Avoid these five email scary mistakes to keep the performance of your emails on the up and up

Beware of These 5 Scary Email Marketing Mistakes | Union

Beware Of These 5 Scary Email Marketing Mistakes

The subject line. The links. The promotion. The graphic aligned just right.
We spend time checking and double checking email marketing campaigns before scheduling and releasing to thousands of contacts. Down the list, we mark off each piece looking particularly perfect and ready for opens.
Yet.
There are a few items you forgot to check. Ones that lurk in the dark. The ones that greatly impact open rates, CTRs and can account for a large number of bounces or unsubscribes. Gasp! Avoid these five email scary mistakes to keep the performance of your emails on the up and up:
<h2>Same Subscriber List…Forever</h2>
It boggles my mind that a company I purchased from about ten years ago continues to send me promotional emails time after time. I never open them. It wasn’t until last month that I finally remembered the login to an old email address to find hundreds of emails piled in my inbox from said company.
I do believe there are subscribers that can be reengaged and can turn into sales, but in this case, I am not one for this company. Actually, I have not opened, let alone clicked links on, any of their emails in 6-7 years. Since it’s been so long since I have purchased from them, my taste and purchase behavior has changed slightly. Obviously, their email strategy has not.
Use your subscriber list to your advantage:
<ul><li>Take a look at your subscriber list and what new segmentation needs to happen. If they’ve been on your list for 10 years, perhaps taking a looking at what content you are sending them would be a good idea. </li><li>Focus on the subscribers that do engage. What content resonates with them most? </li><li>Explore a campaign to reengage subscribers that haven’t been active for a while.</li></ul>
<h2>Email Copy Freights</h2>
Open email. Scroll. Scroll. Still scrolling.
There’s one image and a blog post…in an email.
Attention spans are short and if you get a subscriber to actually OPEN an email from your company, know you have limited time to communicate your message.
“We read almost nothing, and then we forget almost all of it.”
Keep your message brief and powerful. If you need to provide more information, focus on the most important message or reason they should click to find out more. Keep a perspective of your subscriber.
<h2>Something Doesn’t Look Quite Right</h2>
It can be easy to assume if a test email looks good through our email provider or mobile device, it will deliver exactly that same way for everyone.
As a reminder: emails do view differently through providers and devices.
To overcome this obstacle, we are big users of <a href="https://www.emailonacid.com/">EMAIL ON ACID</a>. It just requires sending a test email to your Email on Acid account. From there, you can view your email through a variety of providers and devices.
After all, if you want your subscribers to actually read and take action on your email, they have to be able to view it first.
<h2>The Missing Images</h2>
What happens if the images you spend time tweaking and filling with important messages never load? Will your subscriber miss an important message or will your email suddenly no longer make sense without it?
Don’t forget to take the extra time to add image descriptions in emails for those that cannot view them due to spam filters. View your email without images, read the copy and make sure the experience is still one your subscriber should have — with or without images.
<h2>The Timing</h2>
After checking your subscriber list, copy, test emails and images, there’s one more important piece before hitting schedule:
Being in the right inbox, at the right time.
For a general rule of thumb, test send times on these dates:
Tuesday Thursday Wednesday
10am 8pm 2pm 6am
<a href="http://coschedule.com/blog/best-time-to-send-email/">MAILCHIMP RELEASED A STUDY</a> where the highest open rates were on Thursdays, with a second peak on Tuesdays. A HubSpot study echoed the same findings for Tuesdays, but also showed Mondays and Wednesdays in second place.
Each industry is different and each subscriber list is different. Test dates and times to find the sweet spot for your lists.
Looking for more tips to avoid sending a scary email to your subscribers? <a href="https://union.co/contact">WE’RE HERE TO HELP.</a>

Valtech Union is a creative &amp; performance marketing agency that creates omni-channel campaigns, unleashing creativity on a data-driven world, helping brands produce memorable, measurable and repeatable results. Obsessed with data-driven performance, we believe every marketing dollar should be viewed as an investment. Our clients expect a meaningful return and we prove the ROI of our work with quantifiable data.