Treat your email subscribers like business royalty and in return you’ll have a tribe of engaged followers who want to buy stuff from you because they know, like and trust you.
Your ability to craft good emails in your campaigns can make or break your business; you’ve worked hard setting up your business funnel, drawing tons of traffic and converting them into leads. Now all that’s left the difficult task of making profits through your email marketing campaign.
There are a few common mistakes made in email marketing which you have to avoid at all costs or you’ll potentially be leaving tons of money on the table (and you sure as hell don’t want to do that!).
How to make your subscribers super annoyed;
- Crappy headlines
What would you rather get in your inbox? An email entitled “New blog about email marketing” or “Suzannah, are you annoying your email subscribers?” Get your subscriber intrigued to read more and use their name where possible. There are some great blogs online about writing tempting headlines – go do some research on what words are most engaging. - Affiliate links
Be transparent if you are promoting something to gain commissions. Affiliate marketing can work really well for both parties but only promote things you use yourself or your subscribers will soon lose trust in you. Be honest if you will gain a commission and don’t overdo it with the affiliate links and emails. - Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling
Ideally, the length from left to right for the text of your emails should be no longer than 200 characters. This will help you to improve readability and usability. People have a tendency to scroll up and down rather than left to right but that’s not a reason to make your email really long. Include one main feature and 2-3 smaller bits of news. Your email software (I use ActiveCampaign) will have the width auto set already. If you’re not using email marketing software, you totally need to! It’s essential for many reasons – it looks way more professional, people can unsubscribe and manage their email preferences, it’s easier to manage, you can run some really impressive reports to see who’s been engaged with your campaigns and of course saves bulk emails being sent in batches via Outlook. - Hardsell
Treating your customers right is important, and while making profits is important as well, it should not go at the expense of your readers attention. A good guideline would be to send 1 promo offer for every 9 emails of valuable content. That way, you can “train” your readers to lookout for your emails for good stuff every time you send something and not opt out from your list. - Overkill
An email a month – good, an email a week – great, an email a day..or more – not good UNLESS you’re running a time sensitive launch or offer, in which case you can get away with sending daily emails. Quantity of emails is the biggest reason people unsubscribe from lists. You want people to remember you but not for the wrong reasons! - Boring vanilla
Simple is good but it needn’t be boring. No-one wants to read the equivalent of an A4 sheet of paper with font size 10 Arial text printed all over it. Break up your text with bullet points, use dots like this…
to draw the eye to the next line of text. Be different to your competitors (sign up to their lists to see what they are sending). - It’s rude to share
Sharing your subscribers with other people or businesses is a complete NO NO! Keep their details for your business use only, unless you have had explicit permission from them to say otherwise. An example of this is where you are working on a joint venture with another company and capturing email addresses for a promotion of some kind. MAKE IT CLEAR if you are both going to be marketing to the subscriber.
Finally, always ensure you have permission to add people to your list. Adding someone’s email address from a business card they gave you at a networking event does not entitle you to market to them. Get consent first and always use a double opt-in where possible.
In short, strive to provide value through your email marketing campaigns – your subscribers are Kings and Queens, so treat them like royalty.
