Don’t let common email marketing mistakes derail your business.

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to engage with your community and make sales, however, it’s easy to make mistakes especially when you’re just starting out.  If you don’t know that you’re making mistakes, you can get caught in the trap of bad habits that can derail your email marketing efforts.

Here are 5 common email marketing mistakes and what you can do to fix them:

Mistake #1 – You only use email as a sales tool

If the only time you send an email is when you’ve got something to sell, you’re doing both your audience and you a huge disservice.

Email is a great way to sell without selling, to share valuable information with your readers and teach them what you know.

It’s also one of the best tools you have for building relationships with your readers, but you can squander that relationship if all you do is continually try to sell them something.

Mistake #2 – You don’t pay attention to your numbers.

Another common email marketing mistake is not paying attention to your stats. You need to know your numbers so that you know how well your email campaigns are working, and whether or not your readers are opening your emails and responding to what you send them.

One of the most important numbers you need to track is your deliverability rate. If you don’t even know whether your emails are getting through to your customers, none of your other numbers will mean much at all.

One easy solution for improving deliverability is to use a website email address from your own domain, rather than a third party email account such as from Gmail.  While third-party email services are certainly convenient, they are also a trigger for spam warnings and should be avoided for email marketing purposes.

The other thing you need to know is how to set up things like your DMARC, DKIM and SPF correctly, so that your emails will get delivered to Gmail and Yahoo email addresses.

Mistake #3 – You don’t set goals for your content or get to know your audience

If you don’t take the time to understand your goals and audience fully you have a tendency to create content that doesn’t resonate with them.  The superpower of email marketing is that your readers view it as more personal, and you can’t give them that if you don’t know them.

Build the relationship by using your email marketing as an opportunity to form a deeper connection and understanding with personalized and relevant content.

Mistake #4 – Your content is not optimized for multiple devices

In this day and age, you need to have an understanding of which devices your readers are using to engage with your content. This is crucial as not every email service provider or platform is optimized for mobile devices. However, smartphones are far more available to people than computers.

It’s highly likely that many of your subscribers read your emails and other content on their phones. Therefore, you need to make sure your content is optimized to view and click-through for mobile phones.

Mistake #5 – Your call to action is either wrong or doesn’t exist

The goal of every email you send should be to give your reader the next step you want them to take. That means they should also have an easy-to-use and understand call-to-action that translates to achieving it.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, common email marketing mistakes can hurt your business. But they can also be easily rectified. Pay attention to your readers’ needs and wants, deliver quality content, give them actions to take after reading, and watch your numbers. If you take the time to fix your mistakes you should see an improvement in your email marketing results.