Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses looking to raise awareness, build relationships with their audience, and drive conversions.
As a core part of the cross-channel marketing strategy for many businesses, email marketing often delivers one of the highest returns on investment compared to other marketing channels.
However, the success of any email marketing campaign relies on the quality of the email list that powers it.
Email marketing list management and maintenance is something that is often overlooked by businesses – but it shouldn’t be. Having a poorly maintained, low-quality email list can significantly reduce the effectiveness of your email campaigns and can also lead to deliverability issues in the long term.
In this article, we’ll explore eight of the common email marketing mistakes that businesses make when it comes to their email list – and offer guidance on how to avoid them to ensure your email marketing campaigns deliver the results you need.
1. Not segmenting your lists
Email segmentation involves dividing your email list into smaller, more targeted groups based on criteria like demographics, interests, behaviors, or preferences.
By creating segments within your email list, you can deliver more relevant and personalized content to your subscribers, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
A study by Mailchimp suggests that segmented email campaigns have a 14.31% higher open rate and a 100.95% higher click rate compared to non-segmented campaigns, which clearly highlights the importance of segmentation in capturing your subscribers’ attention and encouraging them to take action.
If you choose not to segment your email marketing list, your emails may lack relevance to a large proportion of your audience.
For example, if you were to send the same promotional email for a women’s clothing sale to your entire email list, which includes both male and female subscribers, it’s likely to result in lower engagement rates. The male subscribers may find the content irrelevant and choose not to interact with the email.
A lack of engagement in your emails may not seem like an initial concern – but it has wider-reaching implications.
When subscribers feel that your emails are not relevant to them, they are more likely to mark your messages as spam or unsubscribe from your list altogether.
High spam complaint rates and unsubscribe rates can damage your sender reputation and ultimately impact your email deliverability – preventing you from reaching the people you actually want to reach.
So, to avoid any issues with your future email deliverability, it’s recommended you spend the time to implement email segmentation strategies that allow you to deliver targeted, relevant content to specific groups within your email marketing list.
2. Over-segmenting your list
While email segmentation is essential for delivering relevant content to your subscribers, it’s important to strike the right balance – recognizing that over-segmenting your list can also have its drawbacks.
When segments become too specific and narrow, creating content that caters to each group can become time-consuming – stretching your internal resources and leading to a decrease in the overall quality of your email campaigns.
There can also be an impact on the statistical significance of your email marketing data.
When a segment contains only a small number of subscribers, the data collected from that group may not be sufficient to draw reliable comparisons from.
For example, a 50% open rate from a segment that only contains 10 subscribers would be inaccurate to draw conclusions from against a 30% open rate from a segment that has 5,000 subscribers.
By striking a balance between relevance and segment size, you can create email marketing campaigns that effectively target your subscribers’ interests and needs while still maintaining a manageable and cost-effective content creation process.
3. Purchasing email lists
In an effort to quickly grow their email list, some businesses may be tempted by the short-term allure of purchasing email marketing lists.
While this may seem like a quick and easy solution, it’s an email marketing mistake that comes with some significant risks that can seriously harm your email marketing efforts and your business reputation.
When you purchase an email list, you’re getting a collection of email addresses that have never explicitly consented to receive emails from your business.
When people receive unsolicited emails from a business they don’t recognize, they are more likely to mark the messages as spam or unsubscribe from your list.
Sending emails to purchased lists can also put your business at risk of being on the wrong side of data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States – which can result in substantial fines and legal consequences.
Instead of trying to ‘shortcut’ the process of building an email marketing list, businesses should focus on organically building their number of subscribers. This approach may take more time and effort but delivers far better results in the long run.
By building your email list from opt-in subscribers who are genuinely interested in your content, you can develop a more engaged email list that drives better open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
4. Making opt-in forms hard to find
Leading on from the previous point about the importance of organically growing your email list, it’s crucial to ensure that your opt-in forms are easily visible and accessible to potential subscribers.
If interested visitors to your website can’t quickly find where to sign up for your email list, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities to grow your subscribers.
To maximize the visibility of your opt-in forms, consider placing them in high-traffic areas of your website, such as the header, footer, or sidebar. This helps ensure that visitors can easily spot them, regardless of the page they land on.
You might also consider implementing pop-up forms or modals that appear after a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on your site. These forms can effectively capture engaged visitors’ attention and encourage them to sign up.
It’s also good practice to offer a ‘lead magnet’ or incentivize people to sign up to your email marketing list. There are a wide range of different approaches you can take, such as offering exclusive content, discounts, or access to webinars.
By making sure you’re giving your audience a reason to sign up and making your opt-in forms highly visible and easily accessible, you put yourself in the best position to organically grow your email list.
5. Not using double opt-in
Double opt-in requires your subscribers to verify their email address after initially signing up by clicking a confirmation link sent to their inbox.
While some businesses may view this as an extra step that could potentially reduce the number of subscribers, the benefits of using double opt-in far outweigh the drawbacks.
While double opt-in is not explicitly required under GDPR, it is considered a best practice for ensuring compliance and maintaining a clean, engaged email list.
Without double opt-in, your email list may be susceptible to people signing up using fake email addresses or making genuine mistakes and mistyping their email address when signing up. Both of these situations can lead to your email marketing list containing invalid email addresses that reduce your deliverability metrics.
On the other hand, implementing a double opt-in process is likely to lead to higher engagement rates, improved deliverability, and clear proof of consent for compliance with data privacy regulations.
6. Sending generic and non-personalized emails
To truly get the most out of your email marketing campaign, it’s important to move beyond generic, one-size-fits-all email content.
A study by Experian showed that personalized emails have 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates than non-personalized emails.
Getting started with personalization doesn’t need to be complicated.
You’re able to start with the basics by including your subscribers’ names in the subject line of your emails to help increase open rates.
If you wanted to take things a step further, you could analyze your subscribers’ past interactions with your emails and website to gain insights into their preferences and behaviors.
Using this data, you could create specific user segments to personalize your email content.
Another more structured form of personalization is to automate email marketing sequences based on specific subscriber actions or milestones. Examples might include welcome emails for new subscribers, birthday offers, or post-purchase follow-ups.
With Simplelists, you can easily create visually appealing email marketing campaigns that incorporate personalization elements to capture your subscribers’ attention and drive results.
7. Ignoring mobile optimization
With the widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, mobile devices have become the primary way for many people to read and engage with email content. It’s actually estimated that 81% of emails are now opened on mobile devices.
Given this trend, ignoring mobile optimization in your email marketing strategy is an email mistake that can have serious consequences, as you risk providing a poor user experience for a large proportion of your subscribers.
This can lead to lower engagement rates, increased unsubscribes, and, ultimately, a reduced return on investment for your email marketing efforts.
If you’re looking for some tips to optimize your emails for mobile devices, we’ve put together a quick list:
Use responsive email design
By implementing a responsive email design, the layout and formatting of your emails changes to fit various screen sizes. This helps ensure that your emails look great and are easy to read on both desktop and mobile devices.
Break up content blocks
Consider breaking up your email content into smaller, easily digestible chunks using short paragraphs, bullet points, and clear headings. This makes your emails more scannable and easier to read on mobile devices.
Use a single-column layout
Try to avoid multi-column layouts in your email design, as they can be difficult to read and navigate on smaller screens. Stick to a single-column layout for a more mobile-friendly experience.
Make CTAs easily clickable and prominent
To make your email marketing campaigns optimized for mobiles, it’s also important that your CTAs are large, easily tappable, and visually distinct from the rest of your email content. This makes it simple for mobile users to take the action you want them to take.
8. Not cleaning your email list
One of the common email marketing mistakes is sending emails to inactive addresses.
People regularly leave jobs or change their email addresses. This means that over time, some of the email addresses in your email marketing list can become invalid or inactive.
When you send emails to non-existent or invalid email addresses, it results in hard bounces, which can damage your sender reputation.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the factors in determining the trustworthiness of an email sender. So, having high bounce rates can actually reduce your ability to reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
This is why it’s important to take the right steps to maintain a clean, healthy, and engaged email marketing list.
Make it a regularly scheduled process to monitor and remove email addresses that result in hard bounces. This will help keep your bounce rates low and protect your sender reputation.
You’ll also want to identify and remove inactive subscribers. It’s a good idea to define a timeframe for inactivity (for example, 6 months or 12 months) and remove subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails within that period.
Improve your email marketing performance with Simplelists
To achieve email marketing success, it’s essential to avoid common email marketing mistakes and follow best practices for how to build an email list.
However, choosing the right email delivery partner is also crucial.
Simplelists is well known as a market leader in group email management, providing businesses with powerful tools to communicate and collaborate with their list members.
However, Simplelists is also used successfully by many businesses for email marketing.
With our user-friendly interface, advanced segmentation capabilities, and support for personalization, Simplelists provides everything you need to optimize your email marketing efforts and improve your ROI.
Experience the benefits of Simplelists today with a one-month free trial.