Five critical email marketing mistakes

Working on Mailchimp with all sorts of clients from Government agencies to large ecommerce companies right through to individuals I get to see what works and what doesn’t in regards to EDM. Of course every industry is different; for example what works for a not-for-profit organization may not work for a marketing company in relation to email campaigns, however there are certain things that always result in poor opens and click-through rates.

Here are five items I see that always result in poor engagement:

1. Generic subject lines: A good descriptive subject line is the first step in getting your subscribers to either read your email or delete it. It takes a few seconds to write a relevant and interesting subject line.
2. Too much content: There are exceptional circumstances when a long email serves a purpose however in 99% of cases short and sweet email campaigns have far better engagement than those with lots of content. Provide just a short amount of content and provide a button with a link where the reader may view more if required.
3. Lack of personalization: Mailchimp provides incredibly easy to use Merge Tags. Merge Tags can be used to add personalization such as including the recipients first name. For example, in your campaign all you need do is add Dear *|FNAME|* to the start and the recipients first name will be included resulting in way higher subscriber engagement. If you don’t have the first name of all your subscribers then set a default Merge Tag value for the First Name field.
4. Confusing style and layout: A simple layout and consistent style makes an email simpler to read. Having multiple fonts with all sorts of colours and sizes will reduce your click-through rates. Keep things simple for better engagement.
5. Sending from a role-based email: A role-based email is one that is generic and doesn’t includes a persons name. Examples of role based email addresses are those that start with support@, accounts@, contact@ and so on. The chance of your email being received by your subscribers diminishes greatly when sending from a role-based email address. In our analysis of subscriber email addresses that Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact and so on find low-quality, role-based email addresses are increasingly being identified as low-quality.

If you want to get better results from your email marketing then contact us. Mailchimp provide our customers with 50% off their Mailchimp accounts for six months.