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Top 5 email marketing mistakes

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Mar 3, 2009 

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Edward Barrera  |

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Top 5 email marketing mistakes

ADOTAS — Email marketing might be old school, but it still works.

Yet people creating and paying for emails make simple mistakes and lose customers. Emailvision gives the top five boneheaded plays in email marketing and how to avoid them.

“In today’s economy, return on investment has never been more important as marketing spend is now analysed and questioned by senior stakeholders,” Nick Gold, UK managing director at Emailvision, told Netimperative. “Companies can’t afford to be making such simple mistakes and missing potential sales. The fundamental aims of any campaign should be high deliverability, targeted mailing, maximum click-through rates and basic personalisation – don’t let the email be the reason customers go elsewhere.”

At number five, trying too hard – designing an email as if it was a website, heavy use of flash or java script, which doesn’t show up properly in an email and can be complicate. Keep it simple and clean, allowing reader to click to company’s website.

At number four, ability to reply – adding the wrong return email address either by accident or on purpose to avoid filtering responses lands. Replies can provide valuable information from problems with the email to enquiries about the product. Create a dedicated inbox account.

Number three, missing information – need a comprehensive and segmented database. I’ve had this happen to me, ‘Dear xxx.’ Do you think I read it? (Actually, I did. You never know.) Even writing ‘Dear customer’ is preferable.

At number two, image but no text… – many ISPs don’t automatically download images so recipients are left with blank boxes. This makes it hard to track response rates. Always make sure this is considered in the email design and use a tool that demonstrates different ISPs or send a test mail to yourself first.

And at number one, stopped as spam – Words in subject lines such as WIN A GREAT PRIZE will not get past spam filters.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

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