As digital marketers, we all know the power of a solid email list.
It is one of the most direct and effective ways of communicating with your leads and turning them into long time customers.
When you send an email newsletter, it lands directly into the inbox of the receiver. This increases the possibility of your emails being clicked on. So, be smart and use this opportunity to capture your leads and turn them into sales.
For that, it’s important that you know how to conduct an effective email marketing campaign for your business.
To help you get the best results, I’ll tell you the most common mistakes that you need to avoid while sending out your emails. In doing so, I’ll also touch upon the best practices to follow which can yield amazing results for your marketing efforts.
1. Not Personalizing Your Emails
The first mistake that most email marketers make is to not personalize their emails.
If you want your email marketing efforts to be successful, personalizing your emails is extremely important.
According to studies, emails with personalized subject lines are more likely to be opened than the ones sent without personalizing.
That’s because by addressing your reader by name or curating content that interests them, your emails you can stand out in your customer’s inbox. Besides, giving your customers some personalized attention can also make them feel special.
The best way to do that is to send highly targeted and relevant content that can genuinely interest your subscribers. Use your subscriber’s first name to address them. This is a very good way of instantly capturing their attention.
Although personalizing every email you send sounds like a tough job, it isn’t that difficult. Thanks to the amazing email marketing tools that simplify it for us.
2. Forgetting to Authenticate Your Emails
The next mistake to avoid is forgetting to authenticate your emails. Not authenticating your emails increases the chances of your emails landing in the spam folder of your subscribers. If that happens your emails will never be read. That’s not something you want to happen as you’ll miss out on conversions. This is why you need to authenticate your email.
By authenticating your emails you make sure that they are successfully delivered into the inbox of your recipient.
The best way to authenticate your emails is to enable SMTP. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and its primary function is to send, receive, and/or relay outgoing mail between the email senders and the receivers.
Plugins like WP Mail SMTP can help you enable SMTP easily. It ensures that your emails are authenticated and that it lands right into the inbox of your subscribers.
3. Not Segmenting Your Email Lists
Not segmenting your email list is one of the biggest mistakes that many marketers make. When you don’t segment your email lists it becomes difficult to understand the needs and expectations of your customers.
It makes it difficult for you to send targeted emails with higher conversion possibilities.
That’s why it’s always important that you segment your email list before starting your email marketing campaigns. Use analytics to group your email list into categories based on demographics. Or ask your readers about their interests when they sign up and segment them based on their choices.
A segmented list will help you get an insight into the requirements of your users. You can then use this data to tailor campaigns that your users will be genuinely interested in.
4. Sending Your Emails in the Wrong Time
Many marketers don’t know the best timing to send their emails. Sending your email campaigns at the wrong time is another mistake that you need to avoid.
The time in which you send out your emails can have a huge impact on your campaign.
Sending your emails at 11 o’clock on a Monday morning may not be the best time for your business. Before sending your emails always consider the whereabouts of the recipient.
On a Monday morning, your users are likely to be busy working in their offices. This means that there is very little possibility for them to read your emails.
So your emails may not get as many click rates as you thought they might get. Here’s a chart showing the best days in which people open their emails the most.
According to the chart above, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days to send an email. The click-through rates on these days are comparatively higher than the other days of the week.
So instead of a Monday, you might want to opt for one of these days for sending out your email campaigns for better results.
But what’s the best time to send them?
According to the chart above subscribers are most likely to open emails after 12 pm. 2-5 pm are considered to be the peak hours when your email is most likely to be opened.
So instead of randomly hitting the send button, you can use the data in these charts for an effective email marketing campaign.
5.Forgetting to A/B Testing Your Email Marketing Copies
Another mistake that you need to avoid is forgetting to A/B test your email marketing copies.
A/B testing or split test is a powerful conversion optimization technique that lets you test the effectiveness of web pages or email marketing copies.
In this method, you can test your original email copy with a different version of it with a slight variation. This can be a different subject line, a CTA, or any other relevant element in the campaign.
The results will show you which copy is more likely to bring in more leads and sales for your business.
By not doing that you can’t be sure if your email campaign is good enough to bring in the leads and sales for the success of your business.
Over to You
Your email list can be one of the biggest assets for your business. So use it wisely to get the maximum benefit out of it. Segment your email list, personalize your emails, and choose the right timing to send an email blast. Finally, split test your final drafts before launching your email campaign. Once you’ve followed the points shared here, I bet your email marketing campaigns will show much better results and bring in more conversions.