Email Marketing Mistakes Archives

By Ahava Leibtag

Email marketing is one of the most personal forms of digital marketing. In the wise words of Henry Ebarb, CEO and co-founder of Eightfold, “Getting access to someone’s contact information is about as close of a touch point as you can get to your customer.”

When users opt in, your organization interacts with them on a deeper level. Email makes it easier to gain trust, build loyalty and, most importantly, keep a steady flow of patient appointments.

Learn What NOT to Do in Email Marketing

Because it’s so important, how can you ensure you don’t make mistakes that break trust between your brand and your audience? Here are some of the top email marketing mess-ups to avoid this year.

Mistake #1: You Don’t Have a Targeted, Defined Audience

One of the first steps to any new email marketing campaign is to have a product or service to promote, as well as a defined audience for that product or service. Automation tools allow you to segment your subscriber list based on specific attributes, like age, gender and interests. Fleshed-out content, personalization and workflow will come later.

Once you know what product or service you’d like to promote, you can segment your list and define an audience to target. For example, to promote the COVID-19 vaccine, UCLA Health sent emails on a rolling basis to specific patient populations. They worked with population health to prioritize and invite the highest risk eligible patients first. Messages were segmented based on language preference (English vs. Spanish) as well as patient portal activation (active vs. inactive).

The campaign was a massive success; the unique open rate for the vaccine invitations was consistently above 60%.

Mistake #2: You Don’t Use Personalization or Automation Tools

Does your email marketing strategy begin and end with e-newsletters you send to a broad audience?

No single newsletter could possibly meet the needs of all subscribers. What’s the most efficient method of delivering the right content to different audiences? How will you know if you were successful? When you commit to marketing automation, the answers are at your fingertips.

Marketing automation uses tools and data within your CRM to deliver custom content based on your audience’s interests. Automation makes it possible to:

Respond quickly after someone subscribes by sending a welcome email.
Schedule content delivery so that you don’t have to manually coordinate every newsletter release.
Personalize messages by including the user’s name in the greeting.

Mistake #3: Template Design Isn’t a Priority

Do you recreate your emails from scratch each time you send one? Or maybe you use a generic template that doesn’t match your brand style or stand out in any way?

One mistake that some email marketers make is not prioritizing custom template design. You can streamline your email marketing efforts by taking the time (and budget) to create well-designed, professional templates. Then, you can run A/B tests to see which design templates resonate best with audiences.

This year, ditch the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) template builders, which have limitations and restrictions. Custom template creation gives you unique content blocks that look crisp and clean, yet on-brand.

Mistake #4: Your Emails Blend in With Your Competition

When it comes to email marketing, how bold are you?

When trying to stand out, simplicity rules. You have few words and little time to demonstrate that your email is worth a click. A thoughtfully-crafted subject line and snippet along with a good mobile experience can slow your subscriber’s roll so that they absorb every juicy detail.

Here’s how:

Start with a short, compelling subject line: Your subject line should create a sense of urgency without feeling spammy. And you have only 25 to 50 characters to do it. A busy subscriber will likely scan past “[Organization Name] Spring Newsletter.” But, “How to Feel Your Best This Spring From [Organization Name]” will likely pique their interest.
Write an enticing snippet: This is the first line of text after the subject line. Leaving it blank could result in an error message. Instead, use this small window of opportunity to share an interesting fact, summarize your email or highlight a new offering. It’s just one line, so be concise.
Use mobile-friendly design: Users are often opening your email on their phone, so keep things tight and clean. Succinct content and smart use of headers make for easy reading. And don’t go overboard with images. When they don’t display correctly, images become big white gaps that detract from your content.

Mistake #5: You Don’t Have Enough Content to Distribute Through Email

Once you’ve enticed users with your exceptional topic and easy-to-read format, they’ll expect regular emails from you. It can be challenging to keep developing fresh content — especially if you’re managing newsletters on multiple topics. But you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

How to feed the content beast:

Get personal: Introduce the people behind the products and services you offer. Staff interviews are easy to pull together and make for compelling content. This information may already exist in staff bios or clinician profiles, and all you need to do is summarize.
Repurpose existing blog and web content: UCLA Health has perfected this process. “We partner with our content editor to determine which pieces to repackage for email. We then write a headline, adjust copy, and add a call to action. The information goes into our template, and we resize images. Then we’re ready to send,” said Anne Machalinski, senior manager of marketing at UCLA Health.
Riff off newsletter articles that performed well: Compile a “Top 10” list at the end of the year highlighting popular articles. And write articles with follow-ups.

Mistake #6: You Set It and Forget It

Some newsletters will be more successful than others. Analytics provide valuable insights into what’s resonating with audiences and where there’s room for improvement. This information is available in real time, so check early and often — and be responsive to what the data shows you.

Jennifer Coffman, email marketing manager at Cleveland Clinic, told me, “If you’re not managing the campaigns and understanding the behaviours and overall data, it can affect your relationship with your audience and your company’s reputation. Don’t set and forget.”

Pull It All Together

In 2022, it’s time to rethink your email marketing initiatives. It’s time to ditch the common mistakes above and take your email marketing to the next level. Make this the year email marketing has the biggest impact for your business.

By Ahava Leibtag

Ahava is the president and owner of Aha Media Group, a content strategy and content marketing consultancy founded in October 2005. Ahava is passionate about content and prides herself on tackling the toughest content projects — from healthcare to higher education to hip-hop (seriously).

Sourced from CMS Wire

By Chad S. White

Email marketing is complicated. A number factors and subfactors govern deliverability. The potential for email rendering problems is mind-bogglingly large. And email technology and tactical issues continue to evolve.

However, not everything in email is complex.

Some aspects are quite simple — and yet companies still regularly struggle with them. In most cases, they’re probably just unaware of the problem or just how easy the fix is. In other cases, turnover on their email team means expertise in the channel’s nuances has been lost. Whatever the reason, here are 10 common email marketing mistakes that are relatively simple to fix:

1. Not Using a Recognizable Sender Name

Subject lines get too much credit for driving open rates. Your sender name actually has a bigger impact on whether your subscribers open your emails. That makes sense for two reasons:

First, email marketing is a permission-based channel, so who’s sending an email to a recipient is critical. If your subscriber doesn’t recognize your name, it can lead to your emails being ignored or, worse, reported as spam. And second, email marketing is a relationship-based channel, so your sender name represents the value that your subscriber has gotten from your emails and from your brand previously.

So, put your brand name front and center and don’t change it from email to email. If you want to safely mix things up with your sender name, try using from name extension strategies. For example, you can emphasize that an email is about a Black Friday sale by changing your sender name to “YourBrand Black Friday.”

2. Not Optimizing Your Preview Text

Preview text is the text from inside your email that’s displayed in the inbox either to the right of your subject line in inboxes like Gmail or underneath your subject line in inboxes like the iPhone Mail app. Often, inboxes display twice as many characters of preview text as they do subject line text, so it’s a valuable opportunity to communicate more to your subscribers about what your emails is about before they open it.

Make sure you take full advantage of what text appears as preview text by using either visible or invisible preheader text. But more than that, run some A/B tests on your preview text, just like brands routinely do for their subject lines. And if you want to take it up a notch further, use multivariate testing to try different subject line and preview text combinations to see which one drives the most clicks for your email.

3. Including Too Much Copy

A good rule for writing marketing copy is to write what you’d like to say, and then cut the number of words in half. A good rule of writing email marketing copy is to cut the word count in half again.

Many marketers seem to have lost their talent for brevity, says Fabricio Lopez, Expert Services Cloud Manager for Oracle Marketing Consulting. “I grew up in South America during the ‘80s when telegrams were still very prominent,” he says. “I used to watch my siblings write incredible messages as part of their jobs. I think we lost that ability when email entered the scene, although Twitter brought back some of that ability. In my opinion, marketers should practice getting the message reduced to the least number of words possible and then embellish it from that point, the result should be a concise and hard hitting CTA.”

If you can’t avoid sending an email with a lot of copy, make sure that you break the copy up and make use of subheads and bullets where you can. That will make the copy much more approachable.

4. Using Font Sizes That Are Too Small, Especially on Mobile Devices

Using responsive email design isn’t enough. Brands also need to use mobile-friendly design principles. Chief among those principles is using font sizes that are big enough for people young and old to easily read in a variety of environments, such as outside in the sun or in bed in the dark.

For standard text, we recommend text that’s 14pt to 18pt. Your headlines and subheads should be even bigger. If this recommendation alarms you because you worry it will make your emails longer or limit what you can put above the fold, keep in mind that while many subscribers will scroll below the fold, almost no one will pinch-and-zoom in order to read your text.

5. Using Low-Contrast Text

When the colour of your text is similar in value to the colour of your background, your text can be difficult for some subscribers to read, particularly if your text size is small. Using high-contrast text — such as black text on a white background — not only helps people who have poor vision, but is also better for someone who’s out in bright sunlight with their mobile device. It’s also just better for everyone in general.

Text should have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, according to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If the text is 18pt or larger or is bold and 14pt or larger, a contrast ratio of 3:1 is fine.

The trickier problem that I see routinely is brands running HTML text over background images that have colours with highly varied values. The result is that some of the text is legible while other portions are not. The solutions to this include picking a different image, darkening or lightening the image, cropping the image differently, and positioning the text differently.

6. Not Using Alt Text for Your Images, When Appropriate

Sometimes the images in your emails don’t load, usually either because the subscriber is blocking them or they are experiencing bandwidth issues because of spotty wifi or cellular coverage. When this happens, your images won’t be displayed to help convey your email’s message.

To serve your subscribers in these situations, as well as to serve your subscribers who are using screen readers, be sure to add alt text to your images, when appropriate. That “when appropriate” is important, because not every image needs alt text. Logos and product images? Absolutely. But generic images that are there to set a mood? Generally using an alt tag on those isn’t necessary and leads to unhelpful alt text like “picture of a sunset” (which is a real example of alt text I’ve seen).

7. Using Graphical Buttons

Creating call-to-action buttons that are completely graphical means that the text of your CTA won’t appear at all if images are disabled or don’t load. For that reason, marketers should always use bulletproof buttons, where hyperlinked HTML text is placed over a button made from a filled table cell or some other non-image-based construct.

Once you settle on a button design that you like, use it everywhere, just change the CTA text. That turns this shift into largely a one-time effort.

8. Clustering Hyperlinked Elements Too Closely Together

In a world full of touchscreens, both on mobile and larger devices, being touch-friendly is important. When linked images and text are too close to each other, it’s easy for people to miss their target and end up on a landing page they’re not interested in. Getting one click is hard enough, so expecting a second click because your email is poorly designed is unrealistic.

Using larger text, as already mentioned, can help. But having decent padding between hyperlinked elements is the biggest key. This is particularly important for CTA buttons. Having plenty of white space around them not only makes them easy to click, but also makes them stand out, which is exactly what you want your CTAs to do.

Also, avoid linking items that you don’t need to. Focus on linking the elements of your design that people are most likely to click on, such as product images, buttons and text links.

9. Making Your Unsubscribe Link Difficult to Find

Some brands are still under the impression that if they make their unsubscribe link difficult to find that fewer subscribers will opt-out. Unfortunately, when people can’t find the unsubscribe link because it’s small or buried in a big block of administrative text or legalese, they simply click the report spam button instead.

For subscribers, the effect is the same: no more emails from the brand. However, for the brand, their spam complaint rate has gone up, potentially hurting their deliverability. Plus, they probably irritated the subscriber, making them less likely to re-subscribe at any point in the future.

10. Having Your Emails Clipped in Gmail

If the coding of your email (excluding the file sizes for any images) is more than 102K, Gmail will clip your email and force your subscribers to click a “View entire message” link to see the rest of your message.

Besides looking suspicious, clipping hides content from your subscribers … including your unsubscribe link. So, not only does having your email clipped reduce its effectiveness, it erodes trust and leads to elevated spam complaints from subscribers who can’t find your unsubscribe link.

All of these mistakes have relatively easy solutions. Some, like writing effective and meaningful preview text or alt text, take a little time for each email you send. Others, like font sizes and button designs, are one-time efforts that pay off for the long haul. All are very much worthwhile.

Feature Image Credit: recha oktaviani | unsplash

By Chad S. White

Chad S. White is the author of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle.