Getting someone’s email address may be hard but this is only the beginning of the long journey of turning a subscriber into a customer. And as with any other lasting process, miscalculations and faults happen in email marketing as well. There’s nothing wrong with it, as mistakes are a sign that you’re working on your business, trying new tactics and approaches.
What is wrong, however, is not fixing these mistakes, hoping things will get better on their own. The below list consists of 8 most often email marketing mistakes that may bruise your sender reputation, blow customer loyalty and kill the willing to keep on the conversation with the brand. Study them to make sure your marketing strategy isn’t compromised by any.
1. Buying a contact list.
A ready contact base is an especially big temptation for those who only getting started with email marketing. It looks like all you need to do is to create a template, and the first campaign is ready for launch.
However, a bought email list won’t make you any good. The main danger of such lists isn’t even spam tramps and invalid addresses it may contain but its irrelevance in terms of your business. You’ll be spending time and effort by sending to people who are not interested in your offers and have never agreed to hear from you.
In addition to the wasted budget, such a strategy can result in issues with your sender reputation, as more people would simply unsubscribe from your unsolicited messages or even report them as spam.
2. Not asking for permission.
Even regular visits to your websites and active social sharing don’t mean people want to receive your messages. Emails are permission-based campaigns, and this principle is strictly regulated by customer policies and laws of most countries.
What’s more, according to the GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation that covers countries of the European Union and the European Economic Area), Double Opt-In has become a must since May 2018.
Double Opt-In is a two-step subscription process. After filling out a subscription form, a user receives a confirmation email asking to confirm their subscription. This approach helps build an email list with only valid addresses, protects from spammers and eventually improves the deliverability rate.
3. Not asking for customer preferences.
The more diverse your product range, the more you need customer preference management. Companies that produce one specific product, let’s say, coffee, may be sure their subscribers want to hear about coffee varieties.
However, if apart from delivering coffee, you produce coffee making equipment and accessories, run a topical blog, organize barista workshops and release coffee reviews and ratings, your email strategy needs customer preference management. Knowing subscribers’ interests and tailoring campaigns accordingly helps deliver more targeted campaigns and generate more conversions.
4. Not sticking to customer preferences.
Let’s say your emails have a manage preferences link, and people often use it to express their likings. However, there’s no use in such tactics if you don’t use this information for further segmentation and sending adjustment.
If people have chosen to receive only one blog newsletter per week but you keep one sending them promos and partner offers four times a week, how long do you think it will take before they decide to switch to a more perceptive brand?
5. Not providing a visible unsubscribe link.
Alongside Double Opt-In, an unsubscribe link is also an official requirement by the GDPR and other anti-spam policies. It should be given in a readable font, not hidden behind any other elements and easily spotted.
The unsubscribe option can let subscribers opt out of particular types of emails, but it also must allow stopping all campaigns from you.
6. Not segmenting your contact base.
Businesses willing to run successful email marketing should consider contact base segmentation as a top tool. The bigger your contact list, the more diverse it is in terms of many factors. The more diverse it is, the more precise segmentation should be.
Gender, age, location, language, purchase history, etc. – use any available customer info to send more personalized campaigns as personalization is what nowadays determines engagement and response. People are no longer willing to spend time on irrelevant offers and unrelated material.
7. Sending inapplicable content.
A kind of annex to the previous position. Segmenting your contact base is crucial but coming up with appropriate content is equally important. Single travelers don’t want to receive news on holiday vacations for families with kids; Tokyo residents are hardly interested in limited sales run in your Los-Angeles stores; motorcycle owners need deals concerning motorcycle parts or maintenance rather than new bicycle accessories.
By sending bulk campaigns that don’t resonate with the interests of the recipients you waste money at best and lose potential customers at worst.
8. Not following a sending schedule.
The lack of marketing consistency will create you a reputation of an unprofessional business and alarm email clients. If you’d been sending 2 emails per week to 50,000 contacts, then suddenly switched to 5 emails per week to 100,000, next came back to the previous schedule, and after reduced the number to one newsletter per month, email clients may consider you a spammer.
A consistent campaign schedule with the slow increase of messages and contacts is what characterizes you as a trustworthy sender. Consistency is especially important when you only get started with commercial bulk campaigns: warm up your sender reputation step by step and increase the number of emails gradually (particularly if you send to more than 50,000 contact).
Email marketing mistakes are inevitable. How you fix them and what conclusions make are what determines the effectiveness of your campaigns. Revise your strategies on a regular basis, monitor reports and analytics, don’t be afraid of apologizing if needed, and watch over your competitors so as to learn from their mistakes as well.
Author’s Bio
Iuliia Nesterenko is a technical writer at eSputnik. Her focus is on exploring current digital marketing trends and describing new strategies for email marketers.
