Email marketing is the key to getting repeat customers and increasing your profits. But that doesn’t mean that any email campaign will get these results. Email marketing takes strategy, and any major mistake can significantly affect your earnings.

Therefore, it’s beneficial to know the most common email marketing mistakes so you can avoid them. Recently, Phillip Rivers from Tetra took to Twitter to list out 13 email marketing mistakes he encounters often. These mistakes cost companies tens of thousands of dollars in revenue and keep them from expanding their brand. In this article, we’ll dive a bit deeper into these mistakes and provide tips on how to avoid them.

1. Not Having A Lead Generation Offer

Most people are a bit resistant to giving their email addresses away to people they don’t know. With the increase in junk and spam mail and the prevalence of data hacks, many people will not provide their email addresses willy-nilly without getting something in return. That’s why you need a lead generation offer to entice them.

Providing a lead generation offer makes this interaction an equal exchange. By subscribing to your email list, they get a reward and potentially more in the future. When you provide your visitors with an instant benefit, they will be more likely to come back for more.

The initial lead generation offer can be anything from a discount to a free guide or book. Feel free to get creative and offer unique options that are on-brand and appeal to your target audience.

2. Not Testing Your Lead Generation Offers

However, not all lead generation offers are equal. Depending on your business, some ideas will bring in numerous new customers, while others will barely make a dent in your metrics. But you won’t know which lead generation offers will make the greatest impact until you test them out.

Without A/B testing, you’re just shooting in the dark. It’s much harder to tell how your lead generations are performing without testing and analyzing key metrics. So instead of just settling for a single lead generation offer, such as a percentage discount, test a few different options and see which one is the most effective.

3. Not Having Core Flows

As your customer base grows, you will encounter numerous situations that can benefit from automation. After all, you can’t craft an email for every single action your customers take. Automating emails saves you time, money, and energy, making it an essential part of your email marketing strategy.

Core email flows are automatically sent out to entice your customer to take a specific action. These flows are triggered to mail out when the system detects specific behaviors from your potential customers.

For example, perhaps a customer added something to their cart but never checked out. An effective email flow for this situation will automatically trigger shortly after the customer abandons the cart to remind them that they still need to check out. This reminder increases the chance that the customer will return and finish that purchase instead of abandoning the cart completely. Otherwise, the customer may not return, and you lose out on a sale.

Other examples of core email flows include sending a thank you email after a visitor subscribes and sending a confirmation email after a purchase.

4. Not A/B Testing Core Flows

But of course, you need to test your flows as well! Just because the email gets sent out doesn’t mean it is fully effective in getting your desired results. Therefore, you need to test a few options to see which emails keep your customers returning.

Just as with lead generation offers, make sure to conduct A/B testing on your flows to improve their effectiveness. You want to test every aspect of the email, such as when it is sent (i.e., 5 minutes after the action or 1 hour afterward), the wording in the subject headline, the lead generation incentives provided, etc.

5. Not Sending The Right Amount Of Campaigns

Getting the perfect email frequency can be tricky. On the one hand, you don’t want to be inconsistent or send out campaigns so rarely that your audience doesn’t care. On the other hand, you don’t want to send out emails every day and drive your subscribers so crazy that they unsubscribe. You need to find a balance that keeps your subscribers interested without burning them out.

There will be quite a bit of trial and error in figuring this out. The frequency you send out your emails will depend on your brand and the products you offer. Some companies find the optimal frequency is once a week, while other brands profit the most from sending out emails 3-5 times per week. Take some time to test out your campaigns until you find your sweet spot.

6. Hard Selling With Every Email

Nobody likes being hard-sold on something constantly. Your audience will burn out quickly if you hard sell your products in every single email. Therefore, you need to mix up your strategy and partake in soft selling strategies.

Soft selling strategies are more subtle yet help strengthen your relationship with your subscribers over time. They provide your subscribers with a benefit, all while still enticing them to buy your product.

For example, you could occasionally send out emails with customer testimonials explaining how your product changed your customers’ lives. This provides your subscribers with an engaging story but also an enticement to buy your product. Or you can send out an educational email about some aspect of your product or industry. Your customers benefit from learning something interesting and, as a result, may be more enticed to buy your product.

As you can see, these strategies can be just as effective, if not more, at selling your products, even though they are not as direct as hard-selling. Therefore, you’ll want to incorporate them into your overall email marketing strategy.

7. Being Afraid To Sell

On the other hand, you don’t want to avoid selling altogether! People subscribe because they like your products, so you need to sell them your products! Though you don’t want to come off as desperate or pushy when it comes to selling, you shouldn’t be afraid to sell, either. That’s why soft-selling strategies like the ones just mentioned work well. You’re still selling your product but aren’t burning out your customers with an annoying hard-sell tactic.

8. Not Segmenting Your List

It’s easy to view your email subscriber list as simply that: a list. But this list is full of real people with unique habits and interests. Though they all have the common factor of loving your brand and products, they are still all unique human beings.

Because of this, email segmentation is important. If you send out all your emails to your entire subscriber list, you’ll find that some subscribers won’t be interested, and for others, it simply won’t be the right timing. Curating your emails to particular segments will get you more interactions and, therefore, more sales.

There are numerous ways you can segment your list. For example, you can simply segment everyone based on their activity history, creating segments for one-time buyers, new buyers, repeat buyers, etc. Or you can allow them to choose their preferences when they sign up or edit their accounts. For example, some subscribers may only want to be alerted about sales and promotions, while others also want to learn about new products. By asking your subscribers for their preferences, you can let them determine what segment they want to be in.

9. Not Optimizing For Mobile

So you’ve taken the time to create the perfect campaign. The writing is enticing, you have a great lead generation offer, the design looks fantastic, and you’re ready to send it out. But then you look at how it looks on your mobile, and it looks terrible. Though a few years ago, creating the perfect email for desktop use was good enough, now you have to keep mobile users in mind. Nowadays, more than half of emails are opened on smartphones, so you need to optimize all your emails for mobile screens.

There are numerous strategies that help with mobile optimization. First, keeping all your copy concise is essential because phone users don’t want to read a giant wall of text. Second, keep your subject lines short, so they don’t get cut off. Finally, keep your calls to action (CTAs) front and center so they’re easier to find. Though there are many other strategies you can utilize, these three tips will immediately improve your emails for mobile.

10. Not Matching Aesthetics To Brand

You probably already know this, but brand consistency is critical! Your emails are probably the primary way your customers interact with your brand, so every campaign must be consistent with your branding.

There are numerous elements to keep in mind to accomplish this. Some companies can get away with a more minimalist approach with text-only designs. However, eCommerce brands typically need more aesthetic elements such as color and photos. That means there are far more elements incorporated that need to complement the overall branding. Therefore, don’t just add anything you think looks nice. Take a step back and pay attention to what each element says about you and your brand. Make sure everything complements each other before sending out your campaign.

11. Not Including CTAs

What’s the point of email marketing if you don’t include calls to action (CTAs)? The whole point of crafting the perfect email marketing strategy is to increase your customers’ interactions and your sales. An email without a CTA can be engaging and aesthetically appealing, but it won’t get your audience to actually do anything. A well-planted CTA will put the idea in their head to click on your link, purchase a product, or do anything else you want them to do.

12. Not Personalizing

Generalized emails are fine, but they don’t make your audience feel special. Personalized email campaigns bring that extra touch that will entice your customers to buy your product. Adding some specialization turns your campaign from a general selling campaign to a personal request. It creates the impression that you are personally asking the customer directly to conduct a certain action, such as downloading an ebook, buying a product, or reading your blog.

There are numerous ways you can personalize your campaigns to your audience. One of the most common tactics is collecting your subscribers’ first names and addressing them by that name in every email. Another option is to personalize the ‘From’ name. Instead of the ‘From’ name just being your company’s name, you can customize it to your personal name or to display [your name] from [insert company here]. This helps customers feel like they are being emailed by a real person, not a faceless automated marketing campaign.

13. Not Investing In Copywriting

Automation, brand design, and testing are all cool but copywriting is the foundation of email marketing success. The visuals and offers may initially entice your audience, but your message keeps them coming back. Therefore, you need to invest in good copywriting.

There are two ways you can do this. On the one hand, you can invest time into learning great copywriting skills yourself. There are numerous free and cheap courses online that will help you master the essentials of copywriting. However, if you don’t have the time or would just rather have someone else do it for you, then you should invest good money in hiring a professional copywriter.

Contact Us For Help With Your Email Marketing Strategy

You’re bound to make a few mistakes when crafting the perfect email marketing strategy. However, by reading up on the most common and costly errors, you’re more likely to avoid them and maximize your earnings.

Nevertheless, it can help to get the advice and guidance of an email marketing expert. At Brandastic, we want to help you perfect your email marketing strategy and grow your subscriber list. We can help you design the perfect email campaigns that will increase your profits and expand your business.

Ready to take your email marketing to the next level? Book a call with an expert today!