Email marketing is still cutting it cool. Remains the most successful marketing channel. The current ROI is $36 for $1 spent.

The very reason your email campaigns aren’t successful enough could be this: you are not doing it right, and making the common email marketing mistakes that are taking a heavy toll on your conversion rate.

What are those common email marketing mistakes? In this article, we will be discussing those errors, and showing you the best ways to avoid them. Let’s dive in.

Common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them

Here’s a sneak peek of the mistakes any email marketers should be careful and avoid –

• Not sending welcome emails
• Missing Call-to-actions
• When your emails look unprofessional
• Being careless about the user-expectation
• Forgetting your mobile-user
• Using a no-reply email address
• Buying Email List a Bad Idea

1. Not sending welcome emails

After someone subscribed to your newsletters, marketing emails, or for other reasons – the first thing they want is to get a warm welcome.

More than 74% of subscribers like to get welcome emails. And, most of your subscribers are most active within the first 48 hours.

Sadly, many email marketers often delay sending welcome emails. And when a subscriber doesn’t get that, his expectation gets a hit.

The goal of a welcome email is simple: you show gratitude for having someone as your subscriber.

A thank you note, guidance for the next step to conversion, telling about yourself, and providing the user a clear idea about your service are immensely helpful to build a positive vibe and superb first impression.

Don’t you see what are you missing? If you failed to send a welcome email sequence, all your possibilities could go downward.

You don’t want to waste the chance of a successful subscriber relationship there. You simply can’t risk it. Rather, you should send this type of email as soon as you get a subscriber –

Juts take a look at the element worked here. The message is clear and saying how many emails the subscriber will get.

What you need to do avoid not sending welcome email is: send it right away, and implement a welcome email sequence to nurture the lead.

2. Missing call-to-actions

Not having CTA can put your email in a position to achieve nothingness. Though, many marketers do this mistake by forgetting a CTA.

Each email should have a goal, and CTAs (call-to-action) are the doorway to guide the user to accomplish that goal.

You can add CTA buttons or clickable text in your email so that a user can make an action. Every email should work like a funnel, and at the end of the funnel you inspire the user to click on CTAs. Thats how you make a conversion.

So, here’s the thing you must consider before adding one or multiple CTA in your email –

Set a clear goal: What do you want from a specific email? Want someone to purchase something, share your content, or take part in a survey? Whatever your goal is, set it before you start composing the email copy.

Make your CTAs easy to find: Try to put your call-to-action in way that a user could find easily. You can use different colour in the button or in the text, try to place the CTA using visual hierarchy, etc.

Go for the right words: A good CTA copy can work better than the whole email copy. It has that much potential. So, keep A/B testing, take the help of AI like Chatgpt or Google bard to write better CTA and improvide them to make a final version.

The best way to implement an successful CTA is writing a clear and engaging email copy. You shouldn’t go for complex sentence and messed up your message. Try something simple and provocative, helpfu, and allign your CTA with the email message. That’s how it works.

3. When your emails look unprofessional

Appearance matters. It creates the first impressions. In email marketing, tons of emails are buzzing in your recipient’s inbox, and may be you get only one chance here.

So, the first impression could be the beginning of a long lasting user relationship or it could be the last.

Making an unprofessional look of your email is a big mistake.

Here are the things that can make your email looks bad –

a. Grammatical mistakes

Forget everything, and only write a CTA button text like this – Bye Now (Instead of Buy Now)

Despite having an engaging copy and exciting offers, your email could fail to get a good impression.

So, avoid grammatical mistakes. Proofread and double-check before hit the send button.

b. Not using a brand email address

Not having a brand email address kill your professional look as fast as possible.

Business emails from a free address makes your user think you are cheap, noob or don’t know how to make a smart communication.

Besides that, if you send marketing emails using a free email domain like – [email protected], chances are high your email may end up as spam.

So, the best way to avoid this mistake is simple: buy a professional brand domain. And start sending with confidence and professionalism.

c. Using Stock Images is a Nah

Images are good for email marketing. It looks your email interactive, and can convey your message with more engaging way.

What if your user get to see the same image in three different emails in a single day? This types of cliche happens when you download stock images and add them to your marketing emails.

This is a bad practice. So, what should you do to avoid this mistake? Try to use original photograph, illustrations, this will make your look more professional.

If you don’t have a design team, AI image processing platforms like Midjourney or design platform Canva could be a great help.

Also Read: 10 Effective Tips on How to Improve Transactional Email Design

4. Being careless about the user-expectation

Not meeting up to the user expectations can get people unscubribe from the list. It’s heaviy alarming.

When you set specific expectations (which is necessarry for a fruitful email communication), you must meet those desired action a user want from you. Otherwise, you are going to loose their interest.

For example, you set expectation to send a weekly newsletter, and your subscribers agreed to recieve that. But you failed, able to send one newsletter a month. This delay or irreagularity can harm your engagement rate.

Or suppose, you do it other way, send a daily newsletter which would be more annoying.

A bad sending frequency is a common email marketing mistakes any marketer should avoid.

Also, this is a frequent mishaps: sending the wrong or irrealevant email to subscribers.

To avoid these issues, you must make a proper plan, segment your subscribers, and send with proper care with the perfect email cadence.

Doing successful email marketing is simple unless a lack of proper plan make things complicated.

5. Forgetting your mobile-user

Compared the 0.9 billion people who check email from their desktop, the number of user who open emails using mobile phone is 1.7 billion.

Despite this huge mobile email user, marketers often forget to make their email mobile responsive.

According to marketing experts, one of the best way to decrease your email conversion rate is forget the mobile optimization of your emails. Funny, but frightenning it is.

So, you get to make your email ready for mobile devices. The good news is modern-day email automation platforms like weMail have built-in mobile responsiveness feature. So, you don’t need to worry how to get it done.

All you need to do is using the mobile-responsive feature carefully, using the right size of images texts, and proper allignment, thats all.

Take a look at this mobile responsive email from the Economist –

Here are some tips to create such a mobile responsive emails –

• Compose single collumn email
• Keep the email font size between 13-14 pt for body copy, and 20 pt for the title/header
• Try to put the first CTA above or in the beginning of the email
• Use smaller but clear images so that they load faster in any device.
• You should use image not wider than 600 pixels

Following a survey, Mailchimp found that, mobile responsive emails can get a 15% more unique click than those aren’t mobile optimized.

6. Using a no-reply email address

There are certain reasons marketers use a no-reply email address.

Most of cases, transactional emails like delivery updates, password resets, or order confirmations don’t require any user to reply. So, marketers often set an automated email sequence using a no-reply email address.

But there’s a risk that a no-reply email can make your user feel less important, distant, and they could think you don’t want to hear from them at all.

Take a look at some core reasons you must avoid a no-reply email address –

• No-reply email addresses make your user-interaction cold
• Deny user to ask if you have their consent to send emails from a no-reply address. It may complecated your competency with GDPR complience and Can-spam law
• Hampered the two-way communication between the sender and reciever
• Cost you a low email deliverability, etc

So, what should you do instead of using a no-reply email address?

You can use a real brand email address with proper domain, implement email tools like email filters and autoresponders.

7. Buying Email List a Bad Idea

The worst way to start sending email is sending blindfolded.

A big reason you shouldn’t sent bulk email to a lot of people you don’t know is: people don’t care to things they don’t have any interest.

So, you can send tons of email and still get no remarkable response rate.

Many brands get their email marketing wrong in the first place by purchasing email list.

May be you are buying the ‘so called’ quality email list with active people. But there are no reasons people who don’t know you going to fall for your offer.

Email marketing only works when you have subscribers who are really interested to hear from you. A list full of customer of a different product may never going to work for your product too. That’s simple science.

Therefore, which tips going to help you in such cases? Follow the below steps –

Step 1. Start from scrach. Build an email list with interested people.

Step 2. Create optin forms and implement in your landing pages.

Step 3. Create quality content, publish them, and attract niche people and offer them to conncet with you.

Step 4. Collab with the similar brands to increase your reputation

To learn how to create an email list from scratch, you can get help from this article: How to Build an Email List with weMail.

Final thoughts on common email marketing mistakes

The list of email marketing mistakes could be never ending. Hence, our goal was to show you the most fatal mistakes email marketers often do while initiating an email marketing campaign.

We believe you keep avoiding the aforementioned mistakes, and try to be careful while write better subject lines, using images with right resolution, using minimal visuals to make your emails more engaging.

So what do you think hampering your email matketing to achieve desired success? Let us know. We will try to come back with the right tips to solve your problems.