Email campaigns can be highly effective, but like anything else, you really have to know what you’re doing. If you can avoid all of these mistakes, your campaign should be a great success.
- Making it hard for people to unsubscribe
- Emailing without permission
- Buying lists
- Having no process to build the quality and size of the house list
- Having no process to maintain the data integrity of the house list
- Having no campaign goal
- Having too many campaign goals
- Having no KPIs to measure performance versus goal
- Having the wrong KPIs to measure performance versus goal
- Not having a mobile-friendly design
- Failing to split-test subject lines
- Using poorly composed subject lines
- Using subject lines with offers too good to be true
- Using subject lines that are too personal or weirdly personal
- Using content that is overly personal or inconsistently personal
- Using content that is cold and impersonal
- Using content with errors in grammar, usage or clarity
- Failing to test formatting, functionality of links and calls to action before sending
- Using an impersonal or automated “from” email address
- Failing to segment the house list for campaigns with multiple goals and messaging strategies
- Failing to split-test offers
- Having too many offers
- Not having an offer
- Failing to split-test titles, greetings, images, calls to action and other elements of the design and content
- Failing to give users a plain text formatting option
- Emailing on an inconsistent schedule
- Emailing too frequently
- Emailing too infrequently
- Not testing frequency to determine the most effective frequency
- Not testing days and times of email delivery
- Not reviewing analytics data, especially open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribes, bounces and email sharing/forwarding
Over to You
What mistakes have you seen cause email marketing campaigns to fail?