It’s something we’ve all fallen victim to. Regardless of your level of experience in email marketing, mistakes do happen.
After constructed a carefully crafted, persuasive message for your audience, one that you know will have a compelling effect, you hit send and wait for your good work to start paying off.
It is at that moment that you cast your eyes over your email for a final, post-sending scan, and you see a glaring error jump right out at you. A mistake you failed to see the first 100 times you proofed the article has finally become apparent… a little too late.
The inevitable panic ensues.
The only way to prevent such situations from occurring is to be aware of how things can go wrong, and to identify blunders before hitting the send button. So, here are some of the most common ways that emails can go very, very wrong.
Inaccurate Personalization
We are now in an age when email messages must be personalized to be read. Inboxes are filling up increasingly fast, meaning that recipients must filter them more rigorously than before. Prior to sending out your email, it is essential to ensure that the personalization is accurate. Check you have the recipients’ correct name, location and language ahead of time.
Irrelevant Information
As with any sales message, make sure your focus is on exactly what your audience want to read. Have you received an email before and wondered, “Does this company actually have any idea who I am?” Ensuring the relevance of your email content comes down to effective segmentation. Group your list into recipients sharing certain traits, and make sure your emails are only received by those who will actually be interested in reading them.
Ineffective Proofreading
This is the most obvious on the list, but it must be reiterated nonetheless. You would be surprised by the number of emails we receive with minor (and sometimes major) proofreading mistakes. Some of the most common examples of this include incorrect images, broken links, and both spelling and grammar mistakes. If you feel like you’re likely to miss these errors upon proofing, get a second or third pair of eyes to look over it before hitting send.
Sending Emails Too Regularly
Another mistake we still see all the time is businesses sending out too many emails. As we mentioned before, email inboxes are filling up faster than ever, and your excessive emails are only going to add to the clutter. Sending out messages too frequently can easily lead to unsubscribes, or being marked as ‘spam’, completely defeating the objective of grabbing your subscribers’ attention.
Avoiding Blunders
The best way of avoiding such devastating mistakes is to be proactive.
There are two key ways of being proactive when it comes to email marketing. The first is to compile a checklist of everything you need to verify prior to hitting send. Simply ticking off a list can help you to identify issues that you might have otherwise missed. Here’s an example of an email marketing checklist:
The second way you can be proactive is to create an action plan for implementing if and when things do go wrong. This plan outlines predetermined actions to take in a given situation, allowing your team to respond quickly and effectively. Getting these things in place will free up valuable time when panic mode sets in. In creating your plan, you should:
- Identify those who can help to resolve blunders
- Develop a notification plan, ensuring the relevant people are quickly notified of an error
- Make plans for various different scenarios
