7 Common Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Solve Them

Learning how to avoid email marketing mistakes is essential to improve results. As statistics presented by Hubspot point out, 99% of digital consumers open their email daily, this communication channel remain as one of the most relevant when it comes to reaching out to your target audience,

Therefore, it's important to plan your email marketing campaigns carefully. You need to consider several factors such as who your target audience is, your brand identity, and what not to do to have your messages signed as spam.

7 Email Marketing Mistakes and Solutions#

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, or have already shown that they aren’t interested in buying anything from your brand.

Solution#

Instead of using cold email lists, 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 should 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. 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#

Your email subject line must catch your reader’s attention. It needs to provide a good reason why the reader should spend their time by opening your email and reading it. If you write and generic subject line just to fill the email form, it's likely your message will be deleted with no further thoughts.

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 phrase. Also, invest in high-quality copywriting skills so you can instigate curiosity and increase your open rate.

3. Information Overload#

One of the most common email marketing mistakes is sending emails with way 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#

Focus on highlighting the main message of your email, and make it clear in the first part of the message. Be direct, and use just one call to action, so the reader will know exactly what action you want them to take right after reading your email.

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 email marketing strategies, it may be worth listening to what each lead has to say. It could shed light into how you can improve 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 so that they can use the live chat tool to solve their doubts. Besides, you can also invest in a professional email marketing tool to optimize your open rates and ensure you're not missing customer replies.

5. Not Conducting A/B Tests#

One of the top email marketing mistakes is not conducting A/B tests to understand what works best with your audience. A/B testing is available to help you validate your choices and find the correct template, layout, or format for your campaigns.

Solution#

Experiment and closely track the results and feedback of each email sent to identify, through A/B testing, which model catches your leads' attention and boost engagement. 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 even make your brand lose credibility,

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.

Choose a layout that is aligned with your brand visual identity, and avoid inserting too many elements that will affect readability and distract the reader from the main message, 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 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#

Know how to schedule your email marketing campaigns, make use of marketing automation provided by email marketing platforms. Use data analytics tools to understand your target audience behavior and define how often and when send the emails,

JivoChat Can Help You#

Now that you’re aware of the main email marketing mistakes and how to solve them, how about taking on the next step to collect email addresses so you can conquer leads, segment them and create effective email marketing campaigns?

With JvoChat tools, you can install a personalized live chat on your website to interact directly with your audience and engage with them. It's possible to set up proactive chat invitations based on your website visitor actions, so you won't lose any opportunity. Enjoy the free trial, and discover everything it has to offer.