Avoid these common mistakes and you’ll start seeing the email metrics you’re looking for.

Image courtesy of Pexels.

When done right, email can be a powerful tool that provides you with impressive engagement and a high return on investment. On the other hand, if you’re not taking the time to improve your emails, they can also become a disappointment.

If you’re seeing poor results or from your email marketing month after month, it might be time to take a step back and see what you might be doing wrong.

When it comes to poor email metrics, it often comes down to a few common mistakes. Whether you’re sending cold emails to prospective customers or trying to nurture a new subscriber, these mistakes can keep your emails from reaching their full potential

In this article, we’ll take a look at a few common mistakes companies make when it comes to their email marketing efforts and how to avoid them.

Here’s a quick look at what we’ll cover:

• Focusing on the wrong goals
• Not using one clear call-to-action
• Sending unprofessional messages
• Forgetting to segment your subscriber list
• Not optimizing for mobile devices

5 Email Mistakes to Avoid

By avoiding a few simple mistakes, you can improve your current email efforts. If one or more of these mistakes sound familiar, the good news is you don’t have to do a full overhaul to fix them. With minor adjustments, you can quickly get your emails to start working for you.

Make sure your emails align with the overarching goals you have as a company. Each email should serve a specific purpose, and you’ll want to create them with that in mind. Image courtesy of Pexels.

Focusing on The Wrong Goals

First and foremost, you need to make sure you’re focusing on the right goals.

For many companies, the focus is on how many emails to send and how often you should be sending them. Now, if the main goal of your email marketing efforts is to simply blast out emails, this might be the right approach.

But chances are good that’s not all you want to accomplish with your emails. You need to identify what your higher-level goals are and how you can accomplish those through your emails.

Here are a few examples of goals you could have for your emails:

• Increase sales revenue
• Spread awareness about a new product or service
• Start a conversation with your customers
• Remind your customers about an upcoming appointment to decrease no shows

Every single email you send should have a specific role to play in reaching your goal. Whether that is reaching a certain number of prospects through cold emailing or increasing sales by sending out a discount code — make sure your emails have a purpose.

You need to tell your customers what the next step they need to take is. Make it clear exactly where they need to click or what they need to do to complete that action. Image courtesy of Pexels.

Not Using One Clear Call-to-Action

Using a clear call-to-action is important to let your users know what the next step you are expecting them to take is.

Your call to action might be for the recipient to send an email response, request a demo, viewing a landing page on your website, or a number of other actions. But if the next step isn’t clear, the recipient won’t know what to do and you’ll see little to no conversion rates.

In fact, emails with a single call-to-action can increase click rates by 371% and sales by 1617%.

Those are pretty drastic increases that are hard to ignore. Taking time to develop the perfect call to action is an important step in your email marketing efforts and will definitely pay off in the long run.

You wouldn’t want to come off unprofessional during an in-person meeting and the same should be true for your emails. Take your time and make sure your message is ready to be sent to avoid coming across unprofessional. Image courtesy of Pexels.

Sending Unprofessional Messages

Your emails need to be professional and sound like they are coming from a trusted source.

Take time to write out your emails and have others review the content before you hit the send button. Sending emails with slang, spelling errors, and poor formatting can come off as unprofessional and sloppy.

Remember that every email or message you send to a prospect or customer is a reflection of you and your company. You don’t want to make a poor impression or discourage customers from purchasing from your brand over a simple spelling error.

By putting a process in place, you can ensure you never send an unprofessional email to your email lists. Whether that is taking time to write, review, and edit emails on your own or having an internal review process across multiple team members — it’s something you’ll want to implement.

The better you know your customers, the better your emails will perform. Get to know the likes and dislikes of your customers and start segmenting them to improve personalization. Image courtesy of Pexels.

Forgetting to Segment Your Subscribers

If you’re not segmenting your subscriber lists, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Especially when you consider that segmented email campaigns achieve 14.31% higher open rates and 100.95% higher clickthrough rates than non-segmented campaigns.

Segmenting your subscriber list means that you group customers based on their demographics, interests, wants, and needs. It’s the first step to building a more personalized email experience and is a great way to scale your email efforts.

There are a number of ways you can segment your subscriber list including:

• General demographics including age, gender, location
• Previous shopping and browsing behaviors
• Engagement with specific campaigns and offers
• Personal preferences and interests

As you further segment your subscribers, you can begin to send them content that is relevant to their interests, rather than sending one main email blast to your entire subscriber base. This will result in higher engagement and conversion rates.

Make sure you can reach your customers anywhere by optimizing your emails for mobile consumption. The majority of people are using mobile for all of their digital needs, so you could be missing out if your emails aren’t optimized. Image courtesy of Pexels.

Not Optimizing Your Emails for Mobile Devices

We live in a mobile world, and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon. In fact, 66% of all emails in the US are now opened on mobile devices.

That means if you skip the step of optimizing for mobile, you’re creating a poor experience for more than half of your customers. For many readers, if a message doesn’t properly open within a few seconds, they will move on and forget about it.

Not sure how to optimize your emails? Here are a few tips to make sure your emails provide the best experience on smartphones and tablets:

• Keep images to a minimal
• Use responsive templates
• Make buttons large enough to be tapped
• Don’t make subject lines too lengthy

The better optimized your emails are, the more customers will engage with your content. Don’t lose a big portion of your audience by being lazy and skipping the optimization stage of your email creation.

Start Improving Your Email Marketing Today

Did any of these mistakes sound familiar to you?

These common mistakes can derail your email marketing efforts and result in poor metrics. Luckily, improving your emails can be as simple as focusing on your goals and making minor adjustments to your email content.

No matter the case, if you’re looking for ways to improve your email marketing, these common mistakes are great places to start.