Do's and Don'ts Email Marketing

Fig.1: Ribkhan (2018) Pixabay [Image]

Email Marketing

While email marketing don’t get the same attention of some other marketing channels, this is still a great way to connect to customers, educate them about your brand and convert leads.

Let's see together  some do's and don'ts to follow to make sure you email marketing campaigns are successful:

Fig. 2: Image by author [photograph] 

Know your audience

Definitely the most important thing to do, before creating a marketing email is to analyze your audience and understand what they would be interested in. This will help you decide what sort of content you need to include in your emails to make them relevant and have more chances to be read. The more people read your email the higher is the possibility that they will become new customers.
It is important to find out key information about your audience such as age range, gender and main areas of interests to then tailor your content around the audience's preferences.

Be relevant and to the point

One of the most common mistakes made by marketers is to include content that is not relevant to the people you sending emails to. It is important not to include too many information that could disorientate the audience and ultimately make them lose interest in what you are sending. Including few images could make your email more eye catching and give a better sense to important information you are sending out. In a busy world where people have less and less time, it is important to be concise and straight to the point. In other words don’t overdo it!

Be strategic

It is important to be strategic and carefully plan what you will be emailing out over the weeks. Having a content calendar helps you to plan ahead your new campaigns and never rush into doing things that could ultimately damage the image of your brand.
With a calendar you can plan weeks in advance, what you will be releasing and when which will allows to create better qualify content for the audience.

Fast loading

Another aspect to consider when sending email marketing is the loading time. The loading time is one of the first impressions you leave to your customers and making them wait too long to read your emails could negatively impact your campaign. Do not include videos or too many images in your emails as, this could increase the size of the file and increase the loading time.
Whatever you are sending , it needs to be loaded fast (ideally under 3 seconds) to catch people’s attentions and have better chances to close sales.

Make it mobile friendly

One of the most important email marketing tips is to create emails that can be read on any device. Today the vast majority of people (about 70%) check their emails from their mobiles or tablets. So, when designing a new email campaign, always make sure you use a mobile friendly format.
Don’t use large images that won’t render well or take too long to load and use short sentences that can be easily read even on mobiles.
It’s important that your emails look as good on a mobile phone as they do on a computer screen.

Fig. 3:  Image by author [photograph]

Flooding inboxes

One of the mistakes marketers sometime do is to send out too many emails in a short period of time.
Even if you are sending some great content out, many people could feel annoyed to receive everyday emails from the same company.
Nobody likes to have their inbox flooded and this could actually increase the number of people unsubscribing from your emails.
It could work better and bring more results to send only one email per week and put all your effort in that single piece of content to make sure it looks great.

Impersonal emails

Too often we receive emails that don’t contain any personal touch in them. One of the main goals of marketing emails is to create a direct relation with customers and it could be great to include something that could make them feel valued. For example try to avoid to use the generic ‘Dear Customer’ and instead include the customer name. By adding some personal touches in your email, you can have better chances to catch people’s attention and increase your conversion rate.