13 email marketing mistakes to avoid for better engagement

Since email remains an integral component of marketers' strategy for 95% of organizations, the battle to engage customers is not for life, but for death.


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With an average ROI of 3,800% and 3.7 billion users worldwide, which, according to forecasts, will increase to 4.1 billion by 2021, e-mail will still be in the top three of the most influential sources of information.

Great news for email marketers, isn't it?

But here is the problem:



The competition is high, and it is so easy to get lost in the rules, trends and experiments in email marketing. Aimed at creating and implementing the most effective email-strategies, marketers still fall into the trap of the most common mistakes.

In this article you will find 13 of them and learn how to avoid these mistakes in order to increase open rates , involvement and conversions.

1. Work with outdated mailing lists

As you know, email providers place high demands on the quality of the mailing list. In addition, they set limits on the number of permissible returns and complaints.

If you do not work with your mailing list, over time dozens of emails appear - long-abandoned or crowded mailboxes. Result? You exceed these limits, and your newsletter is blocked.

What to do?

Use email verification services by analyzing the mailing list. They help to remove broken or suspicious addresses. At the same time, you will ensure your reputation and increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Another trick: gradually increase your mailing list.

• First, take new contacts — subscribers in the last three months — and add them to the mailing list.
• Based on the statistics, remove the "bad" addresses from your list.
• Then add the old addresses (about 15% of the entire mailing list) to the recently sanded ones and send the next one.

This algorithm allows you to eliminate the damage and avoid a sharp jump in email-activity, which providers do not like so much.

2. Sending unexpected emails

A third of marketers send newsletters only when they have something to say.



This is a big mistake, leading to customer frustration and unsubscription.

Just imagine:

Once you have subscribed to the newsletter, but have not received anything in your inbox. Suddenly an e-mail arrives with a product offer. You probably already forgot about this subscription. Thus, you start to boil and press "spam", which does not affect the statistics of this newsletter.

How to do it right?

The best option is to work with your mailing list from the very beginning, even if it has only two contacts. Send at least one email per month!

If pauses occur, do everything possible to re-activate the list. Remind subscribers of your newsletter by offering something attractive.
How did Pinkberry:

3. Sending useless letters

The most common mistake of email marketers is that they create newsletters that are useless for subscribers. They write about the company or product, ignoring the interests of customers and worrying only about sales.
The product reigns in emails, but effective marketing campaigns do not work that way.

What to do?

• Study your audience and start thinking like them.
• Find out their fears, doubts and prejudices regarding your product.
• Decide how you can expose them in emails.
• Write about the successful experience of using your product, and not about the product itself. Consider the words and tone that you choose, and do not create plagiarism with competitors.
• Try to make the email creative and useful enough for readers to share it with friends.

4. No segmentation

According to statistics , segmented emails receive 14.64% more discoveries, 59.99% more clicks and generate 18 times more revenue . The big mistake is to avoid segmentation of your mailing list: if people receive irrelevant information, they are likely to unsubscribe or mark it as spam.

Not surprisingly, default segmentation remains the top priority for 80% of marketers. The same goes for personalization.

How to do it right?

Identify the main segments of your audience and decide on the data you need to separate them. If you have nothing but their e-mail address, conduct a behavioral segmentation.

RFM analysis will help with this. Work with each segment separately: solicit feedback from “loyal” customers, send special offers to “promising” or “asleep”, etc.
Behavioral-based newsletters are more effective than general ones.

5. Incorrect personalization

Here is what happens to your newsletter when you are in a hurry or do not check the tags:



Or did you forget to check the names that visitors use to subscribe to your newsletter. Sometimes they are sealed, they write nonsense like “bdfrtd” or jokes like “John (do not write to me, I am a beggar)”. And when you use such names in the hope of customer loyalty, the result will be the opposite.

What to do?

• Check all fields (names, tags, default settings) twice before posting.
• Then do an A / B test to see if customer calls by name affect your conversion.

Who knows, maybe the game is not worth the trouble: users know that personalization is performed automatically using tags, so naming them by e-mail might not give the same positive effect as before.

6. There is no email distribution plan.

You cannot send emails to customers when you want or when you have time. The result will be low efficiency and open rates, as well as a large number of clicks "Unsubscribe from this list."

How to do it right

Systematize your newsletter. Make a plan for several months in advance and select the ideal days and time to send letters. As for frequency, it will depend on your audience and marketing strategy.

7. Mislead or deceive subscribers

This is the worst thing you can do for subscribers.

Suppose your subscription form promised to send discount codes to beginners, but you did not. Or, the person signs up to receive certain content, but instead you send emails with sales information. Or you promised to write once a week, while you yourself sent emails every day.

This leads to a negative effect.

What to do?

Keep your word. Promise less, give more. This is what helps to gain the trust of customers and turn them into advocates for your brand.

8) Ignoring headers

The pre-headline is the text that appears after the subject line of your email. Some marketers ignore this, although this is another great chance to attract the attention of subscribers and motivate them to open a letter.



Paste a line of code into the HTML of your email to add a hidden preview header that users can see when they receive it.

What to write in the headlines:

• summarize the message
• hook with value
• offer call to action

9. The mismatch of the subject line and the body of the letter

For historical marketing reasons, the subject of your letter says a lot.
Some experts use this trick without thinking, in pursuit of high open rates

It works, but it disappoints users when they open an email and see the subject line and body mismatch. They will consider it a manipulation, mark such letters as spam and unsubscribe.

Moreover, they will no longer trust your brand.

How to do it right?

Writing headlines is an art. You can motivate subscribers to open your emails, but their disappointment with the content foreshadows trouble for the entire marketing campaign. Let your storylines correspond to the content you share with your customers.

10. No feedback available.

Are you still sending emails from a “no-reply” or “admin” address?
For subscribers, this is a signal that your brand does not want to communicate.

What to do?

People want to communicate with people, not with mailboxes.
Ask for testimonials in your letters, share other channels of communication, provide your support service. By providing an opportunity to get answers to your questions, you increase the chance to make them your clients.

11. Multiple CTA

Some marketers overwhelm newsletters with several CTAs: go to the site, subscribe, order, leave your feedback, etc.

People get lost in these endless streams of information and do not know what to do in the first place. As a result, your email campaign becomes ineffective.

Moreover, you cannot evaluate it, because you need to analyze several metrics with different data.

How to do it right

Make subscribers understand exactly what you want from them.

Make sure you provide all the necessary information for this.

The best rule: one e-mail is one CTA , which will help increase conversion.

12. Fear of experiments

Most brands do not risk experimenting, and therefore original letters are still rare today. The same sales emails fall on users' mailboxes, people can't find a reason to waste time on them.
What are they doing? They unsubscribe.

What to do

• Analyze competitors and turn it upside down.
• See the best practices, but do not copy them thoughtlessly.
• Think of the juicy details that you can add to the list. What makes people subscribe? Your writing style? Your voice tone? Anything else?

Here is an example from Uber provided by HubSpot :

13. No tests before launch.

Spamming, wrong layout, HTML errors are all consequences of poor testing.

There are a lot of rules and nuances of creating an email .
For example, this is what happens if you make it a picture:

• Adaptability is lost (mobile versions do not optimize images).
• The subscriber will not see if his email settings do not allow displaying external images.
• High probability of getting into spam.

Other rules include: avoid stop words, capital letters, javascript; do not use abbreviations of links; do not replay with exclamation marks, etc.
It’s hard to remember them all, so the best way to find out if you are doing it right is to test the mailing list before launching it.

How?

Use a test mailing list, including your mailbox from different providers. Be skeptical to evaluate the result and stay in the shoes of subscribers.

Does the letter sound convincing? Do not be afraid to revise, edit and improve it.

Of course, even an experienced email marketer can miss or forget something.
But, as they say, the winner is not the one who does not make mistakes, but the one who makes them less often.

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