Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to grow your business and engage with clients. Even though social media networks provide fresh ways to engage and interact with prospects and clients alike, the benefits of email marketing make this a worthwhile activity for most businesses. It should always be remembered that email marketing is not a guaranteed path to success. And as such, there are a number of common email marketing mistakes that may prevent your business from achieving success in the way that you would like. If you are making any of these email marketing mistakes, it is important to stop doing them as soon as possible.
Email Marketing Mistakes:
1. Emailing a prospect without permission
In an attempt to grow your business, you may be tempted to send off “blind” emails to prospects who have not provided you with permission to send them emails. This may bring occasional success, but more than likely, your email will be viewed as spam, and it may well be deleted before it is even opened. This means you may be wasting a lot of time, effort, and money in emailing out to potential customers who have no interest in what you are offering.
It may be a slower process, but taking the time to develop an opt-in email list will bring about much more success for your business in the long run. Sending unsolicited emails may develop a reputation that is hard to shake off in later years.
2. Your subject and from lines are uninspiring
The first impression is always crucial in life, and with email marketing, you may only have a few seconds to impress someone. This means the subject line of your email must entice people to open the email. You also want to have a “from” tag that sounds professional and will make people sit up and take notice.
A good way to make a subject line attractive is to make it short, make it relevant, and indicate that the email will not take a long time to read. An example would be “2 Ways Facebook Can Boost Your Business”. People are always looking for ways to improve their business, and by saying it is only two things, people know that it shouldn’t take a lot of time to read the email. The above example is a lot more attractive than “Find out about the ways that using Facebook can help you to build your business.”
With respect to the “from” aspect, you want to be personable, but ideally, you want to be sending emails from the domain of your company. A business email sent from a Gmail or Hotmail address will not be viewed upon as professional.
3. Being irrelevant
We all like a bit of fun in our lives, and a joke email from a friend can relieve the boredom on certain days. This is not something a business should be looking to send out, though. Your business emails need to be targeted and relevant. They should be aimed at potential customers providing them with relevant information or products and services that will meet their needs.
If someone opens an email from you and finds that it doesn’t reflect things they are interested in, they will delete it, and they will likely ignore any future emails. This is why you have to make a positive impression from your first email and then continue in this vein.
4. Not reviewing your email campaigns
It is important to evaluate the success of every campaign you undertake in business, and email marketing is no different. At the very least, you should look at the reports to see how many people received, opened, and read your emails. After this, you want to examine how many responses or orders you received from the emails. It can also be helpful to utilize an email service package to examine:
- How many emails were deleted unopened
- How many emails were forwarded
- How many click-throughs have your emails received
This is the sort of information a business needs to review when evaluating the success of its email marketing campaigns. Without this information, a business is guessing whether their campaigns are a success or not, which is a surefire way of throwing money away.
Moxee Marketing is a London-based digital marketing agency. We help our clients, whether based in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in the globe, meet and exceed their digital goals and objectives across various channels.
