Email marketing is a great tool for brands to keep in touch with their customers and send out the latest news and offers. It can help boost sales and can keep customers loyal. With many tools online, email marketing is fairly easy to do for anyone, but with this simplicity, people can easily get them wrong as well.

In our latest blog, we will go through a few common email marketing mistake and how to fix them or avoid them.

Emails that aren’t Optimized:

The majority of individuals who open emails nowadays open them on a mobile device so make sure to consider this when designing your mailshot. If someone viewing on a mobile has to read through paragraphs of text or can’t click on the link, they will likely get turned off and delete the email.

The Fix: Keep the text in your mailshot concise and to the point. Make sure to include high quality imagery and make sure the links and CTAs are large enough for the user to click

Sending out without permission:

One of the biggest no-nos when it comes to email marketing is sending out emails without the user's permission. If you do not have the user’s permission then you are effectively sending out spam or junk mail and can be seen as a nuisance. Sending mail without a user’s permission is also against the law and you can be banned from many mailing services if you do not comply.

The Fix: Always send emails to those who have opted in to receiving a mailshot. It is important to have a message on your website that gives the user the option, such as during registration, a pop-up or checkout.

Boring offers or repetitive content:

Email marketing is great as it can entice customers to check out your shop or to promote offers. However if you keep peddling the same content and offers each week then customers will get bored.

The Fix: Make sure to keep offers to a minimum such as during holidays, e.g. Christmas sales or customer’s birthdays, and say something new with every mailshot. You could have themes each week, or do a spotlight on certain products.

Not timing your email marketing

Sending out a mailshot twice a day can be a bit much but sending it out once in a blue moon isn’t good as the customer can end up forgetting about you. Getting the timing right and how often you send out the mailshot is important as you want your customers to keep you in mind but not get annoyed by you.

The Fix: make sure to keep to a schedule, this could be once a week, once a fortnight and so on, and also be sure to let the customer know how often they will receive the mailshot so they know when to expect it.

Bonus Tip: Always check the analytics for each mailshot so you know how well they are doing and if there have been conversions. If you don’t keep track then you won’t know if the mailshot is doing well or not - it could be going badly and you are losing customers but if you don’t keep track you will never know, which is very bad for business.

Most email marketing tools will have analytics built in where you can see how many clicked on it, unsubscribed or clicked the links, however if you want to track conversions set up Google Analytics. Setting this up will allow you to see if you are making a return on investment.