Five Common Mistakes When E-Mail Marketing | Varn

Insights

1 December 2011

Five Common Mistakes When E-Mail Marketing

Failing to respect your recipients’ in boxes and sending poorly thought out e-mail newsletters or campaigns can cause more damage than they’re worth for the tiny number of sales it may achieve. If you aren’t doing it properly it is better to not do it at all.

Here are five common mistakes to watch out for:

  1. Sending without consent
    This isn’t just bad for business, it’s actually illegal. If a customer gives you their e-mail address during the course of a sale, or if they haven’t opted out of receiving e-mails when given the option, then you’re fine. Of course, you should still treat their inbox with respect.
  2. Contacting for no reason
    Consumers do not care if the head of marketing wants a weekly marketing e-mail; they only want interesting and useful information reaching their inbox. If you have nothing new to offer since the last time you e-mailed don’t. It can be different if your leads have signed up to a regular newsletter, although you will have to work hard to keep subscribers. Decide what the point of your newsletter is and stick to it; don’t just send half-hearted sales pitches with no benefit to the recipient.
  3. Sending inappropriate content
    Maybe you’re a retailer and this week you have a great deal for families. So, you package it all up with a load of other family-friendly content and send it out to your list. Unfortunately, because you’ve failed to target only families, you end up sending it to a bunch of single people and child-free couples. All these prospective customers feel like your content isn’t relevant and unsubscribe.
  4. Offering poor content
    No matter how good your deals if your copy is badly written and your layout is poor it’s not going to get the click through rates you need and it won’t make your business look good. It doesn’t matter if you’re offering half-price tickets to the Wimbledon final; if your copy is riddled with typos and poor grammar, you won’t get the response you’re expecting. What’s more, you’ll damage recipients’ perception of your company. It’s such a little thing to get right, but get it wrong and your e-mail marketing will fail to sell and alienate your potential customers.
  5. Making it hard to unsubscribe
    Perhaps a potential client receives your e-mail and it doesn’t annoy them, but they just don’t want to receive any more of them. They scan your message but can’t see an unsubscribe button, or worse; they click the unsubscribe button but have to log into your site or navigate a complex form in order to complete the process. Make unsubscribing easy or you’ll turn a disinterested recipient into a downright hostile one, effectively ensuring you’ll never make a future sale with that customer

Conclusion

It’s important to ensure you’re making the most of your e-mail marketing campaigns and that all your online marketing is measured and integrated to work together.

For example, you may find that the non-converting paid search keyword, which you just stopped bidding on, is actually generating e-mail subscribers to potential customers at an early research stage of the cycle affecting sales further down the line. You need to track each stage of the buying cycle and measure all of the possible the goals and actions you want people to make in their user experience; not just the main goals.

Article by: Tom, Managing Director of Varn Digital Marketing More articles by Tom

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