by Kyle Blacker 
In today’s digital era, email marketing remains a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their audience, drive engagement, and ultimately boost conversions. Whilst the potential benefits are immense, navigating the landscape of email marketing requires finesse, attention to detail and evaluation over time. From crafting compelling subject lines to delivering content that resonates, there are numerous factors that can make or break the success of your email campaigns.
In this blog, we’ll explore a range of common email marketing pitfalls that even seasoned marketers can stumble upon. Whether you’re a business owner, a marketer, or someone just venturing into the world of email outreach, understanding and avoiding these mistakes will support maximising the impact of your email marketing efforts. Let’s dive in and uncover the key missteps that can hinder your email marketing success, and, more importantly, learn how to sidestep them to achieve optimal results.
Mistake 1 – Not optimising emails for Mobile devices
It pains me to have to put this one first, but unfortunately, it is still very much a common issue I see, even from big brand names. According to HubSpot’s latest findings, 41% of email opens occur on mobile, 39% on desktop, 19% on Tablet, and the remaining 1% on other devices. This data doesn’t just suggest, it means your emails need to be optimised for mobile. It’s never been easier to test your emails on different devices thanks to the many tools out there compiling your emails in an easy to digest view allowing you to immediately identify where things aren’t working as they should. You can find some additional tips on how to achieve this in our other blog post.
Mistake 2 – Neglecting Personalisation
In the pursuit of efficiency, it’s easy to overlook the power of personalisation in your emails. Neglecting to personalise your emails can lead to disengagement and a lack of connection with your audience. Personalisation goes beyond addressing recipients by their names; it involves tailoring content to individual preferences, behaviours, and needs. Dynamic content in particular can be a great tool in your marketing arsenal in this regard. With this, you can dynamically display specific content to your prospects based on existing pieces of data you already have without having to send separate emails.
Mistake 3 – Ignoring Analytics
Another common – not necessarily email marketing mistake, but oversight – is not reviewing email send metrics. It’s a constant learning process and key to building success for future email marketing efforts. A good aid to help work toward is to review Campaign Monitor’s industry benchmarks. Even if you are meeting the average shown for your industry, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t review your email analytics! Reviewing your email campaigns over time will help you create more targeted, personalised emails that deliver better results. Keep a pulse on your open rates, click through rates, etc. What can you do next? Should you try A/B testing, changing the subject line, or revamping your email layouts? Your data will guide you! Account Engagement provides several tools to help with this, one being the Advanced Email Analytics feature, and another being B2BMA dashboards.
Zoe Fisher Principal Marketing Automation Consultant
Looking for help with Account Engagement?
Zoe Fisher
Principal Marketing Automation Consultant
Looking for help with Account Engagement?
Mistake 4 – Abandoning your unengaged segments
Piggybacking slightly from the last point, identifying unengaged prospects is important. Just because you have a pool of prospects that don’t frequently (if ever) engage with your emails, doesn’t mean you should just leave them or delete them from your database. It’s recommended that you try a different approach with these prospects, a re-engagement campaign of sorts, targeting these segments (remember the first thing people usually see in their inbox is the subject line and or preheader). Try something different, but still provide relevant content to these audiences. You never know until you try! Worst case scenario, you can always free up your database if those unengaged prospects still don’t bite. If you need some ideas on how to start tidying up your database, look no further than our post here for insight and tips.
Mistake 5 – Ignoring Accessibility
Email accessibility ensures that individuals with disabilities can fully engage with your content. This includes those using screen readers, and individuals with visual impairments, cognitive challenges, or motor disabilities. In fact, making your emails accessible benefits everyone, as it creates a more user-friendly experience overall. Some things to consider are;
- Colour contrasts
- Descriptive Alt text applied to your images
- Is your email screen reader friendly? Test it!
- Font size
Mistake 6 – Don’t forward test emails!
You test an email, it looks good, you’re happy, you then forward it to your colleagues for another glance. All of a sudden you’re getting feedback that the layout is broken in multiple sections. But it looks good for you, so what’s happened? The issue here could lie with forwarding emails using your inbox’s default ‘forward’ button. This almost guarantees that your email will come through a broken mess on the recipient’s side. If you want your peers to also test an email accurately, simply send it to them directly from your email client!
In the examples below you can see screenshots of before and after an email was forwarded from one inbox to another.
Email sent directly to an Outlook inbox
The same email, just forwarded to another Outlook inbox
Notice the extra padding at the top, font size changes, CTA change and the thin white horizontal line under our logo
Remember, email marketing is very dynamic, and best practices can evolve over time. Staying updated and continuously learning from your mistakes and successes will help you refine your strategies for better email marketing results.