Even seasoned email marketers have room for improvement – which is we we recommend constantly A/B testing your emails. But if you’ve been at it for a while, your emails can start to get stale, you can forget to optimize the old stand-bys you use week after week, and your email marketing game can slip.
So, if you’re feeling uninspired or think your emails could use a refresh, get back to basics and check to be sure you’re not committing one of these 11 unforgivable email mistakes:
Mistake #1: You’re Not Optimizing for Different Platforms and Mobile
Not everyone uses Gmail or Outlook to read their emails. There are many different browsers and operating systems that people use to read their emails on, and each renders an email differently.
But even more importantly, the majority of people today read their emails on mobile devices. If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile, you’re losing a ton of potential customers.
Tools like Litmus and Email on Acid can show you how emails render across a variety of email clients and web browsers – mobile included. Testing your emails in advance can help you pinpoint problem areas so you can get an optimal response in the inbox.
Mistake #2: Your CTA Doesn’t Lead to a Landing Page
The goal of your email is to convert. If a prospect takes action and clicks your CTA button, you’re 80% there. Now imagine that CTA leads to a homepage…what do they do now?
Every step in your conversion funnel should be crystal clear and easy to get through. That’s what landing pages are for. They make it ridiculously easy for your prospects to complete the desired action as soon as they click your CTA.
Mistake #3: You’re Sending From ‘Noreply’
People like to deal with people, not robots. You should never use a generic email “from” name, such as “admin” or “noreply.” It’s impersonal and let’s them know they’re just an email address to you. Instead, send out emails from a department head, or at least from a friendlier name like “marketing” or “hello.”
Mistake #4: You Fail to Segment
As your business grows, your customer base becomes more diverse. Segmentation allows you to send personalized messages most relevant to each of your customer groups.
Sending a generic email to everyone can seriously hinder your results.
Mistake #5: Your Links Are Broken
Yeah, we agree….duh. Believe it or not, this happens quite often, even to the best of us. A marketer puts all their effort into lead generation, segmenting, newsletter design, and copywriting and then provides a broken CTA link.
If your CTA doesn’t work, you can’t convert your prospects. Search for bugs aggressively. Test your emails multiple times and all of your links in particular.
Mistake #6: You Don’t Have a Clear CTA
Email marketing isn’t the time to be subtle. Your CTA should be clear and stand out. It’s a clear call to perform an action (being clicked), and it should feel, look like, and behave as such. Try testing a link, an image, or a button to see what drives the most clicks.
Arguably, it’s the most important element of your email. Without a clear CTA, you won’t get your best conversion rates.
Mistake #7: Your Subject Line Is Deceptive
Often, marketers are tempted to use deceptive subject lines to boost their open rates. Somehow, they believe they can trick users and make them forgive them.
What actually happens is that you not only annoy your users, you’ll lose their trust – and earn a one-way ticket to the spam folder. Without trust, there are no sales.
Mistake #8: Your Email Is Riddled With Bad Copy
Bad copy is poorly formatted, includes useless words, doesn’t flow, or provides no value. A big mistake many marketers make is writing copy that talks about the product, not the prospect.
Nobody cares about you. They care about themselves and their problem. Other copywriting mistakes include poor grammar, not selling, overselling, or terrible fonts (we’re looking at you, Comic Sans).
Mistake #9: You Require A Login to Unsubscribe
What is the purpose of this? It’s a terrible mistake. We get it – you never want a recipient to unsubscribe, but it’s going to happen no matter what. Nothing is more frustrating for email recipients than making it difficult to unsubscribe.
Adding this extra step will most likely drive people to mark your emails as spam (which is much, much worse than an unsubscribe).
Mistake #10: You’re Sending Email Too Frequently (Or Infrequently)
Sending daily emails is sure to annoy your subscribers – even weekly emails can get stale fast. On the other end of the spectrum, irregular or infrequent emails will make them forget about who you are. In both cases, you’ll end up getting your emails marked as spam. Test to find a regular cadence that works for your customers and your conversion rates.
Mistake #11: You’re Not Sending Emails at All
If you’ve been tempted to ditch email marketing for social media, we’ve got to stop you. Email has one of the best ROIs of all marketing channels out there. If you’re not using it, you’re leaving some serious money on the table.