Do you want to know how to avoid making mistakes in your email marketing campaign? The answer is simple – learn about them. Gain awareness of the most common fails in the world of email marketing and you’ll keep an eye on them. In 2019, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received each day. This shows how popular emailing is. The data also reveals that people are getting numerous emails daily.
A one seemingly simple mistake can cost you dozens of subscribers. Not to mention that it can create a wrong impression of your brand. Subscribers need to look at your brand as trustworthy and credible and some email fails can ruin that image. If you’ve made some mistakes in the past, don’t worry. Even big companies with a huge team of marketers can make them. To prevent any inconvenience in the future, pay close attention to the following common fails in an email marketing campaign.
1. Wrong Segmentation
Segmentation is an important step in your email marketing campaign. Segmenting your audience based on demographics or personal interests helps you send more targeted emails.
The effectiveness of segmentation is proved by research and statistics. Marketers found a 760% increase in email revenue when they used segmented campaigns. Additionally, segmented email campaigns have a 14.32% higher open rate compared to non-segmented campaigns. With that being said, the importance of segmentation is clear.
But what happens when segmentation goes the wrong way? It can happen to anyone to click on the wrong group or segment an individual into a wrong group. However, this can have a very bad outcome in some situations.
For example, Shutterfly sent a “congratulations for becoming a parent” email to a wrong person. They did send an apology email as soon as they realized the mistake but the receiver’s impression of the brand can change forever.
Imagine if this was sent to people who are trying to conceive. It can seem like a cruel and mocking email. Taking the wrong direction in segmentation is something you don’t want to experience.
2. Fail in Personalization
Simply personalizing emails can increase open rates by 26%. Most of you already know that personalization is crucial for a good email campaign.
It may be essential that you personalize the emails for better results but that also means that you need to be careful during the process. One careless moment can completely ruin the outreach.
You can send out an email with incomplete personalization. This is what happened to Serenata Flowers. There was obviously a bug in their personalization system which resulted in a confusing email.
3. Skipping the Welcome Email
You might think that once a user subscribes to your email list your job is done for the day. Well, think again.
Welcome emails might not have anything specific to offer to subscribers but they have the highest open rate. Out of all email categories, welcome emails are the most popular.
You’ll miss out on a huge opportunity to make a good impression on the subscribers if you don’t send out a welcome email. People who subscribe to your brand show interest in it. Not sending a welcome email shows the lack of interest on your part.
4. Bad Timing
While planning out the email campaign is great for email marketing strategy, you should always re-evaluate the campaign when its time comes.
You might think of the perfect idea for a mass email you want to send in a few months. Then, you simply create the email, schedule it, and forget about it. Not so fast. What if something has changed in the meantime?
Airbnb has experienced the bad timing fail with their floating home campaign in the middle of Hurricane Harvey destroying Houston.
Diana Adjadj, a marketer and contributing writer at WriteScout, shared her opinion on the topic, “Launching a campaign at a wrong time can bring a whole set of problems. Instead of using the new campaign to grow the list of customers, you’ll be dealing with reversing the damage. It is easier to double-check the elements of email campaign before you send it out than to be marked as a company that shares offensive content.”
5. Nonexistent and Broken Links
Imagine this: You create informative content or an amazing page that you want to share with your subscribers. You create the email, enhance it with a beautiful design, but as time passes there is no result and no new traffic. In that case, you have probably forgotten to add a link or you’ve sent out a broken link.
Shopify knows how this feels as they sent out an email trying to attract subscribers to their blog post without a link to follow. The chance that users will go above and beyond to find the right link is close to zero.
Anyone can make this mistake but that doesn’t mean that it is okay. Do your best to avoid this by checking all the links and call-to-action before you finally click that “send” button.
6. Expired Coupons
Subscribers love receiving discounts and coupons in the emails. It is the perfect way to cheer up someone’s day by offering them a discounted price on their favorite products.
What can kill that excitement is sending an expired coupon. The subscribers can be full of ideas on what they want to use their discount but then they get informed that the offer is off the table.
Make sure that all the coupons you send out are valid. In case this fail does happen to you, rapidly send an apology email, just like Petco did.
7. Sending Too Many Emails
On average, people who have an office job receives 121 emails each day. If you consistently add onto that pile, you will overwhelm the subscribers.
Be moderate in the number of emails you send out to your audience. Some research even shown that receiving too many emails is the number one reason why people unsubscribe from an email newsletter.
Final Thoughts
Making mistakes is a regular part of the business. Email marketing doesn’t differ and even the most experienced marketing can fail in some email campaign attempts. These common fails will teach you what you need to be careful about so you don’t have to deal with offended or annoyed subscribers.
