After having discovered the concept of newsletters and tips for success, here are a few arguments in favor of email marketing! With an average ROI of 3.8% and 3.7 billion users worldwide, and projected growth reaching 4.1 billion in 2021, email marketing is one of the three most influential sources of information.
Excellent news for marketers, isn’t it?
But here’s the problem: email remains an essential component of the marketing strategy for 95% of companies.
Competition is fierce, and it is so easy to get lost among all the rules, trends, and experiments related to email marketing. In this article, you will find 13 common mistakes as well as their solution so you do not repeat them.
1) Working from an outdated/obsolete database
If you are not working with an up-to-date email list, dozens of emails – long abandoned by their owners – will be obsolete. The result? You risk blocking your newsletter or your email campaign and therefore having deliverability problems. Your engagement rate is affected!
The solution ?
You can use an email validation service to analyze your email database. This will help you remove suspicious and invalid addresses. This way, you protect your reputation and improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Another tip: grow your email list gradually:
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- First, take the new contacts – those you collected over the last three months – and add them to your newsletter mailing list.
- Delete the addresses that seem truly suspicious.
- Then, start incorporating older addresses (about 15% of your email list) with the new ones you have already added, and send your newsletter.
- Continue like this until you have incorporated your entire list.
Thanks to this technique, you spread out potential rejections and thus avoid the email bounces or returns so hated by providers, and thus avoid being “blacklisted” and ending up in spam.
2) Sending “unexpected” emails
⅓ of marketers send a newsletter only if they have something to say.
This can prove dangerous and lead to your customers’ frustration and their unsubscribing.
Imagine :
One day, you subscribe to a newsletter but you receive nothing in your inbox. And then one day, an email arrives offering a product. It is very likely that you have forgotten you subscribed. So you start wondering why you are receiving this type of information, and you click on “spam”! And there, say hello to your statistics report…
The solution ?
The best thing is to work on your database from the start, even if your list contains only 2 contacts. Send at least one email per month!
If you suspend activity at some point, do your best to reactivate the list. Remind your subscribers about yourself by offering slightly different content. For example, like Pinkberry:
3) Sending useless emails
The most common mistake in sending email campaigns is that marketers create newsletters that are useless in subscribers’ eyes. They write about a company or a product, without taking the customer’s interest into account: sales, games, promotions, etc. Your engagement rate is never good in that case.
The solution ?
- Know your audience and start thinking like them.
- Learn their fears, doubts, and prejudices about your product.
- Assess how you can convince them.
- Write about a positive and successful experience related to the use of your product, not about the product itself. Remember to take into account the tone and vocabulary you use and do not cheat by plagiarizing your competitors.
- Try to be creative and make your email useful enough that readers want to share it with their friends.
4) No segmentation: no engagement
The numbers do not lie : segmented emails have a 14.64% higher open rate, 59.99% more clicks, and generate 18 times more revenue. It is a mistake not to use segmentation for your mailing list, because if subscribers receive irrelevant information, they will be more likely to unsubscribe or mark your email as spam.
Segmentation issues are a priority for 80% of marketers. And the same thing happens with personalization. In 2018, it is no longer optional, it has become mandatory.
The solution ?
You must first determine the core target of your audience and decide which data to segment them by. If you have no data apart from their email address, implement behavioral segmentation.
Work with each segment separately: ask for feedback from your “loyal” customers, send a special offer to “promising” subscribers, etc. Newsletters focused on behavior analysis are more effective than general newsletters.
For example, here are the tips to follow for B2C newsletters or even everything you need to know about B2B email marketing.
5) Poor personalization
This is what can happen with your newsletter when you are in a hurry or when you do not check the tags:
Or, you forget to check the names subscribers use to sign up for your newsletter. Sometimes people enter fake names, or make a typo, or type anything like “qegsdf”, or even jokes like “Johan (don’t write to me, I’m poor)”. And when you hope to increase your subscribers’ engagement and you send that, the result is the opposite effect.
The solution ?
- Check your fields (names, tags, default value) twice before sending your email.
- Then, you can do A/B testing to check whether addressing your subscribers by their name has a positive effect on the conversion rate.
Who knows, maybe it is not worth it: most users know that personalization is done automatically through tags, so sending them an email starting with their first name may no longer have the same impact it had some time ago.
6) No regularity in sending your newsletter
You cannot send emails to your customers whenever you want or whenever you have the time. This is likely to result in very low effectiveness and a rising unsubscribe rate.
The solution ?
By systematizing your newsletter. Make a plan over several months and choose your regularity, your days and your sending times. As for frequency, it will depend on your audience and your marketing strategy.
7) Misleading or lying to your subscribers
It is the worst thing that can happen.
Let’s imagine that your subscription form promises to send a promotional code in exchange for signing up, but you did not do it. Or, someone subscribes to receive informative content and receives commercial emails instead. Or you promise to write once a week but you send emails every day. Let’s say, your subscription form promised to send discount codes to newcomers,
This leads to a negative response.
The solution ?
Keep your word. Promise less, give more. That is what helps build trust with your customers and subscribers so they can become ambassadors.
Also read: Email marketing: Key figures
8) Ignoring “preheaders”
The preheader is the text that appears after the subject of your email. Some marketers ignore it, even though it is an extra chance to attract the attention of new subscribers and motivate them to click.
What to put in a preheader:
- Summarize the message
- Hook with value
- Offer a CTA (call to action)
9) A mismatch between the email subject and the email body
For historical reasons in marketing, the email subject must be extremely compelling. Some specialists use this trick without thinking, hoping for a high open rate.
It works but has the consequence of frustrating subscribers when they realize upon opening the email that the subject and the email body are different. They see this as manipulation, and may unsubscribe or mark the email as spam. Most importantly, they will no longer trust your brand.
The solution ?
Writing a title is an art. It is good to motivate subscribers to open an email, but their disappointment when they discover irrelevant content will make your marketing campaign lose its value. Adapt your title according to your content!
10) Not leaving the opportunity to get feedback
Are you still sending your emails from a “no-reply” or “admin” address, or from an address that nobody ever checks? That means your brand does not want to communicate with its subscribers.
The solution ?
People want to talk to people, not to inboxes! Ask for feedback in your emails, share other communication channels, introduce your support team. Give them the opportunity to get answers to their questions, and you will increase your chances of converting them into customers.
11) Multiplying CTAs
Some marketers overwhelm their newsletter with Calls to Action: to their website, to a subscription link, place an order, leave a comment, etc. Your subscribers will get lost and not know what to do first. Your marketing campaign therefore becomes ineffective.
You can measure it by analyzing the data.
The solution ?
Be explicit about what you expect from your subscribers. Make sure you have provided all the necessary information for this. You know the answer: One email for one call to action, or, at least, one section per CTA.
12) The fear of testing
Most brands do not take risks, and that is why creative and original newsletters are still rare today. It is always the same types of commercial emails that arrive in inboxes, so people have no reason to spend time opening them all. And what are they likely to do? Unsubscribe.
The solution ?
- Analyze your competitors’ campaigns,
- Take inspiration from best practices and ideas and adapt them to your context.
- Think of a few inspired details to add to your newsletter. What is it that pushes people to subscribe? What makes the difference? The tone you use? Your writing style? Something else?
13) Not testing before sending
Ending up in spam, making a link error, or having a CTA that sends to the wrong page, etc. all of this is the result of a poor testing phase.
The rules and nuances for creating an email are numerous. For example, here is what can happen if you send it in image format:
- Mobile versions do not optimize images,
- The chances are high that your email will be blocked by spam filters.
Some rules: avoid “empty words” (terms that are not indexed), limit capital letters, do not use shortened links, use exclamation marks sparingly, etc. It is difficult to remember everything, so the best way to know whether your newsletter meets your subscribers’ expectations is to test it before sending it to your entire contact database.
How?
Use a test mailing list, one that takes different providers into account. Try to put yourself in your target’s shoes, does your email seem convincing to you? Do not be afraid to review, modify and improve your newsletter.
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To learn more about email deliverability and how not to end up in spam, discover the replay of Boris Leconte’s conference from Mailjet at Automationday 2018.
