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Sending emails with information about our online store is a very common practice, but mistakes are still being made today. Here’s how to avoid them.
The planning and sending of emails with information about our online store, such as novelties, products on sale or information about extra services, is a very common practice email marketing strategy for e-commerces sites.
However, the fact that these strategies are being done does not always mean that they are being done correctly. We are not talking about assessing the best or worst designs in the emails themselves or the attractiveness of the publicised offerings, rather the good or bad practices that are applied when using this online marketing method.
Due to these bad practices, many people confuse the objectives and the meaning of marketing mails with spam. We would therefore like to review some of the most common mistakes committed in mass mailings.
Common error # 1: Lack of planning in email marketing
The biggest mistakes that are made when executing any digital marketing action basically result from execution without thought. The desire and rush to get results as fast as possible often cause us to act without prior planning.
Be sure to dedicate at least a small amount of time to working out an email marketing campaign programme, with the basic stages mapped out for the next year and more precisely for the next 3 months. Once you have done this, set clear and realistic objectives to be achieved for each segment and adhere to them. You’ll find there is very useful to data to constantly improve your emails.
Common error # 2: Incorrect mail segmentation
Divide your database up, taking into account different tastes and possible needs in order to send the most appropriate emails to those who want more information.
Professional email marketing strategy management tools (we will talk about them and their importance later) allow you to split up contact details according to many different factors: age, place of residence, sex, interests, number of purchases made and so on. So take advantage of all this information to get the most out of your mail marketing campaigns.
Common error # 3: Not personalising
As we have commented in other articles about email marketing, when planning e-commerce email marketing strategies, we must customise the emails sent to users as much as possible so that they only receive the information which is of greatest interest to them.
Some examples of the tools you can use to personalise emails are:
- Customised fields: tools allowing each person who receives an email to do so with his or her name in the subject or in the body of the mail. It has been shown that the percentage of opened emails increases if the receiver sees his/her name in the subject line.
- Automatic emails: programming emails to be automatically sent to customers who then perform specific actions creates a very useful sense of personalisation. If we also manage to personalise some of the fields in these emails, this will be even better.
- Important dates: related to the previous point, the scheduling of personalised emails by birthday, the anniversary of a first purchase or any other unique date for each client will multiply the chances of converting a returning client.
Common error # 4: Buying email databases
Another very common mistake in email marketing strategies is buying email databases.
Apart from the fact that you may be committing a crime if this list does not comply with Organic Data Protection Law, the most likely situation will be that nobody on the list has any real interest in what you are offering them, which will probably result in costs which you won’t be able to recover.
The ideal approach is to build a database of your own from scratch, with the relevant data you have on each subscriber and to send interesting and useful emails to them based on that. Only then will your email marketing strategy be successful.
Common error # 5: Using inappropriate tools
Email marketing platforms are a great help in such a strategy, but one of the most frequent mistakes businesses make, especially small ones, is to use generic email platforms (Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail ) to do massive bulk sending of emails.
Apart from the impression of poor professionalism that sending corporate emails such as “business@gmail.com” transmits to clients, it is very likely that these emails will end up in the spam or unwanted mail category.
Professional tools, other than enabling emails to be produced that won’t end up as spam, have a multitude of very useful functionalities such as automatic adaptation to different mobile devices, templates that are very easy to lay out, and very complete organisational systems for databases or statistics.
Common error # 6: Choosing incorrect subjects and senders
Subjects reflect some of the most important choices with regard to email marketing campaigns. They should determine the content of the mail and must meet a number of requirements:
- Length: The space for your subject line is limited, and as a general rule should not exceed 50-60 characters, since email servers may shorten it if it is any longer.
- Content: There are key words and signs that filters detect and which will multiply the probability of emails ending up in spam: sex, free, over-use of exclamation marks or uppercase letters for instance. Try not to use these types of words if you do not want your domain to end up on spam blacklists.
- Sender: The subject line is not the only thing that can make a difference, using a name or email sender that is known, close-by and/or human can also instil the confidence that we are looking for.
- Curiosity: a subject line that generates questions and curiosity gives better results than one that answers questions or is flat.
Along with the choice of the best possible subject line, you should also include an interesting “preview text”. This means the text that appears just below the subject line.
Common error # 7: Lack of analysis and observation
Ignoring statistics and not checking the effectiveness of each email marketing campaign is another very common error. As with the first point in this article, where we talked about planning and organizing objectives, in the last point we recommend analysing if expectations are being achieved or not with our emails.
What should we focus on? Every online store must set their own objectives and measurable factors, but there are some common ones: email opening rate, the number of emails deleted, clicks on links or direct purchases.
In conclusion, if you want to get ahead of the competition and achieve positive results you must keep in mind these much repeated common errors, and now start to adequately invest your time and budget in correct and effective email marketing strategies.
