5 deadly mistakes in email marketing

There are some things an email marketer can do that while they won’t kill you, they will make you dead to your subscribers. They’re innocent enough mistakes and some not totally egregious errors. However, when not taken into consideration ... they can mean the difference between email marketing success and failure. Here are five deadly mistakes made in email marketing.

Unbalanced content

Big blocks of text make everybody’s eyes glaze over. They’ll scan for anything in bold and headlines and probably ignore all the copy you worked hard on crafting.
All the same, emails with too many photos will probably land you in the spam folder ... or at the very least go unseen thanks to inbox clients with images automatically disabled.

Neglecting list hygiene

It’s easy to see the logic that the more people you have in your email list, the more chances you’ll have to make a sale. Bigger isn’t always better, though. Actually, if you keep subscribers in your list that aren’t opening your emails, it can start to hurt your deliverability. Say you send a monthly newsletter. If a subscriber hasn’t opened your last six emails, they probably don’t want to receive them any more. They’re just too lazy to unsubscribe. Clean them out of your list, or at the very least move them to a new list. Try to reengage them with a separate campaign. If that fails, delete them for good.

Stay the same

Say you wear a black suit and white shirt to work everyday. Then one day you come in wearing a grey suit and a pink shirt. Everyone is going to take notice. Switching up your design once in a while will keep your subscribers from getting bored and tuning you out.

Consider the funnel

Email is just one step in a company’s overall marketing plan. It is a touchpoint with customers or leads that is part of a bigger goal. Always keep the ultimate goal in mind. Your email could do the job it’s supposed to, but it won’t matter if the rest of the funnel isn’t in order. If the goal of an email campaign is to bring traffic to your website, make sure your website is doing its job as well.

Doing it all yourself

No, I don’t mean you need a team of employees and interns at your beck and call to do great email marketing. I mean, you should automate as much of it as you can. Autoresponders are a great tool in your arsenal. They’re the Ronco ShHowtime Rotisserie of email marketing. You can just “set it, and forget it!” Things like birthday emails, or triggered email campaigns can do all the work for you after you set them up once.