8 Email Marketing Pitfalls To Avoid

We give our best advice from experience, that goes for me too! A few weeks ago, I sent out an email to my list about marketing jargon (check it out here) BUT I made a mistake and it ended up getting sent out without the link to our blog!

Luckily, I found out I have engaged members on my list because, within a few hours, I had several responses from subscribers letting me know the issue. 

It all ended fine, I thanked our responders and sent them the link directly, then promptly sent out a revised email with the link for anyone else who got to opening it later in the day. It got me thinking - what are some common silly mistakes we make as business owners and marketers? 

So I came up with 8 common email marketing pitfalls that you should avoid:

#1 Abandoning Your List

If you’ve abandoned your list, you might be struggling to come up with good content for your subscribers, too busy to get down to it and create a plan and content, or you might have simply forgotten to nurture some of your contacts. 

You need to have a plan in place to nurture them by providing valuable content on some sort of regular basis - this could be weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. You’re sitting on a gold mine if you have not been regularly marketing to your current subscribers.

#2 Pitch Slapping

You may be thinking “I’ll slap something together real quick and just throw it out there and see what happens.” While you could do that, we advise to esure you avoid aggressively pushing a sales pitch, often in an unsolicited or inappropriate manner. 

So pay attention to who you’re sending your messages to and what other content they might be getting from you. You don’t want to send a brand new connection generic, daily sales emails or interrupt the lead-magnet funnel another contact may be getting by sending aggressive pitches that make them want to unsubscribe. 

Focus on your relationship with your subscribers, even if they have not had a face-to-face meeting with you yet. You still want to build their trust and develop a good business relationship by providing them with relevant and personalized content. 

#3 Audience Not Segmented

One way you can provide each contact with relevant and personalized emails is by segmenting your audience. Sending the same email to all subscribers can result in low engagement and make your contacts feel like you don’t care about them and they’re just getting mass marketing emails. 

Segment your audience based on behavior, actions, and preferences to tailor your messages. For example, if you are a landscaping company, you might be planning on sending out an email to your audience about your lawnmowing services. But what will your current customers who regularly have you mow their lawn going to think when they open an email trying to get them to do the same thing they’re doing? Instead, you might tag them “mowing customer_current” and then exclude them from communication selling mowing services. Then, you could also target this list to upsell fall and spring cleanup services. If someone cancels their work with you, you can list them as “mowing customer_inactive” and send them seasonal emails or promotions to get them to reengage with your business. 

You can also tag them for their downloads and other interactions with you. When a lead gen gets downloaded, you can tag them “has gotten DIY paver patio download” Then if you produce a blog or video related to that, you can send it out to the same list. Or if you create an email with that attached, you can exclude them from the list. With some email platforms, you can also exclude contacts currently in other funnels. That way, if you have a new subscriber to downloaded your lead generator but has not converted to be a customer yet, you wait until their lead generator email sequence is over before sending additional sales emails.

#4 CTA Not Clear

Ideally, you won’t have to send sales emails to your favorite customers, they’ll stay recurrent! If you don’t have clear CTAs, they might not engage further with you. Let’s say you send the lead generator email sequence about DIY paver patios and your new contact opened and downloaded the guide. Now, you have 3-5 follow-up emails that should be nurturing that contact to engage with you further. What exactly do you want them to do?

If you want them to end up hiring you for a service, figure out a complimentary service they would want or explain the complexities of what they’re interested in with another email and how you can help - book a consultation to review the project and give them advice or send them to a blog or video where you give additional instruction or information. 

“Let me know if you need help” is a vague call to action that is non-committal, you don’t seem invested. Or, your second email could point them to a more in-depth video resource and your third could offer your services for consultation on the project, “Want to get it right the first time? Schedule a 30-minute consultation and we’ll review your project and my recommendations. BOOK NOW.” 

#5 Weak Subject Lines

Before you can engage them with a clear CTA, you need to get them to open your email with a strong subject line. Subject lines (like CTAs) that are vague, generic, or spammy won’t compel your contacts to open the email. It might be ignored or even filtered to the spam or marketing folders of someone’s inbox automatically.

It’s important to craft compelling, clear, and concise subject lines and previews to encourage recipients to open your emails.

Take this blog for example, we could use a subject line that says “Email marketing mistakes” but that’s boring and doesn’t call a lot of attention to an email that is likely full of new messages. Instead, we’ve decided to go with “subject line?”

#6 Content Overload

Even if the email gets opened, if your subscriber has to read a book, they will likely disengage. Long, dense emails feel overwhelming and appear to be too much trouble. 

Your emails should be concise, scannable, and focus on a primary message & CTA. If your email needs to be more lengthy, it should at least be set up in a format that makes it easy for the reader to skim through and get the general idea of your content and if they want to engage with it. 

#7 Lists Not Cleaned Regularly

Failing to clean your email list regularly can lead to high bounce rates and poor deliverability. Remove inactive subscribers and invalid email addresses periodically by seeing who has bounced or unsubscribed from the last few emails you have sent and create a segment for “unsubscribed” to exclude that contact from lists in the future or consider deleting them.

#8 Fail to Test

Last of all, the whole reason behind this blog…Sending emails without testing can lead to errors and poor performance (just like we learned when we forgot to check our links!). Test your emails and pay attention to design, links, and content across different devices before sending them to your clients.

Still feeling overwhelmed?

Email marketing isn’t for everyone, that’s okay! If you need help with strategy or content creation, schedule a call to see how we can help.