20 Mistakes that will Break your Email Marketing

Do you know that you can save half of your effort emailing your customers?
Do you want to avoid mistakes that would make your emails unprofessional?

Everyone knows how to start send an email but that doesn’t mean we can do it correctly or effectively. Perhaps you haven’t tried all possible ways to grow your mailing lists to the maximum with email popup, or send the best emails that can really bring up sales. Mistakes can be easily made and cannot be recognized until being told. So let’s go with us to see how many mistakes you’ve made and start avoiding them.

Pre-sending process

1. Send emails without asking for permissions

There are many ways you can do to have a random list of email addresses but if you ever think of sending an email to them, then stop. Firstly, not all of them are your potential customers and it’s more effective to run re-marketing on Facebook or Twitter than sending a spammy email.

Secondly, those emails, especially from social media (like [email protected]), often have high bounce rate and your accounts can be temporarily suspended when you send emails to them. Last but not least, you don’t have permission to send them emails and what you do is illegal in some countries such as US, which is also disturbing to the recipients

2. Don’t have newsletter-subscription on your site

To have customer’s permission on sending them emails, the easiest way is to ask them subscribe your site. You can create a banner in the sidebar, on top of your pages, on a slide-out box that appear from bottom of corner, on a floating bar, an email popup right in the middle of the page… to do that:

But most importantly, your store must have great content that they really want to update. It could be blog-posts about the latest trends, or your store frequently has new items that they couldn’t resist,…

3. Segment your email lists ineffectively

You should not send the same email to all of your customers. Let’s divide your customers into different groups and make sure you understand their interests, locations, and buying behaviors. For example, if you want to promote a new product line and you want to send your customers information and/or some discount codes to encourage them visit your sites, you cannot send all of your customers the same email. Loyal customers should not receive the same message as a new visitor; treat them differently, especially when you want to build a strong relationship with each of them.

4. Don’t send on regular basis

Email is a good way to get in touch with your customers and also make your customers remember your brand. But not sending emails regularly makes it less effective. Sending emails once a week is perfect if you want to get in touch with your customers.

5. Send emails for sales only

“People treat you the way you treat them”; it’s 100% true, especially with small businesses. You cannot become customer’s friends if you only think of your sales or “yourself”.  Instead of sending email for sales, send them some tutorials, some tips or tools that relate to your business and you think it’d be helpful for your customers. For example, if you sell cosmetic products, you can send them makeup tutorials or some skin care tips,…

Subject line

6. Send email with a subject title that is not consistent with the body message

Normally, such kind of email will be considered as a spam one. It disturbs your customers and makes them uncomfortable.

7. Use long subject lines

35 characters or less is the best for a subject title. With a quick glance, your customers can easily catch those words and skim the content of your emails.

Email address

8. Use no-reply email address

How do you feel whenever you receive such kind of emails? Right away, you know that this email is automatically sent to you, it also discourages the connection between you and the people who sent it. So how could you build a relationship with your customers with such discouragement?

9. Use different email addresses each time

You want customers to recognize you and your brand so let’s use one email address to send your emails, changing your address will make your customers a bit of confusing.

Body Message

10. Forget about pre-header

Pre-header is the useful part of email which helps your customers know more about email’s content and at the same time gives your customers more reasons to open the email. Online sellers sometimes focus on subject line or body message only, and totally forget about pre-header which they shouldn’t.

11. Send lengthy messages

No one wants to read a mini book, so try to avoid long and detailed messages. 300-500 characters is the best.

12. Send with too many offers

“Less is more”. Too many offers just make your customers confused and distracted. Sending 1 to 2 offers is perfect, it’s just enough to get customer’s attention on what you want them to do.

13. Use all CAPS

Don’t use caps for all letters, just for the first one only. Using too many CAPS could make your messages look heavy and seem like over informative.

14. Start your messages with a discount number or “free”

Actually, these words make your email less attractive and people usually have intention to close the email sooner. On average, a customer receives 3-5 promotion emails a day. And after a long time receiving such kind of emails, they start to feel annoying. Let’s think of some other interesting methods to promote your sales. Moreover, using the word “free” in headline will increase the chance that your emails will go directly to spam box.

15. Overuse underline, bold, color… and underestimate the plain text

This makes your body message overlooked, especially with 300-500 characters in an email. Besides, plain text is quite stunning if you know how to use it. Here is an example:

16. Forget to use images

It is not suggested to send a long email, so make pictures speak for you.

Post-sending process

17. Forget to provide the unsubscribe link

Of course, you don’t want customers to unsubscribe you but they have right to do it and the more you force them to keep receiving your emails, the more they don’t like.

18. Send mobile-unfriendly emails

A lot of emails are opened in mobile phone or tablet nowadays so that creating a mobile friendly email is necessary.

19. Send without testing

There are a lot of mistakes you can find out and fix with a simple email test. Remember to test your email first to avoid grammar, spelling… mistakes.

20. Not check email reports

By checking reports, you can see which email is effective, which is not. Stop spending ineffective emails or try to fix them and then you will have higher email engagement rate and more loyal customers.

Online sellers can easily make one of those mistakes, the earlier you know and fix it, the better. If you don’t make any of those, let’s share with other sellers so they can avoid.

We hope that, the “20 mistakes that will break your email marketing” can help you send better emails in the future, increasing your email engagement rate and creating a stronger relationship with your customers.