Email Mistakes to Avoid Now
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Email probably never goes away. However, the email could be a mistake in his marketing. Here are 10 common email marketing mistakes and how to fix them.
Email marketing is a complex interplay of tactics and strategies, and it’s easy to make mistakes. I recently wrote about 10 common email marketing mistakes that are easy to fix. Here I would like to share another 10 common mistakes with fixes that are a bit more complicated but still very notable.
1. Ignore errors
Email marketers should be aware of all the errors typical of other digital marketing channels, such as:
- Copy any errors, such as spelling or grammatical errors, and make sure your offers and descriptions are accurate.
- The image is corrupted or incorrect.
- Broken or incorrect link URL.
Additionally, marketers should be aware of email rendering errors. This is most likely caused by the lack of email code support across your inbox. Personalization, live content, CSS-based interactivity, and other advanced email features (which must be fully used) increase the need for careful quality assurance measures.
To work around the issue:
- Have someone outside the team review the copy.
- Send a test email to yourself and other members of your team.
- Click all links in the email to make sure they work and go to the correct destination.
- Use email preview software like Email on Acid or Litmus to see how your email will look in different inboxes and light and dark modes.
Related article: 10 Common Email Marketing Mistakes You Can Easily Fix
2. Don’t set personalization defaults
Personalization is powerful, but some subscriber data points may be missing. This can lead to nasty null set situations where there are blanks (or codes) in the copy where there should be a person’s name, company name, or other details.
Fixing it is not so easy as you may need to fix some of the text or tweak the design to make the copy more readable with the default values. Learn how to copy and design your message so that the defaults work well.
3. use no reply email address
Jacob Halstead, senior account manager at Oracle Marketing Consulting, says first, telling subscribers that you don’t want them to respond is uncomfortable and sends the message that the relationship is a one-way street. .
“We emailed them,” he says. By emailing replies to some customer support software, such as Zendesk, you can filter out of office notifications and auto-reply the ticket number to the actual reply. And having a real person reply later increases loyalty. “
Not monitoring responses can also lead to lost leads and revenue. Plus, in the era of Mail Privacy Protection, replies are a reliable and measurable signal of engagement, helping to qualify subscribers as active.
Related article: Marketers, don’t write off Amp for email yet
4. Don’t use responsive email design
A mobile-friendly design can get the job done, but responsive email design is better overall. Plus, with over 10 years of history, there are tons of tools, guides, and templates to use. This is a better experience for subscribers.
However, using a responsive email template doesn’t automatically make your email mobile friendly. Responsive templates should be used along with mobile friendly best practices such as:
- Easy-to-read font (16pt or greater).
- Creating finger-friendly buttons (44px x 44px or larger).
- Pick what is linked to avoid accidental taps.
- Use a one-column design for easy scanning and scrolling.
5. Using One Size Send Time
Using a test to determine the best overall time to send your campaign to your audience is a good starting point. However, using Send Time Optimization (STO) is a much better solution for answering the age-old question, “When is the best time to send to my subscribers?” Our clients have found that using STO to determine the optimal send time for individual subscribers increases engagement rates by approximately 10%.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection masks open times by sending email service providers a flood of auto-generated opens, calling into question the value of STO. However, the STO algorithm has since been adjusted to significantly emphasize click time in addition to taking into account actual opens from non-Apple inboxes. While this change will give STO more time to adapt to changing subscriber engagement patterns, the emphasis on clicks means that subscribers will click on your landing page rather than simply opening the page. This means that the campaign will arrive when it is most likely to. email.
6. A/B testing only for broadcast campaigns
According to Litmus, most marketers include A/B testing at least occasionally in broadcast and segmented campaigns. But her A/B testing of automated campaigns is even less, and the majority of marketers don’t test them.
This is unfortunate as automated campaigns tend to produce dramatically higher results than broadcast campaigns. In other words, any lift you get from A/B testing can improve your performance even more.
In addition to testing normal email elements such as copy and images, you should also consider using automation to test:
- Delayed triggering of automated campaigns.
- Thresholds for behavioral triggers, such as time on page tests to justify triggering abandon emails.
- Whether a series of emails is more effective than a single triggered email.
- Use send time optimization for a series of emails after the first email.
- Whether to suppress certain emails in a triggered series based on subscriber attributes or behavior.
Related article: 5 ways to increase loyalty and email signups
7. Ignoring Natural Rates of Return
When it comes to automated email triggers, when sending triggered messages such as abandoned shopping cart emails, make sure you pay attention to your natural rate of return. This is the time, for example, after abandoning a cart, that most abandoners will return to it and check out on their own without intervention.
By setting abandoned cart emails to trigger at this point, you can avoid sending abandoned cart emails to many customers who don’t need nudges. We don’t advise brands to offer incentives in abandoned cart emails (especially the first email in the series), but many do. As such, sending incentives to customers who checkout without an incentive is costing brands in terms of the margin they provide unnecessarily.
Doing a tax withholding or using a universal control group can also help you avoid sending triggered campaigns that don’t actually improve the customer experience.
8. Don’t Send Welcome Emails Immediately
While it’s wise to delay sending certain types of triggered campaigns, welcome emails are one of those things that should be sent immediately. Most welcome emails aren’t transactional emails, but they work similarly in that they help confirm a successful signup. So don’t make your customers wait for a welcome email any more than you can make them wait for a purchase receipt.
At the same time, welcome emails should strive to capitalize on the interest expressed by prospects and customers who have just signed up. Your brand is now their number one concern. Be quick to welcome them and ask them to do something of value. Drive purchases, complete profiles, select preferences, highlight the best content, and more. look.
Related article: 6 ways to review and improve your automated marketing emails
9. Sending emails in the wrong language
Be careful with language defaults and language preferences when sending emails in multiple languages, especially when sending in multiple languages. First, you can use it to establish a default language by tagging the language used on your subscriber opt-in form, checkout page, or registration page.
However, during the opt-in process and onboarding, you should display other language options that new subscribers have access to. For example, you can have a language selection dropdown menu in your promotional email sign-up form, and include a “view in Spanish” link, such as at the top of your welcome email. And of course you’ll want to include language selection in the settings center.
10. Not optimized for dark mode
About 14% of emails are opened with Dark Mode enabled, according to Email on Acid. Considering that 14% of emails opened can be equivalent to 20% of subscribers, the number of subscribers worth optimizing for, given that some people use dark mode occasionally, such as at night is more than enough.
Dark mode optimization is tricky because different inboxes implement it differently, but here are some steps to consider:
- Use a combination of dark on white and dark on white, such as dark text on white.
- Add strokes to logos and icons that are the same color as the background.
- Note how background colors and background images affect the readability of text in dark mode.
Testing is definitely recommended. But in the process of doing that, you can quickly learn which combinations cause problems in Dark Mode, avoid them, and incorporate safe combinations into your templates and email style guides.
Bottom line: creating a better email experience is over
All of these mistakes have solutions that are non-trivial, but fairly easy to implement. Some require ongoing attention, such as implementing quality assurance protections and conducting his A/B testing of automation, but many are ahead in terms of effort.
All of these are worth the investment of time and resources to help you provide your subscribers with a better email experience.
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