In the digital age that we live in, email marketing continues to reign king for eCommerce brands. There are so many great way to engage your customers through email, but it can also become tempting to go a little bit overboard if you’re not careful.
Luckily, industry experts have outlined many helpful tips and best practices to ensure you are not missing the mark with your email strategy. You may know what you should be doing when it comes to your email campaigns, but let’stake a look at the seven things you should never incorporate into your email marketing strategy.
Sending Too ManyEmails
This may seem like a no-brainer, but again, it can be easy to fall down the slippery slope when you see how well your campaigns are performing. It’s important to get your message across to your audience at the right time, but sending too many emails can backfire on you, causing a high unsubscribe rate. Bottom line – make sure your emails include valuable and relevant information to your subscribers so they look forward to receiving your messages. Quality over Quantity!
Sell All The Time
The sensible advice is that you should use your email marketing campaign to sell your products some of the time, but most of the time, you should be offering value and information to your customers. Focus on building a relationship with your subscribers by giving them valuable content and the occasional promotional offer, in order to build credibility.
Include Trigger Words In The Subject Line
This is the quickest way to get marked as spam.
Some trigger words are okay to use, but there is a fine line when using them becomes “spammy.”
Email providers have filters these days that look out for certain trigger words in an email subject line. If they see the trigger word, they’re going to dump that email in the spam folder.
Not sure if you’re on the boarder of that thin line? Here are some trigger words to avoid:
- Free
- Cash
- Dollars
- Buy
- Earn $
- Make $
- Work at home
- Bargain
- Money
- Cards accepted
Here’s a full list of trigger words by each industry.
Mislead People With The Subject Line
Make sure your subject line applies to the message in the email. There may be enticing subject lines that yield higher open rates, but they will be quickly followed by an unsubscribe if you are clearly being misleading.
One of the biggest “no, no’s” is to add “FWD:” or “RE:” in the beginning of a subject line. At first glance, the reader may think they’ve had a personal discussion with you and open your email, only to find out it is from someone they do not know. This will likely have your emails marked as spam as well.
Don’t Personalize The Email
Statistics show that personalized emails have a 22 percent higher open rate than emails that aren’t personalized.
In this day in age, people expect some type of personalization. Don’t fall behind and let the competition jump ahead of you when you can be using the same email best practices to keep your subscribers engaged.
Don’t Segment your List
Segmented lists perform 14.4 percent better than unsegmented lists.
What does this mean? When you segment an email list according to customers’ past purchases and behaviors, you can start sending tailored content out to each individual customer so that they receive emails that offer value that is specific to them and their needs. This allows each group of customers to receive relevant content that is meaningful to them, rather than a large email blast with content they aren’t interested in.
Writing Extremely Long Emails
Long form content typically performs poorly in emails. This is the place to get your message across clearly and concisely. Your emails should lead your subcribers to a long form piece, such as a blog on your site. The takeaway – keep it short and sweet with nice imagery.
It’s great to have your best marketing practices top-of-mind, but it’s also important to remember the marketing faux-pas. Be sure you are not over-sending emails to your contacts, keeping the content relevant and valuable when you do send them, are writing short and sweet copy and finally, segmenting and personalizing your emails.
About the author:
Andrew is the CEO of Next Level Web, a trusted marketing agency based in San Diego, California. He has three lovely daughters and the most patient wife of all time. They specialize in Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, PPC Advertising, and Email Marketing (The Agency – not the daughters… yet).
