What are the common mistakes in email marketing?

Before I begin, just as a caveat: mistakes are necessary, and not a big deal if you happen to commit any of the ones I have listed below. It should be treated as a lesson, as that will set you so much further ahead toward success.

That said, here are 12 common email marketing mistakes:

#1 Not building the list from scratch. Do not purchase lists or rely on some kind of tangential subscription tactics, everybody hates those. People should be subscribing to you knowingly and willingly every single time. Basically, just don’t betray people’s privacy or trust and don’t insult their intelligence.

#2 Not targeting the right audience/prospects. Usually, that means going too wide, not specific enough.

#3 Writing long/wordy emails that fail to get the required engagement.

#4 Not implementing CTAs (Call To Action) properly.

#5 Sending the same content over and over again, without mixing it up.

#6 Failure to give value in your emails. Or, perhaps you just not presenting that value so people give them a chance.

#7 Getting too salesy.

#8 Improperly handling the subscribers who unsubscribe or anything perceived as negative behavior from the subscriber in general. Unsubscriptions are like people walking out of your grocery store. They might still come back, and if not, who cares? Same with complaints. This is a learning process. Mistakes can make you better, so don’t reject the chance to grow.

#9 Ignoring mobile optimization.

#10 Not being real, personalized, etc. People don’t want to get emails from a brand, they expect them to be coming from a person. Lean into that, express your knowledge and interest in the relevant things they also care about. You can easily move into a small selling CTA with a link in an email like that and get great numbers, especially if you’ve built trust over several months with most of the list’s population.

#11 Lack of planning.

#12 Not using analytics.

Those are the big ones that stand out to me, but the list could go quite a way longer. Online business is largely about swimming through a sea of things that don’t work to find the right combination of stuff that does. According to me, a common reason for committing mistakes could be the lack of a proper training program and/or instructions before implementing email marketing. Nowadays I use the advice from a few different training programs, one of which being List Warrior, which is pretty solid if you’re looking for something more concrete and specific. I reviewed it on my site if you’re interested in reading further.

Feel free to reply if you have any questions.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo