The most common email marketing mistakes are weak subject lines, an unsegmented list, messages that don’t match the buyer persona, poor follow-up through the buying stages and sending too often. Dull content, technical problems and a missing or unclear call to action round out the 8.
Email is one of the most effective digital channels, as the Smart Insights benchmark below shows. Even a leading B2B SEO company would agree it deserves a place in your plan.
Email marketing really works
Though it is one of the oldest digital channels, emails are checked regularly, whether you are at work, home, or on the move using smartphones. Email is still one of the channels with a high open rate of 22.86%, through which you can establish highly focused and personalized communication.
Once you have engaged and motivated your audience, they are hooked. They are now primed to consider your offer.
Successful marketers use email marketing at this critical stage of the buying process – transforming leads into prospects and then converting them into customers.
Easy peasy, right? But here is the problem.
Your email marketing efforts are not achieving its goals after you have invested so much time and effort to generate leads.
Why?
Our numerous interactions with marketers have found them guilty of committing a few avoidable email marketing mistakes.
Mistakes that drive your audience to unsubscribe or not respond positively to your call to action.
Here are the 8 mistakes, and how to fix each one.
Check if you are guilty of one or some of them. It is never too late to fix them and return to the game.
Mistake #1: Weak Subject Line
You know what makes your email rise above the noise – its subject line.
Ever come across subject lines like:
- Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Fwd
- ?????
- !!!!!
- It’s John
- Please call
- URGENT
These weak, vague, and spammy subject lines make your emails slip through and even turn people off.
An email’s subject line must tell you what is expected of you. It must communicate some urgency, criticality, importance to help you prioritize your time and response. And it must motivate you to act. Engage. And invest.
HubSpot has gathered some amazing email subject lines that are informative and actionable:
Mistake #2: Your Email List Is Not Segmented
You cannot control or monitor everyone who visits your website or connects to your social media channels.
Most businesses do not have only one buyer persona or customer avatar.
You would have 2 – 4 different offerings, and diverse people might be interested in some or all of them, depending on their needs. That means all people falling under different customer personas might be signing up to be part of your email list.
Image by Keith Johnston from Pixabay
However, they are not all at the same stage of the buying journey or have similar needs. Therefore, when you send that same email to all, many don’t respond.
You need to segment your list and form homogenous clusters of leads.
Something like this.
Source: (Verweij, 2014)
Now craft specific email messages for each cluster and target them. See the difference in responses now. You might even want to run an A/B test to see the results.
Mistake #3: Buyer Persona and Email Message Mismatch
What: Content, the problem it solves, and the way it connects with the audience are the linchpins. They move your audience further down the sales funnel.
In the previous mistake, we noted that your list is not segmented.
Mistake #4: Lack of Efficient Customer Connects Through the Stages of the Buying Process
You know that buying occurs through a process. You seldom pick something and buy it on an impulse.
Anything of value – electronics, insurance, automobile, equipment, furniture, house, stocks, even household linen, organic food, etc. —is bought with careful consideration and research.
The diagram below elucidates the point that I am trying to make.
Source: CustomerJourneyMarketer
If your email marketing is not generating results, it is quite likely that you are not hand-holding your leads and customers from one stage to another. The emails are not keeping the customer tethered to the buying process and moving them down the funnel.
Mistake #5: Overeager Case of Sending Emails Too Frequently
Yes, emails are highly effective. And yes, we check our emails many times a day, and they have not gone out of fashion even today.
Hippocrates said, “Everything in excess is opposed to nature.”
So, if you send too many emails to your audience, they might feel overwhelmed and behave like trauma doctors managing a deluge of emails with triage tags: Deceased, Immediate, Delayed, Minor.
And your emails will most likely be tagged “Deceased” and swept aside for more urgent emails.
Paul Jarvis, the author of Company of One says Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, sends one email a week, that too on a Sunday. His audience waits eagerly for the email and he enjoys the amazing response.
Pace it, and pace it well.
Mistake #6: Lame, Casual Content
If your email content doesn’t add value or give your audience a reason to act, it will hurt your results.
Your audience, lead, or prospect receives an email from you to help them overcome a pain point or issue and sail towards smoother seas. They do not expect you to just pop in to say hi or discuss some lame tidbits of information.
Lame content in digital marketing is a cardinal crime**,** especially when the person has invested solely focused attention in what you want to say one-on-one through your email.
Mistake #7: Technical Shortcomings
People are no longer digitally connected through their desktops or workstations. They have laptops, smartphones, and tablets to access information on the go. I hope you are mindful of that.
Is your email message efficiently configured for mobile consumption?
Are you mindful of constraints like screen size, text length, use of embedded images and videos, and even the background and foreground color and font that makes it easy to read?
If not, that could be a turnoff for the otherwise eager audience.
Fix it.
Mistake #8: Misdirected or Missing Call-to-Action
The purpose of the entire spectrum of digital marketing, including email marketing services, is to tell the reader/audience/lead/customer what to do next.
In marketing terms, it is called a “Call to Action.” Its simple English translation would be “Now do this.”
Even though your messages might target very accomplished and smart professionals who are sorted and know what they want, they still need to be told what to do next to move forward. Get ahead and make their lives easier.
Fix These in Order
Start with the mistakes that stop emails from working at all: technical problems, a missing call to action and weak subject lines. Then segment your list and match each message to its buyer persona. Review your send frequency last, once you can see how each segment responds.