Contrary to popular belief, email isn’t dead. It’s been known to generate up to $42 for every $1 spent. That’s umm, potentially a 4,200% ROI, making it one of most overlooked channels, according to Litmus.
Since it’s the new year, we’ve put together our top-10 list of email marketing mishaps to gauge if you need an email marketing consultant or not.
1. Your email domain isn’t connected.
- We see this ALL the time and it impacts your deliverability and can end up sending emails to spam.
- How do you know if your email domain isn’t connected? In the from section of your emails, you’ll see something like: brand@brand.com via ksd3.klaviyomail.com (there shouldn't be a via via ksd3.klaviyomail.com or via anything.com)
2. Your emails aren’t segmented and/or tailored content to user preferences.
- Spray and pray is so 2005. Personalization is key.
- If you don’t have a user preference center, you need to establish one, stat. No one likes spam -- so learning about what your subscriber base wants to hear about is the path to A + performance vs. complete shite. Relevance over volume always and the old quality over quantity rings true here.
- According to HubSpot, marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
- Pro-tip: Ask your subscribers to self-select a maximum number of weekly emails they’d like to receive so you can stay out of the spam aisle in the grocery store.
3. Your emails are novels. Emails should be shorter and should take less than a minute to read.
- Avoid long sentences.
- Trim your copy to 200 words or less per subject.
- Pro-tip: Aim for 25 or fewer words per sentence and ditch the boring content. Have fun, write with personality and stop being so conservative.
4. Your email readability sucks. Be nice to the people who open your emails on their phones.
- Headers should be 18 point font, body: 14.
- Pro-tip: Use the same font size for all your body copy.
5. Your emails are image-only. TL;DR: Pretty doesn’t always perform. We see this in B2C allll the time. It breaks our marketing hearts. While image-only emails may look attractive...
- If your subscriber has images turned off, they won’t see your email.
- Not including live text can hurt your email’s accessibility.
- Personalization options are limited.
- The size of the email can cause it to load slowly—or not at all.
- Images may not scale well down to mobile screen sizes.
- Your emails won’t be searchable.
- Pre-header text is impossible.
- Pro-tip: stop the image-only madness in 2022, please.
6. You’re not following image best practices. And we’re not talking about how you look or what people think. We’re not saying don’t use images -- it’s more that the images in your email need to be chosen carefully.
- Include descriptive image ALT text, and implement styled ALT text where it makes sense to brand this element even with images off.
- Don’t embed text in an image. Instead use background images with live text over them.
- Pro-tip: Optimize your images to keep file sizes small ( under 1 MB is ideal).
7. You’re not using bulletproof CTA (call to action) buttons.
- For CTA buttons, you should use code instead of images.
- Pro-tip: By doing this, your CTA buttons (ahem, the most important buttons of all) will display in all email clients even with images turned off.
8. You're monitoring the wrong (ahem, vanity) metrics.
- Open rate is good, but click rate is better. PLUS! With the iOs 15 privacy update, your email opens will be inflated anyways. This unfortunately also impacts click-to-open rate (CTOR) which measures the percentage who opened the email and clicked on a CTA.
- Pro-tip: Optimize your A/B tests for click rates.
9. You’re spending too much time building one-off emails. If you’re not using modular email templates and/or automations, now’s the time.
- Module email templates cut down on the time it takes to build flexible, creative, error-free emails.
- Pro-tip: if your brand has a blog, do yourself a favor and enable RSS feed automation. Auto-pilot is a wonderful thing.
10. Implement A/B testing the right way. And make sure your tests have statistical significance.
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Everyone says they test but so many test incorrectly. Testing everything under the sun is not an A/B test.
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Pro-tip: If you’re just getting started, we suggest testing ONE variable at time for each campaign. For example, testing a pre-header OR subject line is a great place to start -- but not both together or you won’t know which caused the uptick.
If you’re not making any of these mistakes, then congrats, we award you a gold star. But if you are, the time to refresh your strategy is now. Creating a profitable email program requires expertise and dedication to do well. If you need help, holler. We know some peeps.