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Email marketing is complicated. A number factors and subfactors govern deliverability. The potential for email rendering problems is mind-bogglingly large. And email technology and tactical issues continue to evolve.
However, not everything in email is complex.
Some aspects are quite simple — and yet companies still regularly struggle with them. In most cases, they’re probably just unaware of the problem or just how easy the fix is. In other cases, turnover on their email team means expertise in the channel’s nuances has been lost. Whatever the reason, here are 10 common email marketing mistakes that are relatively simple to fix:
1. Not Using a Recognizable Sender Name
Subject lines get too much credit for driving open rates. Your sender name actually has a bigger impact on whether your subscribers open your emails. That makes sense for two reasons:
First, email marketing is a permission-based channel, so who’s sending an email to a recipient is critical. If your subscriber doesn’t recognize your name, it can lead to your emails being ignored or, worse, reported as spam. And second, email marketing is a relationship-based channel, so your sender name represents the value that your subscriber has gotten from your emails and from your brand previously.
So, put your brand name front and center and don’t change it from email to email. If you want to safely mix things up with your sender name, try using from name extension strategies. For example, you can emphasize that an email is about a Black Friday sale by changing your sender name to “YourBrand Black Friday.”
2. Not Optimizing Your Preview Text
Preview text is the text from inside your email that’s displayed in the inbox either to the right of your subject line in inboxes like Gmail or underneath your subject line in inboxes like the iPhone Mail app. Often, inboxes display twice as many characters of preview text as they do subject line text, so it’s a valuable opportunity to communicate more to your subscribers about what your emails is about before they open it.
Make sure you take full advantage of what text appears as preview text by using either visible or invisible preheader text. But more than that, run some A/B tests on your preview text, just like brands routinely do for their subject lines. And if you want to take it up a notch further, use multivariate testing to try different subject line and preview text combinations to see which one drives the most clicks for your email.
3. Including Too Much Copy
A good rule for writing marketing copy is to write what you’d like to say, and then cut the number of words in half. A good rule of writing email marketing copy is to cut the word count in half again.
Many marketers seem to have lost their talent for brevity, says Fabricio Lopez, Expert Services Cloud Manager for Oracle Marketing Consulting. “I grew up in South America during the ‘80s when telegrams were still very prominent,” he says. “I used to watch my siblings write incredible messages as part of their jobs. I think we lost that ability when email entered the scene, although Twitter brought back some of that ability. In my opinion, marketers should practice getting the message reduced to the least number of words possible and then embellish it from that point, the result should be a concise and hard hitting CTA.”
If you can’t avoid sending an email with a lot of copy, make sure that you break the copy up and make use of subheads and bullets where you can. That will make the copy much more approachable.
