The five most common email marketing mistakes

The five most common email marketing mistakes

There is a lot of advice out there to help ensure that your email campaign is beautifully created, sent out successfully and, most importantly, well-received.

What many people tend to forget — and this goes for seasoned email campaigners and newbies alike — are the common mistakes that are all too often made when you are developing the perfect campaign.

Here are five of the most common email marketing blunders. If you successfully avoid them, it will ensure that your content is relevant, good to look at, grammatically sound and entirely logical:

• You want and/or expect instant success. Banish the thought from your head immediately. With email marketing your aim is to develop a relationship with your customer and this takes time, sometimes more time than you think you have. You’ll need to have patience and a strong resolve. You and I know, understand and accept that Rome was most certainly not built in a day so don’t be in such a rush to get that campaign out “like yesterday!” Make sure you are 100 per cent happy with it and it has been tried and tested before you send it out. You won’t regret it.
   
• Your message isn’t clear. You want it to be powerful, concise and with a strong call to action. If there is any doubt in your mind that it lacks these points then you need to reassess it, even if it sets you back time-wise. It will be worth it in the long term, believe me.
   
• You aren’t entirely sure you have permission. If in doubt, here’s a quick question you can ask yourself to check: “Have they specifically requested to receive my emails?” If the answer is “no”, then you have to go back to the drawing board and work on building up your subscriber list. It’s a simple enough task and will ensure that your emails aren’t deemed spam.
   
• You have subscribers on your list that haven’t heard zip from you in six months. Go through the process of getting them to remember you again. Send a friendly “remember me?” email and guide them to sign up to your newsletter again. It’s the best way to ensure that your subscriber list remains entirely “opt-in” and therefore more valuable.
   
• You buy an opt-in list. I have one word for you here and that’s “unscrupulous”. Your target audience is specific and so is the product or service that you are trying to market, so sending your campaign out to 20,000 people who you don’t know and who certainly don’t know you is not a good idea. Neither is getting blacklisted for spamming, which is what would probably happen if you took this unsavoury route. 

Georgia Christian is the editor of the online email marketing service Mail Blaze.

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