4 Hair-Raising Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

It’s late. It’s dark. And there might be a monster in the closet, but that’s the least of your worries! Your phone just chirped and indicated that you received a new email. But when you went to open it, it was as if a ghost had sent it. There was no “From” address, no subject line, no hyperlinks, and worst of all, it wasn’t optimized for your mobile device.

You’ve just fallen victim to a company that made one (or more!) of these four hair-raising email marketing mistakes. Keep reading to learn about some of the scariest email mistakes you can make—and how to avoid them! (We promise it doesn’t involve salt or garlic.)

1)   Using an Invalid Reply Email Address

When sending an email newsletter, you get to choose “who” the email is being sent from. What do we mean by this? Take a look at your inbox. When I open my personal email, I have an email from Best Buy (BestBuyInfo@emailinfo.bestbuy.com), Dominos (Offers@offers.dominos.com), and Goodyear Auto Service (Goodyear@info.goodyearautoservice.com). All three of these emails come from an email address that implies who the company is and what information the person on the other end of the email can provide.

One of the most bone-chilling mistakes you can make is to have an invalid reply address or an email address that shows up as DoNotReply@yourdomain.com. These can cause a user to get frustrated, leaving the email without clicking through to your website or filling out a contact form.

How to Choose a “From” Address:

The “From” name for your email should be your business name or a title that is recognizable to your subscribers. But choosing a reply address is a little more complicate. When choosing a “From” address, make it simple. It can be a person’s name or something short such as info@yourdomain.com. Follow these guidelines:

• Don’t use a no-reply or do-not-reply address
• Use a valid email address
• Match the “From” name to the “From address”
• Personalize for the campaign

One of the most important things to remember is that there should be someone receiving the emails that might come in! You could be missing out on sales and not even know it!

2)   Forgetting a Subject Line

As children, we’re told not to judge a book by its cover. But when it comes to email marketing, your email newsletter will be judged by its subject line. Think about it—this is the first (and only!) thing the user sees before deciding to open up the email in their inbox.

Forgetting to fill out a subject line is as scary as a monster in your closet! It can ruin your email marketing entire campaign because the likelihood of having people open an email without knowing what it contains is slim. No one wants to open something that will cause a demonic virus to take over their device!

How to Choose an Email Subject Line:

When it comes to subject lines, there’s no set formula that will get you more opens—so we recommend that you track, test, tweak, repeat (TTTR). At Blue Corona, we live by this motto. Try out different variations of subject lines. Make some funny, some witty, and some serious. Include a promotion or personalize the subject line with the user’s name. There are a bunch of different methods to try, but depending on your service or industry, some might work better than others. After sending your emails, look at the data and see what it tells you.

3)   Not Linking to Your Website

Staying in front of prospects and existing customers is a top priority for many business owners. When done right, email marketing campaigns are simple, efficient, cost-effective, and meet relevant eyes. How do they do this? By providing information about your services or promotions! But none of this information is helpful if your email does not include a link to website.

You’d be surprised by the number of emails that get sent out without links directing users to their site. You’d almost think that a witch swooped in and cast a spell on your email. Don’t let a witch’s spell cause you to miss out on leads and sales.

How to Improve Email Clickthroughs:

When we talk about linking to your website, we aren’t just talking about including a few hyperlinks within the content. While all that is well and good, a lot more goes into it. To ensure your email newsletters are designed for clicks, you need to make sure there is a top level navigation. However, you don’t simply want to copy over the navigation from your website. Pair it down to the most important services or products so it is more digestible on a smaller device since majority of emails are opened on phones (but more about that later!). These are the most important places to include internal links within your email newsletter:

• From the logo
• In the top level navigation
• Within the content
• In the footer

Don’t get tricked—you’d be surprised how many treats your email could produce with the right linking structure in place.

4)   Ignoring the Importance of Mobile

According to Marketing Land, nearly 68 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device—and that number is only expected to continue rising. So, is your email marketing campaigned optimized for mobile devices? Or do you only look at it from a laptop or desktop computer? If you don’t design your email for mobile devices—regardless of how relevant your message is—you could find yourself dealing with double, double toil and trouble!

How to Optimize Your Email Newsletter for Mobile:

Before you start send out your email campaign, send a few test emails to different mobile devices, such as, iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. These tests will help ensure that the user experience is top notch across all devices. You may just have a few easy fixes like making some cosmetic or template changes, but you could find out that the template is completely distorted on one device. Testing is one of the most effective steps you can take to avoid mistakes like this—possibly saving you from sending out a poor converting email simply because people couldn’t access the information.

Avoid These Email Marketing Mistakes with Blue Corona

Although we service all industries, we have extensive experience helping small to medium sized home services companies get more leads and sales from the web, including email marketing. Contact one of Blue Corona’s email marketing specialists today at: 800.696.4690