If you heard that email marketing is dead, you heard wrong. Email marketing campaigns can make a huge impact on your brand, if you do it effectively. Through the use of mobile devices, emails are now easier to receive than ever before. But before you generate one of your own, read the below precautions to avoid the most common email marketing blunders!
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1. Not Actively Building Your Subscriber List
When you first begin creating an email marketing campaign, you work really hard to compile a large amount of email addresses by offering incentives, putting on events and other promotions. But how often after the campaign launches do you continue building that subscriber base? Chances are, not frequently. Your efforts transition to generating content and your campaign list gets neglected. With people changing emails and moving, it’s important to keep an updated list of email addresses that reflect the demographic and consumer changes of your business.
2. Failing To Come Up With An Engaging Subject Line
The subject line is the first piece of information your readers receive about your campaign. If you don’t have an engaging subject line, the email will be deleted before it’s even opened. To ensure your subject line will optimize your campaign, avoid using symbols, such as the percentage sign or exclamation point, as they can set off spam filters. Also, be cautious of the length of your subject line – a good rule of thumb is to not exceed 50 characters.
3. No Call-To-Action
Before you begin writing the content for your email marketing campaign, determine the specific goal for its creation. By coming up with a call-to-action from the get-go, you can tailor every piece of content to achieving your specified goal. By nature, we are task-oriented. If you fail to clearly state your objective from the beginning, your readers will never accomplish what you set out for them to complete.
4. Not Testing Your Email
Almost all email marketing platforms allow you to test your email prior to sending it out. Take advantage of this. Often times, the formatting will look different when the overall email is generated verses how it looks in the drafting stage. This is also a good time to catch any grammatical errors. In addition to testing the look and appeal of the email campaign, we suggest generating an A/B test split to see which subject line will generate the best click-through rate and open rate for your business. The A/B split is simply a tool in which you construct two different subject lines and send them out to your subscribers for a designated amount of time. Then, the subject line that has the best response after that amount of time will send out to the rest of your email list.
For more on the best email marketing practices or for help on creating your own email marketing campaign contact us at info@agencyentourage.com, or give us a call at 214.414.3035.
