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In today’s economy, it’s absolutely essential that you connect with existing and prospective customers on a consistent basis. An email marketing campaign is the easiest and most affordable way for you to make that connection.
A well-designed and properly executed email marketing campaign can be worth hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars to your business.
Just think about the universe of buyers you have out there. Think about how many of them carry around phones. And think about how most of them spend endless hours staring at those devices.
That’s your cue.
If you send them emails talking about how you are the answer to their problems, you dramatically increase the chances they’ll stop staring and instead start using those phones to interact with you.
Why? Because when you regularly show up in the most intimate device your prospects own, you win.
The fact is your business gains a decisive advantage when you communicate with your prospects on the same device as their friends and family members use to interact with one another.
Conversely, if you’re not leveraging the power of email marketing (and, worse, your competitors are), you run the risk of giving your rivals the edge they need to beat you in the marketplace.
It’s for these reasons that I want to warn you about five mistakes I frequently see companies make when utilizing email marketing. Sadly, few companies realize they’re committing these harmful errors until after they’ve wasted substantial time and money on campaigns that do little beyond disappoint.
Mistake No. 1: making your emails beautiful
I understand the temptation to use email templates that are aesthetically pleasing. You have products and services you want to showcase—and presenting them in pretty pictures seems like a no-brainer.
But what happens when you load an email with pretty pictures is you make it less likely that your good-looking email will ever be seen.
That’s because most email systems (including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook) automatically mark as a promotion or spam anything containing so much as even a single image.
Next stop for an email so marked: the spam folder.
Let me invite you to recall the last time you made the effort to open your own spam folder and look through its contents. Probably been a while, right? And when you did get around to opening it, I’m willing to bet you only did so for the purpose of mass-deletion.
Now take a look at the emails generated by any of the top online marketers. You’ll notice that their emails are devoid of images and, as a result, appear rather plain. I can assure you that those imageless emails dodge the spam folder with considerable ease.
It’s important to note: while there are countless large brands that send out emails with images, top retailers have massive amounts of domain authority. That’s why their emails land in your primary inbox.
A great example would be the well-known retailer Macy's. Macy's was established in 1858. Shortly after the internet became available, Macy's registered their (Macys.com) domain in 1994. As a result their domain authority and brand credibility has been continuously building over the past 27 years of their online presence.
Most email marketers have to earn the trust of their subscribers prior to emails with images landing in their primary inbox.
The lesson to learn is that you can improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by shifting focus away from aesthetics and instead concentrate on safely reaching the primary inbox.
Mistake No. 2: neglecting to use first names
You’re able to send emails to specific individuals because they at some point in the past gave you their email address. Hopefully, when they volunteered that information, they also gave you their name—in particular, their first name.
Knowing each email recipient’s first name helps improve deliverability. As I’m sure you can imagine, the algorithms employed by the big email systems are quite sophisticated. Owing to that sophistication, they have the ability to readily distinguish between emails sent by friends and those sent by marketers.
This is consequential because these algorithms usher friend-to-friend emails straight to the recipient’s primary inbox while shuttling marketer-to-prospect emails directly to the spam folder.
One of the things that spoils it for the marketers is their tendency to leave the recipient’s first name out of the email. The algorithms see no first name and interpret that to mean the email is but an impersonal business correspondence.
Starting off an email with “Dear Friend” is impersonal—and, as a result, ripe for algorithmic blocking.
The right way to start off an email—the way that makes it more likely your communication will arrive in the recipient’s inbox—is to write something like “Hi John.”
You can also use the recipient’s first name anywhere in the body of the email. Just don’t overdo it. Sprinkling the recipient’s first name, for example in the greeting line, as well as once or twice in the body, also serves to make the email more personalized. Personalization allows you to speak more directly to the recipient, which helps increase the power and effectiveness of your email.
The way that works is your use of the first name subconsciously captures more of the reader’s attention. In turn, that sparks greater engagement with your messaging.
By the way, you can also use the recipient’s first name in the subject line. This is a technique that can be exceptionally effective. My all-time best-working subject line begins simply with “for John.”
Mistake No. 3: inserting too many links
Your email should contain no more than one link. That’s it. One.
To illustrate more clearly: you may use your one link up to 3 times throughout the email. What you want to avoid is using different links and different calls to action in any email you send.
In addition, most email autoresponders require an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email. My one link rule does not require you to remove that link, rather to only focus on a singular call to action link in the body of your email content.
Every additional link you insert after that reduces the deliverability of your email because multiple links are a red flag to email systems. The more red flags raised, the greater the odds your email will land in the spam folder.
I’ve observed that many senders routinely include near the bottom of their emails icons for social-media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Those are usually live-links and they count against the one-link limit.
So, if you’ve been planting these social-media live-link icons in your emails, you should immediately discontinue the practice.
Here’s another reason to limit to one the number of links your email contains. Each link represents one choice of action your recipient can take. The more action choices you give your subscribers, the less likely they are to take any action at all.
You eliminate that problem by offering them just one link.
It’s useful to keep in mind that email marketing operates in a way similar to that of a tightly engineered sales funnel. Such a funnel will be focused on coaxing from each prospect a single action—for example, visiting a sales page.
Your emails should likewise be focused on coaxing a single action.
Mistake No. 4: saying too much
It’s easy to cause subscribers to lose interest in your email. All you need to do is overload your email content with text—especially text in dense blocks.
This won’t be a problem if you tend to keep your sentences short and put no more than three sentences in a single paragraph.
You’ll notice that’s a technique I’ve employed throughout this post. Also notice how I’ve broken the content into easily digestible paragraphs, so you won’t have to burn a lot of mental calories absorbing the presented information.
Adopting this approach to writing will help you author clear and concise emails—the kind most apt to yield best results.
In addition to overly long paragraphs, watch out for awkward sentences. An awkward sentence is one that your recipient must read more than once in order for it to make sense. Every sentence should contribute to giving your recipient a smooth, fast ride to the finish—not having to double back to figure out what you meant.
You might find that awkward sentences you write don’t seem awkward as you’re reading them to yourself. But their lack of cogency will likely jump out at you if you let your computer read the draft email aloud.
Using your Windows or Mac computer in this manner is simple. Just open your system preferences panel, go to the “accessibility” section, and toggle or adjust the “Speak” or “Narrator” settings. Highlight the text you want the computer to read and use the indicated keyboard shortcut commands to begin.
(If you have a Windows 10 system, simultaneously pressing the Windows logo key + Ctrl + Enter is all it takes to start Narrator.)
Mistake No. 5: failure to test for deliverability
Many email campaigns have ended poorly because the sender didn’t bother to first check whether the missives would even arrive in recipients’ primary inboxes.
Fortunately, you can access free software that makes testing for deliverability a breeze. One software product I use for this purpose is mail-tester.
Mail-tester scores the deliverability of your emails on a scale from 1 to 10. The closer you get to 10, the less likely it will be that your email gets diverted to spam folders.
A nice feature of mail-tester is you receive not just a score but also suggestions for revising your email to increase its chances of being delivered.
Another free software product I use for deliverability testing is Litmus. The big advantage of Litmus is its deep understanding of Gmail, currently the world’s largest email service and the gold standard of email intuitiveness.
Whichever software you use, bear in mind that testing is not a one-time undertaking. To derive the most value from these free email testing softwares, I recommend re-running the tests on your email campaigns at least quarterly. This will help you know if you need to adjust your campaign strategies and tactics.
Bonus tip: send emails based on triggers
The reality of sales is that people buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell. You send emails because you’re ready to sell. Your hope is that those emails will act as a prod that readies recipients to buy.
For this reason, I recommend the use of behavioral-based email marketing sequences. This is a methodology that helps you meet the recipient where the recipient is in the buying process and market to them accordingly.
If you don’t meet the recipient where the recipient is, it’s likely your email won’t ever be opened (despite being delivered to their inbox). According to Campaign Monitor, a leading email marketing autoresponder the average email open rate is only 18%.
Accordingly, I like to make sure my recipients are actually engaged with the last email I sent before I dispatch the next one.
Allow me to illustrate. I often run digital ads offering a free e-book or video download in exchange for a name and email address. When someone responds to the ad, I follow up with an email designed to ascertain whether this individual did in fact consume the downloaded content.
This can be easily achieved by creating a link-click goal to the downloadable content. When the subscriber clicks on the link in the email, the email marketing software tracks the click. This confirms that the subscriber has indeed accessed the content and allows me to segment them further. (This is an important point because it is difficult, if not impossible, to sell something to someone who does not consume the free content they requested.)
If the recipient of my follow-up message confirms consumption by achieving the link-click goal I described above, the next email I send to this same person will begin a process of nurturing. Then will come a series of emails propelling this recipient toward a conversion.
The key to making this sequence work is the use of marketing autoresponders which dispatch new emails in step with recipient behaviors triggered by the prior emails.
Think of it this way: you send an email in which you ask a question. If the recipient responds, either by replying to the email or achieving the action-based goal in the campaign, you now have an opening to engage in an ongoing dialogue. In the course of this dialogue, you steadily escalate things until the recipient converts.
In my experience, the use of emails based on behavioral triggers is among the most effective campaign strategies you can implement.
Conclusion
Email marketing is both art and science—but these days it’s a lot more science than art.
Email marketing is also one of the most powerful tools at your disposal to grow your business and stay ahead of your competitors. It is a pleasingly inexpensive avenue for building rapport and trust with your subscribers and allowing them to discover more about your products and services.
However, using email for those purposes requires a thoughtful approach. In part, this includes committing to generating a steady flow of email communication (a good rate of dispatch is roughly once a week).
My recommendation is to view your emails as an integral part of the customer acquisition process (ideally, you already have such a process in place and it is strategically oriented, without one you will find it difficult to make progress and be successful).
The five little-known but often fatal email marketing mistakes I’ve shared with you today are easy to avoid. By not making those blunders, you’ll endow your email campaigns with the right stuff to help you stay top-of-mind with people who may not be ready today to buy from you, but who will be more likely to ultimately choose you over your rivals.
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