The 10 Most Common Email Marketing Mistakes

Email marketing is a powerful method for connecting to your target market. If you don’t have a specific target market in mind just yet, you could be missing out on some great opportunities to be more effective. That’s because the more you narrow your focus and zone in on a specific market (ie. 18-25-year-old male college students, 60-65-year-old working women, etc.), the more effective your marketing efforts can and will be.

Now, when it comes to email marketing, mistakes can be made. And they can be costly. The more you learn about some common mistakes, the easier it will be for you to avoid them and, ultimately, avoid wasting valuable time.

Here are 6 of the most common email marketing mistakes you’ll want to avoid.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #1: Not getting permission.

If you send an email to someone you don’t know without permission (meaning, they didn’t sign up to receive something from you), that’s called … spam. Not only is spam illegal in many jurisdictions around the world, it’s also annoying.

If you want to be blacklisted by your key demographic, then by all means, go for it.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #2: Having poor quality subject lines.

Check out your email inbox right now. No, go ahead … I’ll wait. What do you notice about all those subject lines? You probably have just a few characters before it gets cut off, right?

Something obscure, that doesn’t grab attention, and from people you don’t know (and forget you signed up to receive info from them) aren’t likely going to inspire you to open them. If someone doesn’t open your email, it’s a missed opportunity!

Common Email Marketing Mistake #3: Sending a ton of them.

You get excited about building an email list. Hey, I get that. No, I do. But slow down. Just because you’ve reached your first 100 (or 10 or 1,000 or fill in the number) doesn’t mean you can just send them dozens of emails every single day.

Be selective and patient. One to three per week usually works well. It keeps them thinking about you, but not ‘smacking them over the head every hour’ thinking of you.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #4: Ignoring data.

Use a reliable email generator and they’ll be able to provide you with great data, such as opens, reads, click throughs, and more. When you pay attention to this data, you’ll know when those emails are effective if there are better times to send them, and more.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #5: Not really having a purpose to the email.

Each email should have a specific purpose. There should be no ‘fishing’ and ‘hoping’ your prospects like the content. If you don’t know how to write well, hire someone.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #6: Forgetting a call to action.

It’s easy to overlook how important a call-to-action is, especially in a newsletter, but the main point you’re trying to achieve with these emails is to boost sales! How are you going to boost those sales if you don’t call on your readers to take action?

Give them a simple CTA (Call To Action). Put it in the middle of the end, but make sure it’s in there somewhere. Otherwise, that’s going to be a lot of missed opportunities.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #7. Wrong segmentation

When people get irrelevant information, they tend to delete it or mark it as spam. Is that what you need? Hardly so.

Which is why, create a buyer persona, segment all the clients, customers, and subscribers into groups, know their pain points and share the information every person is interested in.

Relevant information means loyal leads and subscribes and better conversions.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #8. Not using automation tools

Email spreading is a truly time-consuming task so you need to use an email marketing automation tool. One of such tools is drip campaigns.

Drip emails are the messages sent to people in accordance with the schedule and the actions the recipients perform. If the trigger is Contact clicked the link in the email and the person performs this action within a set time, the next email will land into the Inbox folder in a while.

You don’t have to spend time following who of the recipients have performed this or that action and which email is to be sent next.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #9. Using too many colors

How often do you open an email and it’s just a cacophony of colors? Everything is so bright and you don’t know where to look first. That’s not cool, that’s not professional.

You need to know how to use colors in email marketing:

• do not use too many colors, three is maximum;
• the red color is the best for CTA;
• use natural color combinations;
• take advantage of the corporate colors.

Common Email Marketing Mistake #10. Ignoring plain-text emails

Quite often, professionals give preference to bright HTML-emails. In fact, colorful emails are not professional: they look really spammy and are less spam-traps resistant.

This means that it is better to use plain-text emails. By the way, within drip campaign tools, you can create well-performing emails: they look professional, show higher delivery and open rates.