9 Email Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid To Convert Better

Email Marketing is not dead. If it was, then its users were not expected to grow in coming years.

Plenty of businesses are still using email marketing to communicate with their audience. And they’re doing good with it too but what they’re lacking on is conversions. But great conversions require perfect email marketing strategy. Strategies that are flawless and infallible.

But like every other imperfect thing in the world, an email marketing strategy can’t also be perfect. But, they can be better. Hence, in this article, I’ll tell you about some common email marketing mistakes you should avoid to improve your email marketing campaigns and reap the best benefits.

9 Email Marketing Mistakes You Should Stop Doing

1. Not Sending Welcome Emails To Your New Subscribers

Not sending welcome emails is one of the biggest email marketing mistakes businesses make. Welcome emails are like the first impression that leave a huge impact on your audience. But many of the brands don’t send them to their new subscribers. This is like inviting people in your party but not even asking for drinks which you should always avoid.

So here are some tips you can use to avoid this big email marketing mistake:

• Send a welcome email whenever someone subscribes

  Sounds obvious! Create a welcome email that you can send to your new subscribers.

• Offer them something to sign up for your services

  I was recently playing an online multiplayer game made by Supercell. When I downloaded the game, they asked me to create a Supercell ID so I don’t lose my progress if I change my device.

  But I didn’t create that ID to save my progress, I did because they were offering a player’s skin for free in return for creating the account.

  That was just an email marketing example to tell you how you can persuade your users to provide more data apart from their email. Here’s a perfect example of a welcome email with an offer

• Introduce them to your business

  A welcome email is sent to a new subscriber who doesn’t know much about your business. You can introduce your business in the welcome email and tell them how you would help them if they stay with your brand.

2. Sending Emails Without A Call-to-action

Conversion is the goal you expect to achieve from your emails. But the emails with plain text only cannot drive conversions. You need something that can move your customers down in your sales funnel. And that something is CTA. There are many CTA hacks in email marketing but few major ones are written below.

Here are a few things you need to take care while sending an email with a CTA:

• Add a clear CTA in your email body

  If you’re adding a CTA, you should add it in a place where it’s clear and easy to notice. Well you don’t have an area like a football ground in your emails but still if you’re adding a small CTA in a corner, your reader may not notice it.

• Test all the factors for that CTA like color, placement, message

  It doesn’t sound very effective but a minor change in the CTA color has improved open rates of many businesses.

  Source: Business2community

  Always test your emails with A/B testing to find out the best performing template and proceed with that.

3. Outreaching Each Subscriber With Similar Message

Since every user has a different need, your job is to find out those needs. Once you do that, craft an email according to it and it’ll get you more clicks and conversions.

Here’s how you can avoid this email marketing mistake in your business:

• Segment your customers as per their characteristics

  Employ the email marketing segmentation techniques using email marketing tools. This will help you bifurcate your customers who share similar characteristics into different groups. After segmenting them, you can create campaigns that are dedicated only to them. Leveraging this technique will make you witness the great benefits of customer segmentation.

  Source: Campaignmonitor

• Create different campaigns for different users

  You can’t send a Happy Birthday email to each individual user on the same day. You have to filter out those users who have their birthday on that day and send mails only to them. This will increase your open rates and click through rates since the user will feel more connected to your email.

  Moreover, it’ll also enhance your brand image and make them think you don’t forget them.

4. Focusing Only On Desktop Users

70% of your readers will be reading your emails on their mobile device. And I’m one of those 70% too. If you’re not optimizing your emails for mobiles, you’re missing out on a great opportunity for better conversion rates.

Here’s how to avoid this email marketing mistake in your business:

• Optimize your emails for mobile

  Optimizing emails for mobile isn’t rocket science. You need to follow some very common measures. Just keep the paragraph under 3-4 lines, make the email body easily skimmable, use images with describing alt text, remove distracting elements.

  Here’s a clean and perfect example of mobile optimized email I received from Adobe

• Send emails to yourself first

  Don’t just final your emails in one go. Never ever send any email before cross checking them. In the case of mobile optimization, check your mails on mobile apps, send them to yourself first and your other team members because once your emails reach your audience, there’s no going back.

5. Making An Unprofessional Impact

An unprofessional impact can shake the loyalty of the users. And since customer loyalty is one of the biggest factors for business growth, you must always avoid email marketing mistakes that abate the customers’ trust in your brand.

Here’s how you can create professional emails that build customer loyalty:

• Treat your emails like a blog

  Proofread your blogs 2-3 times to identify the places the readers can get stuck. Check for any typing or grammar errors and rectify if there’s any. Cross verify it with others because everyone has a different perspective.

• Avoid using attachments

  Attachments are used by spammers. If you want your brand to be called spammers, use attachments in your emails. There are some situations where you need to add attachments like when you’re sending a resource. But limit your attachments only to those occasional cases.

6. Using Plenty Of Stock Images

As I said, over 70% of users read emails on their mobile devices and you should optimize for it. One more thing you should take care of is that most of the mobile users have that “Load Images” feature disabled on their mobile device. This means that if you’re using plenty of images, chances are they won’t load in your audience’s mobile.

So here’s what you can do to avoid this:

• Describe your images with alt text

  Adding Alt Text will display a message in place of the images. So if the images don’t load, readers can read the message to understand what type of image was there. Thus, your Alt Text should be descriptive that can explain what your image is about. Here’s a perfect example:

  Source: Optinmonster

• Avoid using stock images

  Stock images are royalty free pictures that can be used for designing purposes. Since they are free to use, many of us use it at various places. So the chances are that your users must’ve seen the images elsewhere you’re using in your emails. Here are some best places to find free stock photos for your emails.

7. Not Tracking Campaign Performance

You can try all the tactics but your email campaigns won’t improve if you don’t analyze how they are performing. Among all the email marketing mistakes, this one can be a great hindrance between better conversion rates for your business.

So here’s how you can avoid this email marketing mistake in your business:

• Use tools to track campaign performance

  There are many CRMs and Email Marketing tools that show a complete report of your campaigns. Analyze them after a specific time period and check if there’s a point you’re lacking behind. If yes, make changes, test, and repeat the cycle.

• Don’t let misconceptions dilute your data

  Talking about performance tracking metrics then there are many misconceptions regarding them. These misconceptions can lay out inaccurate data so you’ve to clear those misconceptions before analyzing your metrics. One of the major one is about open rates.

  People think an email is considered open whenever a user clicks and opens your email. But the reality is different.

  An email is considered open only when a user enables the images to be displayed in the email, or clicks a link in your mail. Apart from this, if you send 1000 emails and 40 of them were not delivered, you’d have to eliminate those 40 emails while calculating the open rates. Because the emails that were not delivered can’t be opened as well.

8. Not Personalizing Your Emails

If you don’t show me something I can connect with, I won’t buy it. Likewise, if you don’t add information that resonates with the user, they won’t click on it. This is something most of the brands don’t leverage. However, I won’t count it among the email marketing mistakes but avoiding it will do miracles for your business.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Analyze your buyer persona to personalize your emails

  Before targeting your audience with emails, create your buyer personas. Buyer persona is the fictional representation of your potential buyers. To create the buyer persona, collect your audience’s details like their age, job title, income, educational background, interests, etc.

• Write personalized copies

  Once you create the buyer persona, your next goal should be to write personalized copies for your emails. However, this becomes a child’s play since you know what your audience wants from you.

9. Providing A Straightforward Subscribe/ Unsubscribe Options

A common email marketing mistake is that brands think the user wants to subscribe or unsubscribe from each of your services. If you’re an iMac user, that doesn’t mean you like the iPhone either. Similarly if a user has subscribed to your emails, that doesn’t mean s/he wants to receive all the emails. Provide them a flexibility to choose their subscriptions.

Here’s how you can do that:

• Allow users to subscribe/ unsubscribe for different categories

  I will not explain much here. A perfect example from HubSpot is enough to make you understand.

  Here a user can pick the service they want to subscribe for. And just like subscribing, whenever a user is unsubscribing, let them pick the services they still want to be subscribed. This’ll give them exactly what they want and increase the trust in your brand.

  If you need some cool email templates for free, you can download HubSpot Email Templates from here.

• Incentivize your subscribers for signing up

  I’ve already explained this in the first point. Offering something to your subscribers for creating an account or providing more data will get your more conversions. Prompt them to subscribe by offering them something for free. You can give them a discount coupon, a free complimentary product, or a free trial to your premium service.

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So those were some of the major email marketing mistakes you must avoid to get better conversions. But these mistakes aren’t limited to 9 only. There are plenty of them and we can’t cover each one in this article so we created a dedicated infographic for it. Check it out:

Final Words

So those were some most common email mistakes to avoid in your business. But remember, growing an email list takes time. You can’t expect results overnight even if you avoid all the aforementioned email marketing mistakes. But being patient and continuously improving your email marketing strategy will definitely give you the results you desire.