Just like when you check twice before crossing the street, you should be checking your email twice before hitting send. Okay, maybe they aren’t all things you should check twice before hitting send, but you should make sure you aren’t making these mistakes before sending out an email campaign. People can open your email with a click of a button, and they can also unsubscribe from your list with a click of a button. Look over these mistakes to make sure that your readers are clicking open.
Mistake #1: Forgetting About Your Audience
You need to have your customers in mind during every step of your email marketing process. Break your campaigns up into as small of segments as you can. This helps to personalize it more to things that they are interested in to get rid of access clutter. It shows that you’re paying attention to their needs, and helps build relationships.
Mistake #2: Sending With a Personal Reply-to Address
Sure, it loses the personal touch by not using a personal reply email, but it has a more polished look to it. You don’t want to send out your email campaign to your customers with your somename@aol.com email address. You should have a company email, preferably with your website’s domain, like: info@companydomain.com . This helps to sort out your email, and looks ten times better in the eyes of your subscribers.
Mistake #3: Spamming Your Contacts
This goes hand in hand with mistake number one. If you don’t segment your audience and they receive all of your emails, they will feel like you are spamming them. You will never want to send out every email to every customer, because every customer is different. Pay attention to your customer’s needs and only send them emails they will receive value from. This will help strengthen your relationship with them because they will appreciate that you are paying attention to them, as well as not making them feel as if they are being spammed.
Mistake #4: Ignoring Mobile Email Readers
With the way that technology has changed, it is hard to believe that anyone would ignore mobile email readers, but hey, it happens. Don’t let this happen to your email readers, because they will resent you for it. More than half of people reading your email will be reading it on their smart phone or tablet, so being mobile friendly is a must!
Mistake #5: Writing Like a Used-Car Salesman
Please don’t write “limited time offer” or “buy now” in an email. You will sound like a used car salesman, and more likely than not it will be picked up by spam filters and your subscriber will never receive it in their inbox. Things that spam filters pick up on are: several exclamation marks, using all caps, coloring fonts bright red or green,and using test in the subject line.
Mistake #6: Ignoring Campaign Reports
No matter which email- marketing service you use, you can almost always monitor how each campaign did. Never ever ignore these type of reports! This is where you can determine who has been clicking on a lot of your links within your email, who opened them more than once, and who hasn’t opened them. Look over your report after every campaign you send to analyze your trends. Change your campaigns according once you find out what is working and what isn’t.