In this blog post we have set out to compile the missteps and mistakes that a marketing professional can make when managing email marketing activities : ten mistakes that coincide with ten missed opportunities to get more , much more, from our campaigns.
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1. Sending without consent and buying addresses
Having the recipient’s consent to receive your communications has three implications:
Ethics : It is no longer the brand that chooses to send its communications, but the recipient who agrees to receive them. Any mailing that does not respect this golden rule violates the pact of ethical and moral responsibility that is the basis of any email marketing initiative; thus we become spammers.
Legal : Anyone who sends an email without the recipient’s consent risks fines and penalties. Over the past few months, coinciding with the entry into force of the new European Regulation, we have explored all the rules that closely affect marketing professionals, in a series of blog posts .
Strategic : anyone who sends contacts to the database who have not given their consent will see campaign results (open, click and conversion rates) very close to zero. The success of email marketing relies heavily on the recipient’s consent. How can you make sure you get it? In this blog post, we guide you through the pros and cons of the two basic subscription methods: single and double opt-in.
Added to this mistake is another: buying packages of email addresses, more or less abundant, sometimes really huge. There are still those who give in to the temptation, but this solution only brings disadvantages, both in the short term, medium and long term: from the lack of participation of recipients to the risk of sanctions , to the deterioration of brand identity and sending reputation . This blog post sheds light on the phenomenon, showing its disadvantages and offering the best alternatives.
2. Isolate email from other channels
Email platform, external databases, CRM, CMS, ERP, e-commerce, business intelligence systems: these are not separate worlds, but close and communicating. Or at least they should be, in any digital marketing strategy. A sending platform like MailUp allows you to connect all the systems , synchronize the information present in each of them and make them communicate. In addition to the custom configuration service , let’s look at some of the possible integrations with the MailUp platform, which allow you to activate automatic campaigns profiled in detail; without forgetting the potential of the SMS channel which, combined with email, allows you to cultivate every touch point of the customer experience.
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3. Neglecting the contact database
The churn rate – between unsubscribes, inactives and wrong addresses – can erode, on average, 25% to 30% of the database each year. Obviously, the figure fluctuates depending on the referral businesses and the recipient acquisition criteria. For this reason, database building activities should be among the priorities. The resources available to marketers are in continuous development and allow you to translate each point of contact with customers and users into conversion opportunities into recipients: from the pages of your site, thanks to a dynamic pop-up , to your Facebook page , to events or to your physical point of sale, thanks to a registration form for iPad created with the Jade application .
Another mistake is forgetting the activity known as “ database cleaning ”: removing inactive addresses (those that have not opened emails for a long time) is of fundamental importance to improve the deliverability of your mailings; as well as identifying errors in your lists. Two activities that are carried out automatically on the MailUp platform: the platform processes the database to identify syntactical or typographical errors in email addresses, bounce, unsubscribe and duplicate management. For clean and reliable contact lists.
4. Not segmenting recipients
In the United States, this approach is called “one size fits all”: beyond the metaphor, it means sending the same message to the entire database, without making any distinction between recipients. A fatal error, although it is still quite widespread: according to SuperOffice , only 11% of companies segment their database. Segmenting means sending the same type of email that is only diversified in the offer or in some key points of the content, depending on the type of recipient, their identification data, their interests and their previous actions.
In a nutshell, it’s all about personalizing emails so that they’re relevant to each contact. The dynamic content and filters of the MailUp platform (identification data, geographic data, activity data, and device data) make it possible to automate the entire process. Furthermore, if integrated with the automated marketing features , you can set up automatic email workflows calibrated to the activities of each recipient.
5. Think of emails from a PC perspective
This is a point of no return that has been reached for many months now: email openings from mobile devices ( 56% – Litmus data) have surpassed those from PCs. This trend will become more and more dominant, given that by 2021 there will be six and a half billion smartphones in the world ( Ericsson Mobility Report ).
Conceiving and designing emails with only PC viewing in mind is one of the most serious mistakes you can make. It is therefore time for mobile first , an approach that orients design and content to the type of reading imposed by smartphones and tablets, which is increasingly faster and intermittent. In this post you will find 10 tips for creating adaptable and effective campaigns.
A special note is in order regarding image-only emails : frequently used by brands, these emails – which use a single large image covering the entire body of the message – are very often not optimized for mobile, and are not viewed by all recipients who have the “images off” option activated; in addition, particularly large images are often blocked by many providers’ anti-spam filters , which perceive them not as emails but as huge advertisements.
6. Ignoring some small but essential elements.
Footers in Spanish, footer for Anglophiles: a section of the message as peripheral as it is fundamental. It is the section that closes the e-mail and contains important information for the recipient: the transparency and reliability of a brand largely depend on the footer. Not giving it due attention in the design or (what is worse), forgetting it, represents a structural error for any e-mail marketing strategy. Let’s look at the elements that should be found in every footer:
Unsubscribe link
Brand contact information
Social sharing buttons
Link to Preference Center
Permission and copyright reminder
Privacy Notice
For more details on footer elements and how to make them look better graphically, read the dedicated blog post .
7. Approaching the text with the wrong focus
An e-mail is not a website page, nor a brochure with detailed information. Rather, it should be compared to a teaser to arouse interest or an advertising brochure , due to its direct and incisive nature: a message that introduces and presents news and offers, a prelude to additional content (a web page or a PDF) that can be accessed with a single click. For this reason, it is useless to saturate the message with too much text that tries to be exhaustive, especially if we consider the mobile-first approach we discussed in point 5. However, the opposite approach is also wrong: to stay too long in allusions and partial information when presenting the news.
The same applies to the subject line of the email, which is not just a label, but a real headline that, in a few words, should provide as much information as possible about the content of the email and inspire people to open it. For example, “September Newsletter” will be less effective than “The 7 Best Ways to Send Email.”
To complete the subject line, never forget to cover the summary (or preheader ), the short text that appears next to or below the subject line in the inbox. By offering more information about the content of the message to the recipient, a good summary significantly increases opening rates, especially on mobile.
8. Not experimenting with A/B testing
It’s not a mistake, but something that’s missing, because testing is an essential tool to find out which elements of your email are most effective and most attractive to your recipients: with an A/B test you can compare two versions of the same message (changing the subject, the layout, the call to action) until you define a winning version , the one that gets the best opening, click and conversion rates. In this post you will find a handy tutorial to set up an A/B test in the design of your emails.
9. Not performing the shipping test
The most basic errors in an email message can be avoided by spending a few minutes testing: spam control , preview , link analysis and other details. These are tools for testing sending (within a single area of the platform ) and ensuring that your recipients get the best possible display of your campaign, checking compatibility with email clients, the accuracy of the HTML code, the presence of spam words and much more. In B2C, it is essential to test sending to the main email portals (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, Virgilio…). We also recommend testing hyperlinks: MailUp automatically analyses their correctness and checks that they have not been blacklisted. But it is always a good idea to do a final check before launching.
10. Not analyzing the results
Email marketing is one of the areas of the digital world that provides the most detailed information on the progress of campaigns : ignoring the tools available for analysis is a serious mistake. One of MailUp’s mantras is “what you can’t measure you can’t improve”: we’re talking about opening rates, click rates, unique opening rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. That’s why we’ve equipped the platform with an advanced statistical reporting system , updated in real time and sorted according to different criteria: reports by recipient, by message, by geographic area, and by device. In addition, benchmark studies allow you to compare campaign results with the averages of your reference sector .
There is no better time than the first few weeks of the new year to update your strategy and clean it of any possible structural errors. In addition to our 10 points, do you have any other mistakes to point out or stories to tell us? Leave your comment below.