Whatever the nature or size of your business, incorporating email campaigns into your marketing strategy is vital.

Many brands and businesses think that email marketing is obsolete. But this is not the case. Despite the advent of various digital marketing strategies, it remains highly effective. According to the DMA Marketer Email Tracker 2019, email campaigns deliver a high ROI. For every $1 spent, you can expect an average return of $42.

It is estimated that there are now over 3.9 billion users and this figure is forecasted to grow to 4.3 billion in the next three years. That number represents half of the world’s population. Every day, around 306.4 million emails are exchanged. These staggering statistics are enough to convince nearly 9 out of every 10 marketers to use email as their primary communication and marketing channel.

Despite the impressive statistics of email marketing, some brands and marketers suffer unimpressive results with email marketing. Others completely ditch email marketing for its perceived ineffectiveness.

If your email campaign is struggling, chances are, you’re doing something wrong that needs to be corrected. These email marketing mistakes can hold you back. Unfortunately, these errors are very common that many don’t even realize what they are doing are wrong.

Modifying your approach and avoiding these mistakes can help ensure success. Here are the five most common email marketing pitfalls you need to avoid at all costs.

Poor subject lines

The first thing readers see in an email is the subject line. Considering that people only spend a fraction of a second on each email, you want the subject line to be interesting enough to catch their attention. Marketing emails with poor subject lines end up unread, deleted, or marked as spam. Sadly, this is a common mistake for many marketers and businesses.

Basically, the subject line must do two things: compel readers to open the email and take action. The following characteristics help increase the chances of achieving these goals:

• Concise, direct to the point and sweet
• Add value to its recipient
• Interesting but not sensationalizing, tricky, or deceiving
• Personalized and professional
• Avoid unnecessary, filler words

Your prospects receive tons of emails every day. If your subject line does not connect with them, they’ll readily skip or delete it. As such, it is very important to focus on creating effective titles.

Lacks call-to-action

When sending emails, you need to have a clear objective such as to compel recipients to sign-up into your program, share your social media post, join an upcoming event, or simply to buy your product or service.

Call-to-action (CTA) is vital to drive your goal home. Sending emails that lack CTA is wasteful to both you and your client. It wouldn’t add any value to their life as well as it wouldn’t have any impact on your marketing campaign. All your emails should have a purpose and a CTA helps you achieve it.

On the other hand, you should not also overdo with CTA, which is another common mistake. Some marketers go overboard by adding several CTAs in one message. As a result, readers get confused and overwhelmed with your instructions and end up not doing any of the

Each email should focus on a specific objective. Thus, you need to create a cohesive email that primes and sets up the reader towards the desired action. From the subject line to email content down to the conclusion, it should focus on the CTA. This can greatly help improve your conversion rate.

Ignoring sender reputation

Specialists at email address validator Byteplant emphasized the importance of sender reputation in an effective email marketing campaign. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t give it much attention.

Sender reputation refers to the score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns your email. Good sender reputation results in better email deliverability. Meanwhile, poor sender reputation might lead to your emails immediately marked as spam or even banning your emails completely.

Many factors affect sender reputation, namely daily email volume, email bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. Sending out large amounts of emails at once, especially from a new IP address, negatively impacts your reputation. To avoid this, set an incremental schedule to prime your IP address and avoid ISPs from initiating an investigation.

Bounce rates refer to emails that are sent back to you. There are many reasons for why emails bounce such as undeliverable email address, inactive email account, and recipient inbox full. Regular email list hygiene can help reduce returned emails, which makes it crucial in your email marketing campaign.

Another factor is the number of contacts unsubscribing from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate alerts ISPs. Your account might be flagged and investigated for possible spamming. This can be mitigated by providing a double opt-in feature wherein subscribers are required to click a link from a welcome email before they are added to the email list. While this added step will reduce your overall subscribers, it also leads to a better contact list with a higher conversion rate.

Sending too many emails

Email marketing is not about quantity but rather quality. Bombarding your subscribers with emails is not the way to do it.

When subscribers sign up to your list, they did so because they want something of value from them. Your goal is to provide value to them through your emails.

Limit your email promotions to at least once a week or twice a month. Realistically, consumers don’t want to visit your website every day. Sending them unsolicited emails can only make them feel annoyed. Obviously, you don’t want your brand to have this association.

Not segmenting

Back in the days, email marketers and brands relied on email blasts. While it might have worked at some point, the ‘one size fits all’ approach proves futile and wasteful.

Nowadays, relevance is key to email marketing. Every email you send must connect to its reader. Segmenting your contact list is vital in ensuring that your messages are relevant to its recipients. Regrettably, only very few email campaigns are segmented which makes it a very prevalent mistake.

Segmentation refers to classifying subscribers into different groups. For example, you can segment subscribers based on interests, location, gender, job title, industry, etc. Messaging should be customized to suit the audience. This can help increase customer engagement and improve conversion rates. Ideally, you should not proceed with an email campaign without segmenting your list.

To improve your segmentation, you need to have more data about your subscriber. This enables you to create valuable messages.

Final Thoughts

As long as users trust email as a communication channel, email marketing will continue to out-perform other digital marketing strategies.
However, if your email marketing campaign is not performing as planned, it is time to review your tactics as you might be doing something wrong. Frequently, correcting these mistakes is a lot easier than identifying them. Start with this list of common errors and see how it can improve your email marketing campaign.