6 Email Marketing Mistakes That Can Doom Your Business in 2022

Email is one of the most powerful ways to market a business, generating more leads than any other marketing method. However, without proper planning and advice, you can tarnish your brand reputation. Thankfully, these email marketing mistakes are easy to avoid, and you can turn them into free email marketing lessons. Here are five email marketing mistakes to avoid in 2022.

Failure to Respect the Inbox

You might be tempted to buy a list of contacts from a third-party service but resist the urge. When you send an email to people who didn’t sign up for your newsletter, they have no idea who you are and what your product is about.

Even worse, if someone gets an unsolicited email from you and doesn’t recognize your company, they’re likely to ignore it or report it as spam. When this happens your sender score takes a hit and future emails end up in junk folders instead of inboxes where they belong. This is a terrible way to start a relationship with new customers.

Instead, focus on building up your list organically by giving people incentive to sign up for your emails like offering coupons or early access to products and services. You could also send them useful information such as free reports or eBooks in exchange for an email.

Always require a double opt-in. The EU’s privacy regulations have forced marketers to clean up their lists and start taking list management seriously. One way to prevent dead emails or spam traps from making their way onto your list is by requiring new subscribers to confirm their signup via email. This method also prevents people from accidentally signing up for your newsletter if they don’t want it. (We’ve all signed up for something before we realized we didn’t want it.)

No Segmentation or Targeting

If you’re sending emails to everyone on your list, you’re missing the opportunity to segment and target, which is one of the most useful ways to make the most of your email list. By dividing your customers into groups based on factors like age, gender, geographic location, and even customer lifetime value, you can send highly targeted emails that your customers are much more likely to open and engage with.

Segmentation is the most powerful email marketing tactic. It allows you to send more targeted messages to your subscribers, and that leads to better results. It also engages them more effectively because the message is relevant and personal to them.

Treating Email as a Marketing Campaign

Having an active email list is crucial to the success of an online business. But many businesses get this wrong by treating their list as a marketing campaign.

When you treat your email list as a marketing campaign, you’re likely to make sales in the short term but it won’t be sustainable in the long run. The success of your business depends on how many people you can sign up for your email list with discounts or other incentives. Then, when you sell them something, they’ll probably never buy from you again.

Emails should provide value to the customer. Every email you send shouldn’t be a sales pitch. One of the biggest mistakes people make with email marketing is treating their list like an ATM instead of treating it like the audience they are. Think about what they want to receive and not just what you want to write about or send. People get a lot of email nowadays, and they want to hear from someone who cares about them personally.

Not Testing

You’re not going to know what works unless you test it. Every email platform has A/B split testing built in, so you can see what gets better open rates. Try testing different subject lines, images vs. text-based emails, etc., until you find out what works best for your audience. This kind of information will help you refine your email marketing and make it more profitable.

Making It All About You, Not the Customer

Many companies mistakenly send an email that focuses entirely on their own business or products. Your customers don’t want to read a sales pitch — they want interesting and relevant content that helps them solve problems or get better at what they do.

Focus your content on your customer and how he or she can benefit from your product or service. When you write a marketing email, consider the reader and his or her wants and needs. Make it about what’s in it for them — not you.

Your subscribers don’t care about your business unless it can help them solve their problems or make their lives easier. Write with your audience in mind, not yourself. Steve Job said, “People don’t care about you, your product, your service, or your company. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals.”

Writing Poorly Crafted Subject Lines

The subject line of your email is the headline of your message. It gets people to open your emails. If you don’t have a compelling subject line, you don’t have a chance to get anyone to read the rest of your message. It’s what gets you noticed in a crowded inbox.

When people see a poorly written subject line, they may think it’s spam or will not bother opening up the email at all. Keep it short and sweet and make it so that it instantly grabs the attention of anyone who sees it and is relevant to what your customer signed up for.

What’s the best practice for crafting an email subject line? Put the point of your email in the subject line. Subject lines should tell the reader why they should care, not what your email is about. For example: “How to write a good email subject line (that gets opened)” tells the subscriber that this article is for them and offers value to them.

Here are five key features of an effective subject line:

1. It’s personal
2. It’s relevant
3. It provides value
4. It’s easy to understand
5. It’s not too long

Optimize each of these components and you’ll skyrocket your open rate.

Sending Too Many Emails

Many people have become desensitized to email marketing messages because there’s so much of it out there every day. The best rule is not to send more than one commercial message per week per customer — any more and you risk overwhelming them with marketing messages they don’t care about, and even multiple messages a week may be too much for some customers.

As email marketing becomes increasingly crowded, the only way to build and maintain a robust list is to win over your readers’ trust. You do this by creating relevant, interesting, and informative messages. Keep your subscribers engaged, and they will keep opening your emails; lose their attention and trust, or use tactics that are misleading or dishonest, and you risk alienation and humiliation. Keep email marketing but be smart about it!