The Open Rate Killers: Email Marketing Mistakes You Should Strictly Avoid

In this post, I’ll tell call your attention to some of the mistakes you have been making in your Email marketing exploit and how you can strictly avoid them.

In my previous article we discussed "How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy", you learnt about Content Marketing, and you will agree with me that part of the content marketing strategy will be how to delivering your messages to your target audience or followers via their mailbox.  You’ll market more effectively and get your mails right in the inbox of your target audience if you strictly avoid the email marketing mistakes we will be discussing in the article. It’s a win-win. Ok let's get started!

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You gained a solid base of subscribers, created a gorgeous series of letters and the desired “output” did not happen?

The simplest action is to drop everything, thinking that email marketing is not for you.

But let’s look at it from another side. Your emails not being opened may be due to making one or more of these mistakes.

Shall we check? Email marketing mistakes you should strictly avoid.

1.       You don’t segment your audience

There is little sense in mailing “all.”  If you’re not segmenting subscribers, you don’t understand what they’re interested in. Therefore, your emails are ignored. According to statistics, even the simplest segmentation is able to increase your open rate by 14.4%. While brainstorming on content that interest your personas, you also need to do the segmenting alongside. Divide subscribers into segments according to criteria:

Place of residence;

Gender;

Age;

Interests;

Buying behaviour.

To get to know your readers conduct a simple survey, asking them in return for a gift (discount or bonus). This way, you will get real tips on what topics will be right on target, and you will also be able to generate an additional list of active readers.

2.       You don’t use email list cleaning

If you do not weed out “dead” addresses and remove inactive subscribers from your database, your email open rate will be distorted. It may be that this is the case:

·         People receive your letters, but they aren’t interested;

·         Your emails end up in the spam file.

Create a list of active readers using email validator and get permission from them to receive your emails. 43% of email users send emails to the spam folder if they don’t know who is sending them.

By the way, if you want to know more about email verification we recommend you to read article “How to check email addresses: basis points”.

Here are list of some software that has inbuilt functionality to help validate and remove redundant email addresses.

·         Atomic Email Studio

·         SendBlaster

·         Mailchimp

·         Constact Contact

3.       You don’t care about your sender reputation

This point echoes the previous one. The service with which you send your newsletter will periodically check to whom you’re sending emails, how often and if your recipients complain. It will also check to see whether your emails are opened and whether the links in them are clicked. All this determines your reputation and affects the deliverability of emails.

Your reputation is safe, if:

Subscribers can confirm their subscription and unsubscribe at any time;

You send newsletters only to active readers;

The subscriber may customize the number, type, and frequency of receiving emails. If any of our subscribers is not interested in receiving our newsletter, they can unsubscribe at any time. Do you give users such a possibility?

4.       You don’t care about the timing

Believe me, sending too many emails or sending significantly lower number of emails, are both considered expensive email marketing mistakes to avoid.

Sending too many emails will skyrocket the number of people who unsubscribe, while sending not enough emails will weaken the loyalty-trust bond between you and your subscribers.

There is, unfortunately, no standard email frequency.

Tip: A good idea is to ask new subscribers about preferred number of emails they want to receive in a week.

By avoiding the most costly mistakes, you can greatly improve your chances of pulling off a successful email campaign. Rest assured you will tap into a goldmine of potential if you avoid these. You need to start caring about the timing of your campaigns if you haven't been doing so. Web analytics tools will give you an insight into your audience demographics, and you can from the data obtained be able to determine the best time to send out your Emails. Read Insight from Mailchimp's Send Time Optimization System on Mailchimp’s blog.

5.       You think duplicates will improve your chances

You have to ensure that your contact list is clean and there are no duplicates. In most cases, when you are importing your contact list you need to be sure that there are no repetitions. You can also make use of the software list in Section #2 to clean your database. They will automatically remove duplicate while you import the list for email blasting. So no user get more than one Email in each campaign. Now you know.

6.       Multiple Calls to Action(CTA) in a Single Email

I’ll begin with the most critical one. There are a couple of expensive email marketing mistakes related to Calls to Action (CTAs) that you must avoid.

• First, most email marketers don’t have a clear goal or an objective, thus there aren’t any CTAs in the emails they send out.

• Second, including too many CTAs in a single email results in poor conversion rates and CTR. In this case, you are actually increasing the amount of work that your subscriber has to do.

In both the cases, your emails will most likely make its way to the trash folder or you will see no significant CTR or conversion rate.

7.       Email Subject Line

One of the most critical things to preview and give thought to is the email subject line. You must have noticed that every email client, including gmail, shows a certain portion of the email subject of emails in the inbox. You must know how much of the subject will be viewable inside the inbox and what you have written in that viewable subject portion.

Also, your Email subject should be analysed. Most email marketers always thinks are can send emails out without not checking keyword. Your subject line should be reviewed and ensure you use keywords or phrase rank higher. There are several ways that this could be done. Some of the email marketing software listed in section #2 has the inbuilt features to analyse keywords and there several online web based applications such as ( Coschedule, Post Planner, Google Keyword Planner) will help your analyse your keywords before actually  sending out emails.

In short, your Email Subject Line will determine if your readers will open your email. Besides, emails must be previewed for mobile devices too, as most of the subscribers will be viewing your email on their mobile device. It should look clean and complete.

I know we can't exhaust the list of things to avoid. Please do well to share with us other things we can avoid while sending out Emails.

Thank you.

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This post was written with the assistance of my CEO/Head of Digital Marketing and Digital Marketing Manager of TopYouGo Digital Marketing Agency. Thanks!