Everyone loves a good email. But a bad one can really dent your reputation! Here are our top 5 faux pas of email marketing…make sure you don’t commit any!
Broken Links
You’ve done a great job of convincing your customer that they really need your product/ service in their lives. The email has a great design, the copy text is persuasive and informative, and they are sold. They click that call to action button filled with anticipation for their purchase…only for the link to be broken, and not take them to your website. All those positive feelings from your customer are now out of the window – how frustrating to want a product and not be able to get it! Of course, they could go to your site by another link and find the product page themselves, but remember your customers are busy people. Maybe they don’t have time right now. Maybe they think they’ll look it up later. Maybe they’ll forget, and not buy that product at all… The whole point of an email is to direct customers to your site, so make sure they can get there!
SHOUTY SUBJECT LINES
Subject lines are important – you need to stand out in a crowded inbox. However, caps lock is not the way to achieve this, unless aggressive and pushy was the angle you were going for (unlikely). Stand out for the right reasons – because your message is relevant, interesting or exciting. Today’s customers receive so many emails that simply shouting at them is not enough to get their attention, so think carefully about your subject line to make sure it sparks their interest.
Hi {First Name}
Sticking with the subject line topic, a great way to make your email relevant is to include some personalisation. However, make sure you set some default text for if your database isn’t 100% complete. Otherwise, rather than a personalised email with the customer’s name, they’ll see the subject line as Hi {Fist Name}, Have You Seen Our New Autumn Collection? Not so personal after all! With a little care, it’s easy to create subject lines that work both ways. So, if you don’t have a customer’s first name details, they could be sent ‘Hi There, Have You Seen Our New Autumn Collection? for example. Who knows, by sending that email you may get a purchase from that customer whose name you didn’t have – if they provide it this time round your database just improved. Now that’s a win-win situation!
5 A Day
Fruit is a good thing to have 5 a day of. Emails are not. At least not from the same company! While 5 emails a day would be excessive in the extreme, the message here is to not bombard your customers with emails. The best frequency will vary depending on the messages you send, and the people who receive them, so test it. Send 2 emails one week and 4 the next – does the engagement level change? However, we’re pretty sure that 5 a day is not the answer in this case…
Sloppy Spelling
To be fair, this rule applies to all marketing, not just emails. But it is one of our biggest pet peeves so we’re including it here too! Spelling mistakes, misplaced apostrophes and syntax errors simply make it look like you don’t care. That you didn’t take the time to simply read the copy through before hitting send. We marketers are busy people, and sometimes even when we do proof-read things we miss the errors in them. So, our advice is to get a colleague to proof-read on your behalf – it’s much easier to spot errors in something you didn’t write yourself! remember that emails are likely to be going to thousands of people, so even though they won’t include a huge amount of text, it’s vital that the text is spot on.
So, there you have our top 5 email faux pas. Do you have any more to add? Let us know in the comments!
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