Email marketing is a popular strategy because of its inexpensiveness and its accessibility, as well as its consistent performance. Even if you have a lean budget and a small audience of prospects and customers, you can reap tremendous rewards from an appropriately timed and planned email marketing strategy.
But if you want to get as much value as possible out of this strategy, there are some tactics that you should cut out entirely.
Email Marketing Practices You Should Stop Doing Now
These are some of the biggest mistakes and weak practices tactics you should end immediately:
- Buying lists and subscribers. We understand the temptation to buy a list of email subscribers. Attracting subscribers naturally is difficult and time-consuming, and in contrast, buying a list is simple and straightforward. But buying an email list will almost always work against you. People generally don't like to receive messages they didn't sign up to receive; if they start getting emails from you, and they never subscribed to you in the first place, they're going to be immediately incentivized to unsubscribe, or worse, flag you as spam. Besides, naturally attracting your subscribers will make your email content more relevant and therefore more effective, helping you land more sales.
- Adopting templates as is. Most email marketing platforms provide you with templates you can use and modify for your messaging campaign. These templates are extremely helpful, especially if you don't have a professional designer to create custom emails from scratch. But it's a bad idea to use these templates as they exist by default; instead, apply at least a few modifications to them so they look more original and to make them better suited for your campaign, specifically.
- Spamming your subscribers. It's tempting to send as many messages to your subscribers as possible, since each message is a new potential sale. But it's also important to avoid spamming or subscribers. If you send too many messages, too quickly, you'll quickly overwhelm your subscribers and prompt them to unsubscribe. This is another strategy that could also get you flagged as spam.
- Selling constantly. For most brands, email marketing is a way to increase sales, but you're making a mistake if all your emails are exclusively focused on selling products. People don't want to feel bombarded with advertisements, so make sure to provide value in the majority of your messages. It's fine to send marketing and sales emails periodically, but they shouldn't dominate recipient inboxes.
- Failing to update your data. When was the last time you cleaned your email list? Getting rid of email addresses that are no longer accurate or relevant is an important move to boost the relevance and value of your campaign. At minimum, you should be scrubbing and maintaining your list once a month. You may need to practice this even more often if you receive high volumes of new subscribers routinely.
- Send clickable images. Historically, there were not many elements that could be used to build a high-impact email. Trying to generate email marketing campaigns that would surprise users, marketers have made the mistake of including clickable images linked to videos hosted on channels such as YouTube. This action is far from achieving its goal, since users often do not open these links and if they do it, they find a number of distractions, such as: the slow speed to load the video, the multiple ads that appear on YouTube, among others.
However, today there is an excellent solution that has proven to not only increase the interaction rate of emails, but also the level of subscriber engagement and conversion rate.
It is now possible to play videos within the body of the email, which is 200% more effective than clickable images, because within the email users are not exposed to other distractions and their attention is captured from the first second.
Viewed is the only platform with the technology to embed videos in the email marketing template easily. If you want to know how this technology works we recommend you to schedule a demo with one of our email marketing experts. - Rushing a campaign without testing. You may be working with a limited timeframe, but that's still no excuse to rush through the campaign planning process. Before sending any message or executing any new campaign, you need to test the message and its delivery system. Make sure that all your subscribers can receive this message in that you've eliminated all errors and bugs from this message.
- Neglecting spam filter optimization. If your email messages are getting trapped in spam filters, they're not going to help you sell or market anything. That's why spam filter optimization should be one of your highest priorities when planning a new email marketing campaign. Essentially, this means writing, designing, and structuring the email in a way that minimizes the possibility of getting caught in a spam filter. Different spam filters from different organizations work in different ways, so there are many small tactics you'll need to follow here, from optimizing the subject line to improving the design and wording of your message.
- Including no call to action (CTA). Every email you send should have some kind of call to action (CTA), even if it’s not a sales email. Without a CTA, most people won't bother taking any action in response to the message. There are many types of CTA that you can include, encouraging people to purchase a product, visit a website, watch a video, or sign up for a different list segment; the point is, whatever your goals are, those goals should be tied to some actionable event that you encourage your customers to initiate.
- Ignoring data analytics. The true power of email marketing lies in its malleability. If you study your campaign data closely, you'll quickly learn what types of emails work best and which ones fall flat. Then, if you apply these data, you can form insights that we do to design and send better and better emails to your audience. Too many email marketers simply follow their instincts or mindlessly mimic best practices; it's much better to actively experiment and gradually refine your approach to see better results.
Building a Better Email Marketing Strategy
You’re reading this article because you want to improve your email marketing strategy. We’re writing it because we want to help you do it. That’s why we created Viewed, the tool that makes it easy to embed automatically playing videos into the body of your email messages. Upload the video, copy the code, and paste it into your email template – it’s really that simple. Sign up for free to try it today!
