Email is one of the most powerful marketing channels to use. It often offers the highest ROI, and it allows you to scale your presence in a personal way by creating a one-to-one connection with large email lists. It’s a direct line of communication with prospects that can encourage them to become a client. However, it takes a lot to have success when it comes to email marketing. There are many mistakes that can easily be made. To help avoid these mistakes, we pulled together 4 email marketing mistakes to avoid for better engagement.
Not showing empathy
Some businesses have given email marketing a bad reputation by sending sales-like emails that clutter up their recipient’s inboxes. Avoid being this type of email marketer at all costs. This will not only give you poor results, but it will also make your emails ineffective in the long run.
A better approach is to send relevant emails that are customized by list segments. This type of empathy for your recipients will not only give your emails long-term success, but it will also make those receiving your emails more likely to engage with them. If you want your recipients to look forward to receiving your emails, you have to send emails that are relevant and valuable to them.
Not setting a goal or objective
Not all emails serve the same purpose. Those on your list come from a variety of sources, and they all have different perspectives. The goal of emails to new or unengaged segments of your list is to get them to open to your message. It’s important to focus on building trust and establishing your expertise early on with prospects. The best way to accomplish this is to share valuable thought leadership on topics that they care about. Emails that are sent to more engaged segments are better suited to have action-oriented goals. It’s less challenging to get engaged subscribers to open your emails, it’s more about getting action out of them. The goal of your email should dictate the structure of the email.
Not cleaning your list
Regularly sending emails to a large list of unengaged contacts won’t do you any good. It will take your sender’s reputation and your ability to get into inboxes. This is why it’s important to clean your list. Regularly sending to invalid email addresses will negatively impact your sender’s reputation. Along with this, if you acquire a fraudulent and spam email address can get you blacklisted. This will have a lasting impact on your ability to get into inboxes.
Sending high image-to-text ratio emails
Using images in email is not a bad thing. Sometimes images help paint a clear picture in ways that go beyond what you can do with text. However, you shouldn’t go overboard with images. Including large images with little text is problematic for three reasons:
- Email-filtering tools may automatically filter out your emails from the inbox if the ratio is too high.
- Images have to be downloaded. The size and quantity of images used in an email may cause it to load slowly or not at all.
- If your recipient has images turned off, they’ll most likely miss the message you’re trying to convey in your email.