Having worked with countless email marketers over the years, you can say we have a pretty good grasp on the main email newsletter mistakes out there.
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The good news is that all of these mistakes are easy to understand and easy to fix. And I’m about to tell you exactly what these mistakes are, help you understand the issue at hand, and how to make things better. So let’s get started.
Lacking that “Human Touch”
While this has always been a common mistake with ineffective email marketers, it might be even more relevant to discuss it today. I’m sure you’ve seen all the hype about using ChatGPT and AI tools for everything under the sun. Some marketers even think they can use something like ChatGPT to do their marketing content for them.
So here’s a well-needed reminder about email marketing. We all know that email produces some of the most astonishing results out of any channel. However, it is important to focus on why this is the case. And it has to do with the ability to produce a sense of “connection” and a “relationship” with the subscriber.
Sending emotionless content that a college student with no interest in the topic could have produced? It won’t garner anywhere near the results that you would get if you put some “personalized” flair into that content. You want the reader to get a sense of getting to know you (or your brand), and so you need to always have a personality intertwined with everything that you write.
Generic and bland is your enemy. And the more generic your content, the more akin to sending spam that your email marketing becomes. This is especially true if you also make some of the other mistakes on this list.
Ignoring “mobile optimization”
Look, most people do most internet things through their mobile devices today. That includes checking their emails. While the percentage of mobile views can vary based on your industry and sending times, making sure to provide a good mobile experience is a must.
Fortunately if you’re an Emercury user this is relatively easy with our new email template editor. Just click on the mobile icon on the top left and you can preview the exact mobile experience for your subscribers.
Alternatively, if you want to let the pros take care of it, please remember that we also offer email template design services. So don’t be afraid to ask if you need professionally crafted templates that fit your brand, and look good on mobile too.
Confusing badly written content for being “personable”
Yes we talk all about being more relatable and “human”, but that doesn’t mean being completely unprofessional. When we talk about adding that personable touch, we’re talking about your tone of voice. We don’t mean sending content where it’s clear that you didn’t proofread the thing even once. Or having broken images, links that go nowhere, or other glaring errors.
Please note that the seemingly “carefree effortlessness” that you might see in content produced by “master marketers” is a mirage. They make it seem like they just turned on the computer, typed something at the spur of the moment, and hit send. That is the intended effect, but it’s not really what happened.
They might have rewritten that email a couple of times and even spent time tweaking things word by word. I’m not saying you need to go that far. Just don’t be fooled by people who make it seem like their content is “spontaneous” and made “in the spur of the moment”.
Not caring about list-hygiene
It’s completely normal to feel attached to your leads. Especially when you’ve spent a lot of time, effort or money to grow your list. However, you have to realize that bad leads aren’t just “inactive subscribers who fail to buy your stuff”. They are actively hurting you and putting the entire list at danger just by being on your list.
Subscribers who never engage with your emails lower your overall reputation with the inbox providers. And the longer you go without cleaning your list, the lower your reputation overall. This means that inbox providers are getting clear signals that your emails are “unwanted”. In turn they are more likely to deprioritize delivering your emails, or even send them to the “spam” folder.
This is why it is essential to pay attention to email deliverability and list-hygiene as a newsletter owner. And among other things, this means regularly cleaning your list of bad leads. Now, this doesn’t mean that you immediately unsubscribe people who haven’t engaged in some time. You can, and you should give them a second chance. This is where re-engagement campaigns come into play.
Acting like someone who just discovered email marketing
The prospect of email marketing can be quite exciting, and so it isn’t surprising to see novices to email marketing go overboard. Now, don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with not being a “veteran” at email marketing. However, you have to curb your impulses and try to present a more refined image.
And when I say this, I’m talking about a couple of issues that we often see. For example, you might see marketers using all caps, exclamation points and subject-lines that look and feel like spam.
Granted, this isn’t always due to bad intent. Often it is due to excitement at the prospect of “making sales with email”. However, you want your email to sound like you’ve done this a 1000 times before, not like you’ve just discovered a shiny new toy called email.
You have to remember that email marketing works because it excels at helping you play the long game. It’s about building a relationship with the subscriber over time, and increasing their lifetime value. So try to be excited about the long-term prospect of email, and tone things down with every one individual email.
It’s all about you, when it should really be all about them
This one might sound counterintuitive, especially if we’re talking about a newsletter. Don’t people sign up because they want to hear all the latest news about you, your product and your company?
Well kind of yes. That is the formal definition of a newsletter, but it’s not how it works best in real life. You always have to come back to the number one principle of marketing – WIIFM (what’s in it for me). So even when you’re sending content that is about the latest news, you have to find a way to make it about them, the subscriber.
If you’re sending updates about your product or services, make sure to lead with how this is going to make things better for them. Focus on the benefits this will bring to them as a subscriber, customer or future customer.
Overcomplicating things instead of focusing on the basics
I blame this mistake on the “marketing gurus” and many of the “shiny toys first” marketing platforms. They’re always talking about the latest and fanciest ways to do marketing, because this is what gets interest from novices.
However, most results in marketing come from applying the basics well. And if you’re like me, you might be tired of hearing about the 80/20 rule. However, this rule is just as true in email marketing as in other fields of business.
The truth is that those “boring” basics that have been around for a decade or two are still behind most profits made in email marketing. The shiny and fancy new tricks and technologies only give you a competitive advantage, after you’ve set the basics in place.
Now don’t get me wrong, we love those fancy new technologies and shiny brand new features as much as anyone else. In fact, we’re constantly releasing new features to help veteran marketers take things to the next level. However, it’s not something we push towards someone who hasn’t even gotten consistent on the foundations.
And by “the foundations” I mean things like getting really good at delivering value, implementing segmentation, basic personalization and a focus on email deliverability. Basically the kind of things we’re discussing in this guide. Most mistakes are really about getting one of the basics wrong.
Now, I do understand this might sound a bit vague, so let me get more specific with an example. Let’s take a look at something like personalization. If you looked at discussions online, you would notice they revolve around the latest and most cutting-edge ways to do super fine-grained personalization. And we support all of these things at Emercury by providing you with site tracking, custom events, goals, incoming and outgoing web-hooks and more…
However, those things take time and effort to implement properly. And yet, basic and “not as exciting” personalization gets you most of the same benefits with a lot less effort and setup. I’m talking about basic merge tags, and our amazing smart personalization feature. If you want to talk about a good 90/10 with personalization, that’s it right there.
Focusing on sales instead of “conversion”
This one might seem contradictory as most people think of sales as a conversion, and technically it is. But when I say “focus on”, I am talking about the mindset and how you approach things.
You need to think of your newsletter as a “system” where a subscriber is led down a path from a merely curious lead to a customer, and perhaps even a raving fan. Sales should just be the logical byproduct of that process.
If you change your focus from trying to “sell stuff” to “building a relationship and demonstrating an ability to provide value”, you will produce many more sales. Kind of counter-intuitive, but it’s just how things work.
And one of the first things you will do with that kind of “mind shift” is to focus on finding ways to provide more value to your subscribers and customers. It’s not about just sending emails for the sake of sending emails.
It’s about finding ways to demonstrate that you know how to provide value and meet their needs. All the while demonstrating authority and understanding. This is how you convert subscribers from “merely curious leads” to “raving fans”.
Forgetting to “ask for the sale” or being too indirect
This one might sound like it contradicts the previous one, but this is where the secret lies. Whilst you do want to avoid your emails being endless sales-pitches, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever ask for anything.
Almost every email should have a goal, or an action that you want the customer to take. It doesn’t have to be visiting a landing page selling a product. It might be just going to your blog to read a valuable article that you wrote for them.
However, you always want to make sure that you’re habituating people to take action off of your emails. That means you want them clicking on links that you provide. Aside from habituating them so they’re ready when you do have a sale, it’s also good for your deliverability.
High clickthrough-rates are a great signal for the inbox providers that people love your emails. So by failing to ask people to act in some way, you’re sending a signal to the inbox providers that your emails aren’t that good, even if they are.
Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side
There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.
If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.
I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.
Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.
Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Note that we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.
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