3 common email marketing mistakes that don’t make sense at all

For many people, email marketing is a numbers game. They send a large number of emails just to receive a few responses. This is why they are constantly looking for new techniques and formulas in email marketing. 

And this is where self-proclaimed email marketing gurus start describing techniques and methods. They use the frustration people experience with email marketing to sell their ideas and find a small clique of followers. You may have little success with these methods, but once you see beyond the end of your nose, you will realize that these methods only harm your results in the long run. You will lose the trust of the recipients and hurt customer loyalty among other things. 

Here are some of these errors. 

1. Having a dirty slate

The motto “less is more” is fully applicable in menus mode. In other words, a small (but clean) list is more valuable than a huge (but unclean) list. The unclean mega list has a large number of inactive subscribers no matter what, they are not interested in you or your product.

Inactive subscribers incur high costs to you, firstly because they do not open your emails and thus reduce the overall open rate (and a consistently low open rate will send a signal to mailbox providers like Google or Yahoo!, and secondly, that it costs too much to keep – you need To pay more to your ESP email service provider to get a huge unnecessary list. 

Most email marketers will do anything (literally anything) to expand their email list, from begging nearly any blogger to feature in their email broadcasts to promising any kind of irrelevant lead magnet to any visitor. The truth is, appearing on other people’s lists or promising lead magnets are two of the most common (and of course effective) ways to build an email list, but once used poorly, they have negative effects. 

It all comes down to the quality of your listing. If you want to appear on an email list, make sure you have a strategy in place regarding your message, framing, or even select bloggers who have an active and carefully organized email list rather than anyone with a huge list. 

If you want to offer a lead magnet on a landing page, first make sure that you are driving the right traffic to your landing page, and secondly make sure you have a suitable lead magnet that will be interesting only to your ideal customers rather than any visitor who has little curiosity in your products or services. 

The necessary step to having a clean slate is to run your email list through the email checker and remove invalid emails.  

2. Open your emails at any cost

The problem starts when the unlock rate gets more attention than it deserves. Believe it or not, some people still rely on their campaign’s open rate to determine its success or failure. They will do anything to improve it even if it means using deceptive subject lines. 

Psychologically, most deceptive subject lines usually rely on people’s anxiety or frustration and prepare them for a way out. The result is that they got huge open rates. 

Let’s say someone is laid off and desperately looking for a job. He will immediately open an email promising a dream job, but is frustrated to find out that the email is actually a promotional email from one of the sites he signed up for. 

Using deceptive subject lines has a major downside: it reduces trust between you and your customers over time. With every deceptive subject line being submitted, you lose a part of your subscribers’ trust in your channel. It will finally level up when they take all of your claims for a grain of salt. You may see a decent open rate or even a CTR but you may be wondering why despite all these numbers you don’t have a good conversion rate. 

3. Spam email instead of cold email

Cold email still works its magic one way or another. However, contrary to what most people think, cold email isn’t really a pure numbers game. Having a huge contact list can certainly be a valuable asset but the quality of the list or how you handle it with your cold emails is more important.

SalesHandy demonstrates that successful email needs to intelligently address potential customer problems. So before you even think about sending an unsolicited email, make sure you know your prospects well. They also suggest a 7-stage roadmap to having a successful cold email: 

1. Use a friendly sender name:  To build trust with recipients, you need to make sure that you are using an authentic email sender name. Use your real name or your name plus your company name.  
2. Eye- catching subject line:  47% of recipients open emails based on subject lines only. So you need to spend a lot of time writing an eye-catching subject line. Some techniques are understanding the recipient’s perception and writing a subject line that addresses their problems, making your subject line personal and alluring, and writing a clear and expressive subject line. 
3. Simple Introduction to Breaking the Ice:  Write a short introduction (2-3 sentences) and explain how you came to know it. Praise their accomplishments and make them feel important. 
4. Ask questions for participation:  You should ask a question about your research and the recipient’s problem. Your question should be one-line and reflect the interest of the potential client.
5. Offer a short solution:  When promoting your product or service, the focus should be on benefits and not an explanation of product features. Write down the benefits the potential customer will get from your product or services. Be very specific about how effective it will be in growing their business. Keeping it short and simple will do the trick for you.
6. One Call to Action:  You will have to write a call to action to get what you want the prospect to do with your cold email. Action can be a simple answer, scheduling a call, comment on your product, or anything that enters into a business conversation. You don’t really need to immediately sell your product in your cold email. 
7. Email signature:  Your signature should be short and meaningful. Never add a lot of unnecessary data with your signature. Simply add your name, label, email ID and organization details. These details will help the recipient learn more about you. Add your phone number and social media contacts only if necessary.

Skip Emails: Post-Click Optimization

Email marketing campaign success is achieved once conversions occur. Open rates or click rates are just vanity metrics that will most likely determine the success of your email script writing. Once you direct recipients to a landing page, the quality of the landing page and how you can improve it determines whether or not you really succeeded in your campaign. 

In a classic must-read article on post-click optimization, Instapage explains that post-click experiences are often overlooked by ad agencies because they mostly focus on “creating ads.” The problem starts when only 3% of ad clicks are converted. The article then explains that good post-click optimization has three pillars:

1. Scalable Build: Create landing pages at scale to create multiple post-click experiences. With a custom URL shortener, you can create multiple custom URLs, add various tags, segment your audience, and manage links and visitors in one place. 
2. Optimization : A/B testing frequently to see what works well and what doesn’t
3. Personalization : Increase the importance of landing pages for each section of the audience. By working on and improving these pillars, the post-click experience for visitors and thus the quality of their journey will inevitably improve. As  Ben Aston explains,  “improving the ‘customer journey’ has been proven to increase revenue by up to 15% while increasing customer satisfaction by about 20%.” This by itself will increase the conversion rate of your email campaign