If you’re a regular reader of my writing, then you’d have probably heard me saying this term over and over: Email marketing is golden.
Yup it is!
You may have heard about various new and shiny marketing strategies and tools to help promote your blog or business. But email marketing still works and it indeed works much better than any other marketing strategy.
Why? Because….
Now, the purpose of this blog post is to share a few simple email marketing mistakes that you could be making without realizing the bitter fact that you are ruining your reputation.
While the mistakes themselves are so simple the effects are BIG. So these mistakes should not be taken so lightly, especially when it comes to a marketing channel like email marketing where you get a more personal stream to connect with your prospects.
You don’t want to ruin your chance to truly connect with your prospects and build a loyal fan base, do you?
So, I am going to talk about the mistakes right away!
Mistake #1: Using a very formal name
Don’t get me wrong here. Yes you need to use a professional sender’s name for your emails. Names like [email protected] or [email protected] are really unprofessional names to send out a newsletter representing your prestigious business.
At the same time using a very formal name will destroy the whole purpose of email marketing - the ability to connect more personally with your readers. Preferably, the sender’s name should be from a real person and not from a company.
Using a company name is fine, but you should make sure that your email sounds as if it is sent from a human being and not from a bot.
Your email should also sound as if sent from you (the real person representing the business) and not from a bunch of staff who work at your company.
So while you try hard so much to maintain your professionalism in your emails, also do make sure that your emails are realistic, personal and human.
I could send emails to my newsletter subscribers that either read “Message from Problogging Success” or “Message from Jane” - which one do you find personal and real? You get the idea.
Mistake #2: Sending only HTML mail (not including text version)
This is a no-brainer, yet so many internet marketers fail to include a text version of their email in their campaigns.
In almost all the autoresponder services, this option is available at the click of a button. For instance in Aweber, you just have to turn on the plain text auto generation feature .
Your email list will consist of a list of people who can receive HTML messages and also people who cannot receive HTML messages. Some people simply won’t prefer to receive HTML emails because they are clunky and they are slow.
If you do not include a text version of the email you will miss out those people in the list.
Further, when it is so easy to include a text version, what’s stopping you?
Important thing to note
It doesn’t matter if you are sending out a plain text mail, or a HTML mail, but the person who chose to receive only text email will not be able to see the links embedded via HTML. Let me give you an example:
So, you get the idea! The best way to include links in a text email is to embed the raw urls (like this > http://www.probloggingsuccess.com/email-marketing-mistakes/). I usually do both - add hyperlinked urls as well as insert raw urls into email body so I can cover both HTML and text only viewers.
Mistake #3: Send bulky emails
Bulky emails are a pain. They could easily annoy your subscribers. Some might not even be delivered properly.
So avoid attaching big files/images or including heavy images within your email or as attachments.
Also it is important that you use a light email template that is not bulky.
Bulky emails have a higher chance of getting bounced. They may also load very slowly thus testing the patience of your subscribers.
Mistake #4: Unethical
Well this one is neither a simple nor a small mistake. This one is BIG.
I’m talking about those who buy email lists from others and keep sending those people in the list, their own marketing emails.
First, you don’t have their permission. They signed up for a different list with a different expectation in mind. So if your start sending them your emails, even if they are relevant to their expectation, it is still not ethical - just because it is not a good manners to access someone’s bedroom unless you’re invited to 
(Hope I made a good analogy here).
So if you are one of those who buy lists and then start sending emails to those people, you need to stop it now.
This will put you in trouble quite soon.
I ruthlessly mark such emails as spam. So will your subscribers.
Mistake #5: Un-targeted emails
If your email autoresponder service provides you an option to set up multiple email lists (like Aweber which allows you to have unlimited lists), then USE IT.
If you build just one email list but have different marketing purposes, it just won’t cut it.
Or if you do not need multiple lists, you can still have one list but segment it effectively in order to better target your emails.
For instance, you may separate and save a small group of people who actively open a particular type of email and start sending more emails of the same type to that list.
This way you are able to segment out people with particular interest and send emails that match with their interests.
You can greatly boost your email conversion rates using this technique.
One of the beauty of email marketing is that you can target and then target some more, thanks to the nice features offered by email autoresponder solutions.
Takeaway
Email marketing works great even today; even if it is thought of as old school stuff by most marketers.
You may not get desired results with your email marketing campaigns if you do not do it effectively. You might be making any of these mistakes given above.
So buckle up and double check to see if you are making any of these mistakes.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
If you want to start off with email marketing I highly recommend Aweber and GetResponse (I’ve tried both of these and am extremely happy with them).
