Avoiding Email Marketing Mistakes

Once you’ve created an excellent company and you know that you have an amazing product or message that your audience should not be without, it’s time to tell them all about it! Easier said than done. When you’re ready to get your message out, you want to be clear, concise, and convincing, but you don’t want to be overly excited, too ambitious, or incredibly frequent. To help you walk that fine line between too little and too much, we at OSO have compiled some email marketing mistakes that we’ve seen other small businesses in our great tri-state area make over the years, to help you avoid them!

• You’re so excited! Of course you’re excited! You’ve created an amazing company, and you offer fantastic products or services that you think everyone on the planet should be equally as excited about. But think about it like this: have you ever gone into a store and been bombarded by the overly hyped sales staff that wants to know how you are when you’re six inches into the entrance? When you’re online, that’s how too many exclamation points come across. You’re absolutely allowed to be excited (in fact, we’d be concerned if you weren’t!), but when you’re talking to your audience (some of whom may be brand new customers), keep your volume button near you, and remember that being too aggressive right out of the gate can have an adverse effect on your audience.

• You’re too available. As in relationships, being too available can be detrimental. In terms of marketing, being too available means that you always have sales, you always have messages, and everything is always super urgent. It’s kind of like the girl crying wolf: at some point, your audience will become immune to too many sales or messages, and the people reading them will find them far less meaningful. For example, if your online craft store offers free shipping every Friday, you will just train your customers to purchase on Fridays, decreasing sales on the other days of the week while they wait for your expected offer. So temper your message and take care to tend to your time wisely.

• You mix up your messages. When you reply to someone that’s inquiring about your product or service, don’t change the subject line. If you do, they might not understand that you’re coming from a helping place, and you might get filed with the rest of the junk mail. If you want people to genuinely care for your business, make sure that you genuinely care for their inquiries. If you receive an email inquiry, don’t change the title of the text. The author of the original writing will be looking for a response entitled with words that he or she recognizes; changing the title can be an instant means for being ignored.

• You’re not approachable. Of course, you want to come across like an authority figure in your field, and you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about, but keep in mind that email marketing is a relationship-building tool, and if you’re too formal or, conversely, speaking down to your audience too much, you’ll lose your readers’ attention very easily. If you are a master plumber in Yonkers, NY, you don’t want to send out emails discussing the different thickness of piping and interior wall angles of joints, you want to make yourself more open to customer concerns, like freezing pipes and avoiding septic smells. Being approachable goes for the content of your message as well as your headline itself. It will take a little practice, but it’s important to focus on writing attention-grabbing headlines that are followed by friendly messages that your readers can relate to.

Mistakes happen. Nobody intends on writing something that commands limited attention or responsiveness. Fortunately, we can all learn from others’ mistakes, and if you take some time to adjust your own methods and proactively work against the common mistakes, so you are well on your way to a happier email marketing campaign!

If you enjoyed this blog, you may also enjoy reading, “Do’s and Don’ts of an Email Newsletter: Part 1″