Avoiding common email marketing mistakes

Unlike a quick communique with a colleague, more thought and planning is required to execute a successful email marketing campaign. The absence of this strategy can lead to low engagement rates and even damage your brand.

One of my favorite sayings goes something like this: It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

This perfectly describes my attitude toward email marketing. Given the choice, I'd prefer not running an email marketing campaign than rushing through a poorly thought-out and executed one. Even a single blunder can reduce the effectiveness of future mailings and significantly damage your brand.

So let's look at some common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.

Inadequate (or non-existent) planning

While it's important to plan the approach for individual email marketing messages, it's crucial to double your efforts for multi-email campaigns that span weeks or months.

If you want to maintain interest from the first to last message, you can't make it up as you go—especially if you expect messaging and design continuity throughout the campaign. Otherwise, your overall message will lack cohesion. Not only will you risk low reader interest, you might end up losing readers who were already interested.

This doesn't mean you need to write and design every message in the campaign before you start. But you should at the very least create a blueprint that defines:

• Overall theme or idea behind the campaign
• Length of the campaign
• Message schedule
• Goal and CTA of each message
• Strategy to maintain interest from beginning to end

Lacking a clear goal

What do you hope to achieve with your email marketing campaign? And please don't say “to increase revenue".

Yes, that's the ultimate goal for most businesses, but your messaging needs a more focused purpose. Is it to get subscriber signups for your newsletter? Is it to achieve a certain number of downloads for your newly released software? Is it to increase brand awareness and customer engagement?

Narrow your goals for each message in the overall campaign and focus on that “micro-goal". Otherwise, without a specific objective, it will be tough to quantify the success of each message and the campaign as a whole.

Using a generic approach

It's simple: use the right tool for the right job. So don't try driving a nail through a 2x4 with a chef's knife.

You shouldn't use the same email template, copy, and style for everything you're trying to achieve. You'll end up with low open rates and even lower response rates. Instead, use different email types and content to serve different purposes:

• Promotional emails announce special offers and discounts.
• Newsletters are regularly scheduled emails that include company news, tips and how-tos, and blog posts.
• Feedback or survey emails ask customers for their thoughts on a company's products or services.
• Lead nurturing emails guide potential customers through the sales funnel.
• Seasonal and holiday emails are a fun way to connect brand promotions with holidays or seasons.
• Re-engagement emails encourage inactive subscribers to interact again with the brand.

Not defining or understanding your target audience

I've always stressed the importance of knowing and understanding your audience. The same applies here, probably even more so.

But all too often, companies use a generic, one-size-fits-all approach. Would you send the same email to a Gen Z gaming startup that you would for old-school banking executives? It won't resonate with them, you'll risk boring them, and you'll end up with low engagement rates.

You can read more about this in my previous articles about properly starting an email and observing business email etiquette.

Using misleading subject lines

Don't you hate it when you see a great deal at a store and, once lured in, are told the item you wanted to buy is out of stock and pressured to purchase a different (potentially more expensive) item instead? That's called a bait and switch.

There's a similar tactic in email marketing: clickbait.

Clickbait subject lines often use:

• Exaggerated or bold language: “This message will change your life!"
• Fear or false urgency: “Someone could be breaking in right now."
• Incomplete information: “You have 24 hours to respond or…"

Sensationalized subject lines always underdeliver and lead to disappointment because the actual email content doesn't meet the expectations set by the subject line. If done too often, they'll damage trust and result in higher spam reports. So stop turning your subject lines into subject lies.

Not testing or proofreading your messages

An improperly formatted or error-laden email shows a lack of professionalism—even laziness.

Ensure you test and proofread your messages before you send them. It only takes a few minutes to notice that your message looks wonky on mobile devices or that there's an embarrassing typo.

If you make a mistake that requires a follow-up apology/correction email, do it and own up to the error. But if these mistakes happen too often, your recipients will stop taking you seriously and view your emails as amateurish.

Sending too many emails

Be respectful of your readers' time, and don't expect higher response rates just because you send more messages. In fact, sending too many messages, especially over a short period, can overwhelm readers and lead to unsubscribes or cause them to flag you as spam.

Frequent messaging causes content saturation, and your email becomes white noise. The result? The impact of your communications will be significantly lessened with each successive email.

Remember: one skillfully crafted email can garner a better response than three carelessly thrown-together messages.

Unclear or complex call to action (CTA)

Your email marketing goal is what you hope to achieve; your CTAs are the mechanisms to facilitate that goal. But to get readers to perform the desired action, your CTAs must be:

1. Clear and concise: You can use clever and creative text in email to catch and maintain readers' attention. But make your CTAs easy to understand, without forcing them to sift through or decipher mounds of copy. If they're confused about what to do, they won't do it.
2. Easy to perform: Unless you're dealing with recipients who are already familiar with your brand or have a vested interest in your messaging, getting an unsympathetic or ambivalent reader to do something is going to be tough—so make it as easy to do as possible.
3. Singularly focused: Carefully write a single, focused CTA. Don't give them a long laundry list of to-dos or complex instructions.

Closing thoughts…

Email marketing is a vital communication tool for brands of any size. They give you the chance to create opportunities for your business and form meaningful connections with customers.

Keep in mind that successful email marketing campaigns aren't one-dimensional. They're a mix of tried-and-tested strategies, new and creative ways to use technology, and fundamental understanding of your customers. When all three are used in equal measure, you give your brand a sustainable recipe for success.