In this weeks’ video, we are going to take a look at the 5 top email marketing mistakes that you are probably already making. It’s all too common to completely scupper the results of your email marketing by making a few simple to rectify errors.
Being aware of the common email marketing pitfalls will really help to make your email marketing successful. So, let’s take a look at the top five email marketing mistakes that you could already be making and how to avoid them.
1. Send from name
This is one of the most common mistakes that we’ve all made at one time or another. The send from email address that you use plays a massive part in both the deliverability and how you appear to your target audience.
If you are sending out from a generic send from mailbox name, such as sales@ or marketing@ - this can really have a large impact on the deliverability of your email marketing. Lots of spam filters are set to look for addresses such as this and will deliver them into your recipient’s junk folder.
This mailbox name can also have an effect on your recipient’s initial reaction to your mailer. Generic addresses such as marketing@ can make your recipient feel like they are part of a large scale marketing campaign. This can cause a much lower rate of engagement from your recipients.
If your marketing is sent from your a personalised address such as john@ - then this has the double bonus of better deliverability and better rates of engagement.
2. Personalisation
Following on from the last point - none of us likes to feel like we are part of a large scale marketing campaign, if we receive something that looks like it’s also been sent to half the world then this really causes us to quickly lose interest.
There are lots of ways that you can add personalisation to your email send - doing this really helps the viewer to feel valued. As well as addressing the email to the person you are sending to - you could also add their name to the subject header line.
You can also mail merge more information, such as their company name into the body fo your email.
Email marketing software such as email blaster will give you the ability to import your email data with lots of fields available to as a mail merge inside your email design.
3. Not cleansing data
The common mistake with email marketing is to think of it as a volume marketing method - lots of us think that our lists need to be as large as possible, this leads to a reticence to delete email addresses from it.
If your list contains dead email addresses or people who haven’t engaged with your mailer for a long time, then these really need to be deleted.
Low rates of engagement and bounces can really cause damage to your future deliverability. Service providers will penalise you for that and will lower the sending score of your email server.
4. Not optimising your images
If the image looks great, most of us don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the file size. If you are using images in your email marketing, as most of us are, then you really need to keep the file sizes as small as possible.
With most of us viewing emails on mobile devices, large file sizes of images can cause a frustrating viewing experience, you need to sit there waiting until your device has downloaded the image before it displays.
Large image sizes can also impact how inbox friendly your mailer is, many spam filters will penalise emails that contain images with large file sizes by sending them to the spam filter.
As a rule of thumb, it’s worth trying to keep your image sizes underneath 200kb. There are some great image optimisation services available such as tinypng.com that will downsize the file size without affecting the image quality.
5. Burying your call to action
The call to action is one of the most important parts of your mailer - it’s the part that asks your viewer to do something.
A common mistake is to put the call to action too far down the page. Typically this could be a large button, inviting the viewer to click to contact you or visit your online store.
If this button is too far down, then the viewer will need to scroll in order to see it - often, people just won’t do that. They may read the first section of text and then their attention will start to move on to the next email and yours may be deleted without them ever seeing the button.
Ok. so that’s our rundown of the top 5 email marketing mistakes that you could already be making. Following these five simple pointers will make a large difference to the success of your email marketing, both in terms of deliverability and viewers engagement.