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6 Email Marketing Mistakes To Avoid and What To Do Instead

Lilit Yeranyan

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Did you invest a lot of time into creating email marketing campaigns and expect great results? Then you should definitely be aware of main email marketing mistakes and try to avoid them. 

Although email marketing boasts the highest ROI compared to other channels, it is crucial to adopt a strategic approach to harness its full potential. Only this way you can create effective email marketing campaigns that help you accomplish various business goals.

Keep reading as we are going to speak about key mistakes that occur in email marketing campaigns. Most importantly, we will discuss what you should do instead and suggest helpful tips to strengthen your email marketing strategies.

Common mistakes in email marketing and what to do instead

Do you still wonder why you should invest in email marketing and why you should need to create proper campaigns? Just consider statistics that prove 61% of customers prefer to communicate with businesses through email. So will give helpful and strategic tips on how to avoid top mistakes in email marketing to leverage its power effectively.

Inbox full of messages 

Not creating hooking subject lines 

The first thing email recipients notice in their loaded inbox is the subject line. It is the main factor determining whether they will open or ignore your email. 

Basically, the subject line is the first stone of building a successful email campaign. So having a poor subject line will be one of the huge email marketing mistakes. 

What to do instead? We suggest following subject line best practices.

✔ Keep your subject lines short and concise

✔ Provide value to the email recipient 

✔ Be catchy and engaging

✔ Try to personalize

Following our tips, you can increase your open rate and avoid one of the common email marketing campaign mistakes.

Not personalizing email campaigns

Getting noticed in a cluttered inbox is a challenging task. Alongside a strong subject line, personalization can also guarantee higher engagement rates and the overall success of your email campaigns. Thus, personalizing your messaging is a must-step to avoid one of the top mistakes in email marketing.

Remember, you have to craft and send personalized messages instead of generic ones. This way, you can make your email leads feel special and showcase that you care about your email leads to individual needs. So you are already convinced that failing to personalize your email will be a huge mistake; let’s discuss how to do it successfully.

Start with a small but important step, including the recipient’s name in the subject line instead of generic email greetings.

In the next step, collect valuable data about email leads, like preferences and previous purchases. Then use this data to create personalized content that addresses their needs and interests. Divide your email leads into different segments based on specific criteria such as demographics and interests. 

This allows you to tailor your messages to each segment, making them more relevant and personalized. Customized email content can successfully engage email leads and can even convert them into customers. 

Moreover, suggest personalized recommendations that align with their interests and pain points. This shows that you value their individual needs. 

Lastly, consider using a conversational tone to make your messaging more personal.

Marketers create campaigns while avoiding email marketing mistakes 

Being salesy and over-promotional 

Your goal is to create strong and positive relationships with customers and accomplish the email marketing objectives that you have. So you need to avoid being too pushy in your emails. 

Even if your ultimate goal is to increase sales, you need to be strategic and keep the perfect balance. While email marketing remains a great medium to promote your products or services, you should avoid being salesy.

This is one of the common email marketing mistakes that many businesses make, and you should stay away from it. Otherwise, you may lose potential customers who feel your messages only have to sell.

So what to do instead? First, try to be as helpful as possible and suggest solutions that potential customers face. In that matter, share valuable and useful content in your emails or relevant industry tips. 

Next, ensure your messages deliver value to the email leads. Thus focus on addressing your customers’ pain points and offering solutions rather than solely promoting your products and services.

Don’t limit your content to your branded content to promote your offers and share social proof. Therefore, include customer testimonials and product reviews to showcase how your products and services improve customers’ lives. This way, you increase your chances of building trust, converting email leads into customers, and establishing trustful relationships with them.

Lastly, when trying to avoid one of the common email marketing mistakes, meanwhile increase your sales, offer exclusive discounts and special offers.

Marketing team creates compelling CTAs

Not creating compelling CTAs

While you managed to create an effective subject line that convinces you to open your messages, in the final step, you need to create a compelling CTA. It should encourage email leads to take action after reading your email. So avoid making common email marketing mistakes and not writing strong CTA. In these cases, both click-through and conversion rates will be low.  

Moreover, poor CTA can prevent you from reaching your email marketing goals. So how to avoid one of the common mistakes in email marketing? We suggest these tips:

 ✔ Be clear and strict to the point

Your CTA should clearly indicate the purpose of your email. So use action-oriented language and share what exact actions should do. Whether you want your customers to buy a product or sign up for the free trial, you should create a strong CTA.  

✔ Use strong verbs

Use strong action verbs to make your CTA more persuasive, create a sense of urgency, and motivate people to act.

✔ Use contrasting colors and visual elements

Make your CTA visually stand out by using contrasting colors that grab the email lead’s attention. 

✔ Test different variations

Experiment with different versions of your CTAs to see which ones perform best. Test variations in wording, color, placement, and design. A/B testing can help you identify the most compelling CTAs for your audience. 

Sign of analytics 

Not tracking campaigns

It would be one of the biggest email marketing campaign mistakes not to monitor analytics to improve the effectiveness of your strategies. Moreover, it can hurt your business. And the reason is you invested your time and budget into email marketing, so you expect great results. By tracking your campaigns, you gain valuable insights that can drive continuous improvement in your email marketing efforts. 

Start the process by tracking important email marketing metrics and start checking the open and click-through rates of your campaigns. Next, you can monitor the conversion rate to measure and improve the overall performance of your email marketing campaigns. 

This way, you get valuable insights into your audience’s preferences and behavior and your emails to their interests. Then you can make informed decisions to improve the overall performance of your email campaigns.

Not making your campaigns mobile optimized

Numbers speak for themselves, as statistics prove that 85% of users access email via their smartphone. Thus, it will be a big email marketing mistake not to optimize your campaigns for mobile users. Ignoring mobile optimization can cause a loss of customers and lower the chances of improving the effectiveness of your email campaigns. So what’s to do instead? When trying to find what email marketing mistakes should be avoided, optimize your campaigns following these strategies:

✔ Keep the subject line and email content concise and short, as mobile screens have limited space.

✔ Use a mobile-responsive design to make emails visually appealing on mobile devices.

✔ Optimize font sizes for mobile devices and avoid small fonts.

✔ Minimize image sizes to reduce loading times while keeping quality high.

✔ Test your emails on various mobile devices before sending them.

To sum up

You may hear that mistakes are important for growth. So you can learn what mistakes other businesses have made in their email campaigns and try to avoid them.

We shared about key email marketing mistakes and also gave tips on what to do instead. By following our suggestions, you can increase your email marketing strategies effectiveness.  

Good luck with creating successful email campaigns. Stay tuned for more helpful articles with email marketing insights.

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