10 Email Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

Email Marketing | May 17 2022
Aileen Wheetly | 5.5 Min Read
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    Blog Email Marketing 10 Email Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

    10 Email Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

    Email marketers in increasingly competitive environments must continuously optimize their emails for success. This means crafting emails that create a good overall impression of your brand by avoiding common email mistakes. As email mistakes can have a huge negative impact on how customers perceive your brand, this article lists 10 of the most common mistakes in emails you need to be aware of. Accounting for these—and ensuring they don’t apply to your emails—can help you reach customers more effectively and convey a favourable brand image.


    Email Mistake #1: Using Unengaging Subject Lines 


    Your subject line is an essential aspect of your marketing emails. With customers sending and receiving a total of 319 emails daily, according to Statista, emails with unengaging subject lines are likely to go unnoticed. As such, you should seek to create a favourable first impression by crafting snappy email subject lines. With 33% of email recipients deciding whether to open emails based on their subject line, your email subject line should inform, engage, and hook customers into the contents of your email. 


    Email Mistake #2: Sending Unbranded Emails 


    Not branding your marketing emails is one of the most common mistakes in email writing — particularly for companies just getting started. Branded emails can be a great way to solidify your brand image and breed familiarity. Consequently, consistent branding across your marketing channels can yield a 23% increase in revenue. For a branded look to your emails, try to make your emails as recognizable as possible; use branded imagery, logos, CTA buttons, colours, fonts, and formats to create familiarity with customers. 


    Email Mistake #3: Not Double-Checking Grammar and Spelling 


    Have you ever received an email ridden with spelling and grammar errors? Then you know the detrimental effect poorly-written emails can have on customers. These have the potential to make your company seem incompetent, untrustworthy, and amateurish — and no one wants to do business with someone who doesn’t take their customer communications seriously. To avoid these errors in your emails, you need to proofread (two, three, or four times) before pressing ‘send’. If you’re still uncertain about the flow of your emails, you can request help from your co-workers or use AI-based grammar checkers such as Grammarly when writing emails. These resources can stop you from making common email mistakes when writing, hence improving the efficiency of your emails.


    Email Mistake #4: Sending Emails Without Permission 


    Companies must be cautious when using customer information given the increasingly stringent consumer privacy laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA). Nowadays, there are severe consequences for unauthorized or improper use of customer information. This makes sending emails without customers’ consent one of the worst email mistakes you can make. To avoid breaching anti-spam laws, ensure you receive explicit permission from customers you plan on emailing. When doing so, clearly state what type of emails and content they can expect. This way, they know what they’re signing up for and won’t be surprised when receiving emails from you. 


    Email Mistake #5: Not Optimizing Emails For Mobile 


    One of the most common mistakes in email marketing is not having mobile-optimized emails. As more than 60% of consumers open and read emails on their mobile devices, you must optimize your emails’ format, copy, and imagery for mobile devices. This increases your emails’ readability and conversion rates, with mobile-responsive emails increasing mobile engagement by 15%. Without the ease of use that comes with mobile optimization, your customers will have difficulty navigating emails from you. Having to scroll around while zooming in and out of text can make reading emails off-putting and frustrating. This may put off customers from opening your emails altogether. As such, optimizing your emails can facilitate positive customer experiences, making customers look forward to their interactions with you.


    Email Mistake #6: Including Too Many CTAs 


    A strategically placed CTA can nurture customers down the marketing funnel—we all know that. However, including a lot of CTAs in your emails can have the opposite effect. Adding too many CTAs can result in choice overload, with many consumers ending up not clicking on any CTA at all. To avoid this common email mistake, keep the number of email CTAs to a maximum of three. Not sure which CTAs you should prioritize? Get reacquainted with your main business goals. These can help you pick out email CTAs that best align with the broader company goals.


    Email Mistake #7: Not A/B Testing Your Marketing Emails 


    A common email mistake made by newer marketing teams is not A/B testing marketing emails. A/B testing is a great way to increase the success of your emails, helping you find out which emails customers respond best to. You can test many things in your emails, including your emails’ subject lines, imagery, content length, tone of voice, preheader text, and formatting. By trying and testing one email element at a time, you can grow your knowledge of profitable email marketing practices and continuously enhance the success of your emails.


    Email Mistake #8: Lack of Personalization 


    Given the overwhelming amount of emails customers receive daily, you must create emails that grab customers’ attention. One way to stand out in their inbox is by personalizing elements of your emails. These personalized approaches can result in 6x the transaction rates compared to impersonal emails. You can use your segmented email list and customers’ online behaviours as a starting point for email personalization. Depending on the information you have, you can try to send them personalized emails by:

    Tailoring email copy based on customers’ interests, names, and online behaviours.
    Delivering targeted offers based on customers’ preferences and previous purchases.
    Sending cart abandonment emails that include pictures of the items customers have abandoned. 

    Email Mistake #9: Making It Difficult to Unsubscribe From Your Emails 


    Customers can easily get annoyed by companies that bombard them with irrelevant or uninteresting emails. If you don’t offer them an easy way to unsubscribe, they can get frustrated with your emails and mark you as ‘spam.’ This can affect the efficacy of your emails, impacting your email deliverability and causing issues with your ESP. To avoid this common email mistake, ensure your users can unsubscribe from your emails effortlessly, using only a few quick clicks.


    Email Mistake #10: Not Automating Emails 


    In this day and age, companies must be able to scale at a rapid pace. This makes email automation essential for growing companies that want to stay in touch with customers. Email automation can help you send emails based on specific triggers, such as customers’ online behaviours. Delivering emails as soon as your customers perform certain actions is when customers are most receptive to your emails. This means they’re highly likely to engage with your content, hence increasing the efficiency of your emails. Examples of automated emails you can send are birthday emails, welcome emails, and cart abandonment emails.


    If you’re looking to get started with automating highly personalized emails using dedicated formatting, contact iwinBACK for more information!