Four common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 8:29 am
How many times have you received an email that starts with “Dear *|FNAME|*”? It happens so often it’s laughable, and it’s a clear example of personalization gone wrong.
Have you ever created a new email campaign after copying and pasting from an old one, only to realize that you’ve now sent everyone the exact same unsubscribe link, which you discovered when [email protected] unsubscribed 200 times because everyone on your list clicked her (invalid) unsubscribe link?
Don’t be too hard on yourself.
Every seasoned email marketer has made mistakes. Below, I’ll detail honduras phone number material the most common email marketing mistakes I’ve seen, and what our technology does to prevent them.
I won’t cover obvious email marketing mistakes such as not optimizing design for mobile users, not segmenting contacts, emailing people too frequently, and making grammar mistakes, because other writers have already covered those topics here, here, and here. It’s 2019, and by now, these should be obvious. In fact, the previous articles I just mentioned were written only for the benefit of SEO, not to teach you anything useful about email outreach.
But I digress. Here are the most common technical mistakes made in email marketing campaigns and how, at GMass, our software addresses them.
1. Personalization Failures
If you use a personalization merge tag that doesn’t belong, we’ll warn you when you try to send the campaign.
merge tag warning
GMass warns you if you use the wrong merge tags.
For example, if your spreadsheet column is “First”, but in your campaign you accidentally use type {Firs} or get the tag wrong altogether, like {FName}, GMass will notice that and alert you, allowing you to cancel your campaign. See this post for more information on our personalization warnings.
2. Copying/pasting click-tracked links from an old campaign
A common practice for email marketers is to copy a campaign they’ve already used and paste it into their email marketing app’s campaign builder as a new campaign. This is a terrible practice because if you’re using click-tracking, the links in the prior campaign have already been modified to be click-tracked. That means parameters have been added to the link to identify who clicked on what and to report this data back to you.
Have you ever created a new email campaign after copying and pasting from an old one, only to realize that you’ve now sent everyone the exact same unsubscribe link, which you discovered when [email protected] unsubscribed 200 times because everyone on your list clicked her (invalid) unsubscribe link?
Don’t be too hard on yourself.
Every seasoned email marketer has made mistakes. Below, I’ll detail honduras phone number material the most common email marketing mistakes I’ve seen, and what our technology does to prevent them.
I won’t cover obvious email marketing mistakes such as not optimizing design for mobile users, not segmenting contacts, emailing people too frequently, and making grammar mistakes, because other writers have already covered those topics here, here, and here. It’s 2019, and by now, these should be obvious. In fact, the previous articles I just mentioned were written only for the benefit of SEO, not to teach you anything useful about email outreach.
But I digress. Here are the most common technical mistakes made in email marketing campaigns and how, at GMass, our software addresses them.
1. Personalization Failures
If you use a personalization merge tag that doesn’t belong, we’ll warn you when you try to send the campaign.
merge tag warning
GMass warns you if you use the wrong merge tags.
For example, if your spreadsheet column is “First”, but in your campaign you accidentally use type {Firs} or get the tag wrong altogether, like {FName}, GMass will notice that and alert you, allowing you to cancel your campaign. See this post for more information on our personalization warnings.
2. Copying/pasting click-tracked links from an old campaign
A common practice for email marketers is to copy a campaign they’ve already used and paste it into their email marketing app’s campaign builder as a new campaign. This is a terrible practice because if you’re using click-tracking, the links in the prior campaign have already been modified to be click-tracked. That means parameters have been added to the link to identify who clicked on what and to report this data back to you.