose is the right one is one of the biggest email marketing mistakes you can't make.

Solution#

Experiment and closely track the results and feedback of each approach to identify, through A/B testing, which model catches your leads' attention and engages them. This advice also holds true for essentially any digital marketing strategy.

6. Using distracting email layouts#

An email layout with too many images, tacky design, pixelated images, and more can end up distracting the email viewer from the content of your email and possibly even instill distrust in your email reader.

Solution#

There is no clear rule for how many images you should include. However, just like your ecommerce page itself, you need to pay attention to design principles to create layouts that can help the customer grasp the message effectively.

To do this, highlight the focus of the email and make sure that the call to action is visible through a button or image. As for the text to image ratio, you can go for the 60/40 rule, where 60% is text, and 40% are images.

7. Failing to create a strategic email distribution schedule#

It’s difficult to cross a balance between nurturing warm leads and sending the right number of emails at once.There is a fine line between sending spam and not sending enough emails and so your clients forget you. A big marketing mistake you should be aware of is that an irregular email distribution schedule can actually be harmful.

Solution#

Here’s an email marketing tip: to know how to schedule your email marketing campaigns, make use of marketing automation provided by email marketing platforms. Alternatively, take a look at this infographic to understand when’s the best time to send emails according to 14 studies.

… Maybe JivoChat Can Help#

Now that you’re aware of the top email marketing mistakes you can't make and the solutions to each of them, how about taking on the next step to collect email addresses so you can create segments and provide real-time customer service?

If you like this idea and want to learn how to optimize your campaigns and drive sales with JivoChat, be sure to check our features and integrations with email marketing platforms such as MailChimp.