Emails are one of the most effective and cost-productive sales and marketing outreach channels. As reported by SaleCycle,
Advertising and marketing emails reportedly influence the buying decision of 50.7% of customers.
With a return on investment (ROI) of $42 for every dollar spent, many B2B sales and marketing teams use emails to gain direct access to customers, improve sales conversion and increase revenues.
Despite these high success potentials, your emails can perform very poorly if you miss out on some critical factors and have many errors in your email copy.
Although some email marketing mistakes are very obvious and easy to detect, you could be making other worse mistakes without realizing their negative impact on the success of your emails.
In this article, we will be discussing the common email marketing mistakes you should avoid and improvement tips to help you send high-converting email marketing campaigns.
Table of Content
- What is email marketing?
- Why email marketing still works?
- Benefits of Email Marketing campaigns
- The implication of email marketing mistakes to Business
- 25 Email Marketing mistakes
- Tips to avoid email marketing mistakes
- Proven ways to correct your email marketing mistakes
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing practice of connecting and building relationships with leads and customers via email.
It is a powerful form of direct marketing that uses emails to connect, interact and inform prospective customers and existing ones about a company’s new products, discounts, or other services.
Email marketing is also an effective channel used by sales professionals to provide value and nurture leads in the early stage of the sales cycle to improve conversions and revenue.
Based on research, emails are 40% better at converting leads than SEO and social media channels. Some of the most commonly used email marketing campaigns are welcome emails, email newsletters, promotional campaigns, event announcements, lead nurturing emails, sponsorship emails, transactional emails, video emails, etc.
However, with some of the new digital marketing platforms and tools available for sales and marketing teams, do emails still work in 2023?
We will find out in the next section.
Why email marketing still works?
In 2023, a total of 333.2 emails are sent per day to email subscribers with an average value of $48.87.
According to further reports, 29% of B2B marketers rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel while 72% of customers prefer email as their best channel for business communications.
Being one of the oldest forms of marketing, why are marketing emails still effective today? Below are some of the reasons you should implement effective email marketing strategies in your marketing campaigns.
1. Emails generate better results than other marketing channels
Email marketing campaigns generate one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) of over 40% and a conversion rate of 66% for purchases made from promotional email campaigns.
With direct access to prospects and ultimate decision makers, marketers and salespeople stand a better chance of generating more leads and effectively nurturing them to generate revenue.
2. Customers in B2B sales prefer emails to other marketing channels
According to a HubSpot report, 86% of professionals give more priority to email connections than other marketing channels.
Emails are regarded as a business tool used by professionals to introduce a business, interact and build relationships to achieve sales. Based on these existing practices on emails, B2B customers expect email promotions and will most likely consider the message sent via emails than social media.
3. Emails have a higher engagement and retention rate
Emails are effective marketing channels to provide potential and current customers with valuable information about your products or services and their benefits to gradually win them over.
Contrary to other marketing channels, emails allow you to develop a deep connection and relationship with your customers that can positively influence their engagement rate before or during sales and retention rate after sales.
4. Emails allow message personalization
Personalization is critical to developing a successful email marketing campaign.
By addressing your customers by their name and writing about how your products or services can solve their pain points, challenges, or needs, you increase your chances of achieving sales and increasing your customer base.
5. Emails can help you increase your website traffic
An effective email marketing strategy can help you gain highly engaged and valuable prospects and customers.
Through email marketing, you can send those individuals promotional emails and reminders about your new products, offers, discounts, or resources on your websites – hence increasing your website traffic.
6. Emails can be easily integrated with other marketing channels
You can easily add links to your other marketing channels like your social media pages, webinars, websites, landing pages, or content marketing content in your emails to drive traffic to those channels.
Compared to other marketing channels, emails can be easily merged with other marketing strategies or content to achieve better results.
Benefits of Email Marketing campaigns
Email marketing campaigns can help you achieve the following benefits;
1. Increase brand awareness
Email marketing helps you stay on top of your customer’s minds with timely and regular product email reminders to remember your products when they are ready to make a purchase.
2. Build Relationships with customers
Personalized email messages can help you improve your connections and build mutually beneficial relationships with your prospects and customers.
3. Content Promotion
You can use your emails to share and promote relevant content or resources with your prospects
4. Generate leads
According to the content marketing institute, 85% of marketing leads are generated with emails. To generate leads, you can provide your email recipients with valuable marketing messages/resources in exchange for their contact information.
5. Nurture your leads
Email marketing is one of the best lead nurturing channels. You can successfully move your prospects down the sales funnel by constantly providing your recipients with relevant content
6. Increase revenue
You can gain more customers and increase the sales of your products or services with effective email marketing strategies – thereby increasing your organization’s revenue.
The implication of email marketing mistakes to your business
With the current demands and expectations of customers in B2B sales and marketing, it is almost impossible for businesses to drive sales and growth without adhering to the best sales and marketing practices.
Email marketing is a strategic and deliberate marketing strategy with a high potential to maximize ROI and sales if done properly.
Effective writing is critical to the success of your emails. Writing emails with spelling & grammatical errors or unclear, ambiguous messages can annoy your promising leads and make you lose a lot of money.
Below are some of the negative consequences of email marketing to your business:
When you write and send poorly written emails to your email list, you fail at your core duties and hit your sales target.
Failure to achieve your goals will automatically affect your overall performance and value to your business.
2. Waste of time and company’s resources
Realistically, email marketing is a time-consuming and super-intensive marketing strategy that requires you to spend so much time and create numerous valuable resources to build relationships with leads and nurture them till they become customers.
When you write poorly written emails, all this time and resources can go to waste.
3. Damages your company’s reputation
A poorly written email can pass the wrong message across to your customers and affect how they perceive your brand as a credible brand.
When you continuously write emails that poorly represent your brand and the benefits of your products or services, you become an unserious brand in the face of your prospects and customers.
The worst thing you want to do is create such a perception in the minds of your email subscribers.
4. Loss of revenue
When you write your emails without including some key elements like a subject line, personalized greeting, a compelling call to action, customized email signature, etc., you risk gaining the attention of your promising email recipients.
When you fail to gain their attention and trust, you lose those customers and fail to achieve your revenue targets.
5. Risk of Spam Filter
When you continuously write poor emails that don’t add value to your prospects or customers and omit personalization in your emails (subject line, “from” line, opening lines, and email body), you risk getting noticed by spam filters.
Once your email triggers the spam filters, you risk your emails landing in the spam folder.
As emphasized in the paragraphs above, email marketing mistakes are detrimental to the success of your emails. Your customers are the lifeline of your business. If you fail to make the right impressions on them, you risk losing them and many more in the long run.
Though you might be aware of some of the email marketing mistakes like spelling errors, grammatical errors, wrongly spelled names, etc., there is a possibility that you could be making other terrible mistakes that are much worse than the ones you know of.
In this section, we will be taking you through some of the terrible email marketing mistakes that could ruin your brand reputation and hinder you from achieving your sales target.
1. Not identifying your target audience
Your target audience is a group of people your brand needs to achieve its sales goals and objectives. These sets of people are the reason for your products or services.
Emails can help you achieve a very high success rate, but only when you do it right. It is counterproductive to send your emails to a large group of people who do not need your products or services.
Without a buyer persona – a document that identifies your target audience, their needs, goals, interest, and pain points – You would only end up sending your emails to the wrong people.
Consider developing a buyer persona that clearly defines your target customers to increase your email success rate.
2. Not setting measurable and achievable goals
By now, you should understand the significance of goal setting to your sales and marketing plans. Your emails must be goal driven and a medium to achieve your organization’s bigger goals.
Ensure you set SMART goals for your email marketing campaigns to achieve success. These goals must be;
- Specific: What exactly do you plan to achieve with your emails, e.g. Grow customer base, increase sales, etc.
- Measurable: What parameters do you plan to use to measure these plans e.g. generate 1000 leads in a month, convert 100 leads to customers, etc.
- Attainable: How feasible and realistic are your goals e.g. instead of 1000 leads in a month, how about 200 qualified leads in a month.
- Relevant: How will these goals contribute to your organization’s goals (their relevance to your organizational goals).
- Time-based: What’s your timeline for the goals e.g. generate 50 leads in a week, etc.
3. Lack of an email Outline
As clearly explained in the preceding sections, you can use emails to achieve numerous organizational goals – generate leads, nurture leads, boost awareness, build relationships, etc.
Without writing an outline of your emails – the subject line, pre-header text, “from” line, opening lines, email body, call to action, and email signature – and how you plan to write them to connect with your email recipients, you risk losing them to other competitors.
4. Buying Email lists
According to the General Data Practice Regulation (GDPR), a European data privacy act, email recipients are legally allowed to opt-out of emails they no longer want to receive. They also found that buying an email list is not compliant.
Aside from these legal restrictions, by buying an email list, you risk annoying your prospective customers and leaving a wrong impression of your brand.
5. Absence of lead magnets
Lead magnets in marketing are free resources and items that you offer your prospects and customers in exchange for their contact information or subscription.
Examples of the common lead magnets include ebooks, infographics, templates, webinars, mini-courses, toolkits, planners, guides, etc. Adding any of these lead magnets to your marketing emails can help nurture your leads and build relationships with them to boost sales.
6. Not including a share button
Adding a share button in your emails enables you to increase your email shares among your email recipients and their connections.
When you craft and send emails with lead magnets, valuable information, and a share button to your prospects and customers, your email can be shared across a large group of potential customers. The more people share your email, the more values and prospects you can attract.
7. Wrong or broken links
A common email marketing mistake is sending emails with wrong, broken, or no links. As emphasized above, email marketing is an effective marketing channel to generate traffic to other marketing channels.
Sending your emails with wrong or broken links can redirect your prospects to the wrong sites or channels – hence making you lose out on promising leads. Likewise sending emails with no links can fail to move your leads down the sales funnel.
8. No personalization
The worst email marketing mistake is sending your emails without personalizing your subject lines, pre-header text, opening lines, email body, lead magnets, call to action, and email signature.
Sending your emails to your recipients without including their names, and telling them how your products or services can help them solve their pain points and challenges can affect your email performance.
9. Not optimizing your emails for mobile users
According to research, 85% of emails are opened and read on mobile devices.
Since your emails can be accessed and read from various devices – smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops in different shapes and sizes, your emails must be optimized for mobile devices and responsive to be opened and read on different screens.
10. Sending emails to the wrong person
Sending an email marketing campaign to the wrong email recipients undermines the whole essence of your email and wastes your time, efforts, and resources.
The success of your email depends on your ability to target and tailor your messages and offers to people who have “need” for your products or services. When you send your emails who have no interest in your products and have no pain points that you can solve, your emails perform very poorly.
11. Sending a wrong email
Just like the previous point, sending the wrong email is just as bad as sending the right email to the wrong person.
A lot of your customers and prospects get thousand of emails from many marketers daily – some of which can be your direct competitors. Sending an email with the wrong product information or email body can put off your prospects and even make you lose your loyal customers depending on the gravity of the mistake.
12. Poor subject lines
An email subject line is the first point of connection with your email recipients because it gives a brief description of your email content. From your subject line, your email recipients can easily determine if they want to open your emails or not.
Personalize your email subject line with “FNAMES” to include their names to gain their attention from the onset.
13. Not sending a welcome email
A welcome email is the first email you send to your new subscribers to thank them for signing up, build relationships with them, or send them discounts or product offers.
Consider using automation tools like Sloovi Outreach, to automate your welcome emails and reduce your chances of missing out on any new subscriber. Personalizing your welcome emails will help you leave a lasting impression on your first-time subscribers.
14. Sending emails with typos or grammatical errors
One of the most common mistakes that marketers make is sending email campaigns with typographical or grammatical errors.
Wrongly spelling your recipient’s name, misspelling a word, or having grammatical errors in your emails can annoy your recipients and affect their future dealings with you.
15. Sending your email campaigns from your email account
Email marketing is serious business in B2B sales and marketing. To appear serious and keep the communication formal, you have to send your emails from business email accounts e.g. Zeesloovioutreach.com rather than from a personal account like @yahoo.com, @outlook.com, and @gmail.com.
Free email internet service providers like Google, Hotmail, and yahoo can make your emails end up in the spam folder.
16. Using an outdated email list
A good email list is critical to the success of email marketing. It is the collection of email addresses you send your messages and product offers.
Over time, your email subscribers can unsubscribe, trash, or not open or click on your emails. One of the most common email marketing mistakes is not constantly updating your emails to trash these low-performing email addresses and add new ones.
Always validate your emails to detect and remove inactive emails.
17. Sending too many emails
Another email marketing mistake that marketers make is bombarding their email recipients with too many emails. With email marketing, quality rules over quantity.
Sending high-quality emails with relevant information at intervals will less likely annoy your prospects and help you achieve better results.
18. Sending emails at the wrong time
According to a report by Campaign Monitor, the best days to send emails are Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Wednesdays, while the best times are 10 am, 8 pm, 2 pm, and 6 am.
Although these recommended times and days can work for some companies, it might not be the case for your brand and type of products or services. 50% of marketers claim there is no perfect time and day to send emails as every business and customer is different.
Look out for the best time and day of the week your emails perform best, and ensure you send your emails within these times.
19. Not segmenting your email list
Customer segmentation is the process of classifying your customers based on different parameters and sending them tailored messages based on their needs and level in the sales cycle.
Failure to segment your email list and prioritize your leads can slow down your success rate and make you lose valuable prospects.
20. A mismatch between your email subject line and body
As explained above, your subject line gives your email recipients a clue about your email content. If you include an interesting fact in your subject line and don’t live up to the expectation in your email body, this can annoy your recipients and make you lose credibility.
21. Not including a call to action
A call to action directs your email recipients to the next line of action after reading your email. Failure to include a call to action (CTA) button or link in your email can increase your risk of losing interested and promising prospective customers.
22. Not including an unsubscribe button
An unsubscribe button or link allows your email subscribers to choose whether they want to keep receiving your emails or not. Failure to include it in your email can reduce your email performance.
23. Adding too many images
Images are perfect to attract the attention of your subscribers but when they become too much or are of low quality, your subscribers can delete your email or even trigger the spam filter.
24. Not monitoring your email metrics
How are your emails doing in terms of their open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.?
Not tracking these metrics is another common email marketing mistake that can make it hard to determine your email performance and how you can improve their performance.
25. Not conducting A/B testing
A/B testing is the process of testing two variations of your emails to see which one performs better. It allows you to test different email content and gain a better understanding of your subscriber’s preferences.
Tips to avoid email marketing mistakes
Email mistakes are inevitable, especially if you are just a beginner. To make email marketing a more enjoyable and effective practice, below are some tips to follow to avoid making common email marketing mistakes.
- Always proofread your email before sending them to your recipients.
- Send yourself a test email to check the email content and formatting before sending it out to your real subscribers.
- Before sending emails, map out your email content outline to guide your content and formatting.
- Create time for your emails and avoid sending them in a rush to minimize errors.
- Use clear and simple fonts and formatting to make it easy for your busy subscribers to read or scan through.
- Reduce images and only use high-quality images or designs
- Optimize your emails for different devices
- Research your prospects and customers to find their interests, goals, and interests and clearly understand how your products or service can help them.
- Use email automation tools to schedule emails and send them at regular intervals.
- Verify your email addresses and update your list regularly to add new ones and take out outdated ones.
Five proven ways to correct your email marketing mistakes
No one is above mistakes. Even the most experienced email marketer can still make mistakes. However, when mistakes happen, what do you do? And how do you manage it to keep the consequence minimal?
Consider the following proven techniques to correct your email marketing mistakes:
- Seventh sense recommends sending a correction email after 24 hours only to the subscribers that opened the first email.
- Put your email campaigns on hold when you identify an issue.
- Work with your development team to redirect your broken link to the correct one.
- Include a giveaway such as invited to a webinar, seminar, guides, infographics, etc., along with your correction email to create a diversion.
- Admit your mistake in a human and fun way to build a connection with your subscribers.
Conclusion
Email marketing has become one of the most used and effective marketing channels to build and nurture prospects and customers that can contribute immense success to your brand.
Making mistakes in your marketing emails can affect your brand reputation and customer perception of your team. However, when mistakes happen, you must calm down and think of the best ways to correct and possibly turn them into a marketing opportunity.
Several marketing experts recommend using words like “Oops” in your correction emails to show your brand’s transparency and human side and increase your email open and engagement rate. Create your customized email signature now!