Easily avoidable marketing email fails

We all know that marketing emails can be fiddly to put together, and they're more time-consuming to create and populate than people who never create and populate them could ever imagine.

Naturally then, it’s rather easy to make a tiny mistake. Two jobs ago, I definitely missed the odd thing, on occasion. You could say it’s how you learn things.

Anyway, there are a number of basic things you can always make sure you've checked upfront, before you hit that ‘send’ button. Here are some of the most common, but easily avoidable mistakes.

Let's start at the top of a typical email, and work our way downwards...

Photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels

Fail #1: There’s a typo in the subject line

Many of us have done it. No-one’s perfect. However, this is one of the very first things your email recipient will see when your email lands in their inbox, so it’s going to be important to:

• Spell every word correctly

• Use the right punctuation and grammar

• Not accidentally miss out a word within a sentence

Why? Because it doesn't ever make a good impression; particularly if it means that 'Do you need an online assistant?' has now become 'Do you need an online ass?'.

That's a drastic example, but you get the point. 

Takeaway tip: Double-check your subject line just before sending so you know that everything's as it should be!

Actually, also check that your subject line doesn’t truncate (or truncate at an ‘awkward’ point!).

Fail #2: There’s no preview text (aka preheader text)

I see this happen more often than I’d otherwise expect. It particularly makes me cringe when I see it happen with businesses that should know better; e.g. digital agencies/marketing agencies/massive, global brands.

We’ve all seen examples where someone totally forgot to fill in the ‘preview text’ field of their email draft OR they left in the default text on their template. 🤦🏻‍♀️

It's not the end of the world, but it's another little missed opportunity to entice your audience to open your campaign.  

Takeaway tip: Always fill in the ‘preview text’/‘preheader’ part of the draft! Yeah, it can feel a bit tedious, but particularly in the event that you’re using a very generic/cryptic subject line, your preview text can mean the difference between an 'open', a 'move to trash' - or worse, a ‘mark as spam’.

Fail #3: You’re not using personalisation/it’s not working properly

Now we come to the main body of copy; the words that are going to attempt to inform/convince/begin building a relationship with your end readers.

So, how can you use personalisation to enhance your copy, and really make that end reader feel like you’ve specially written this message just for them?

There are a few things you can do. You could, at the very least, include a ‘Hi NAME’ type of token (if you’re thinking of using a ‘NAME’ token, always check it’s properly working when you run a test send. Otherwise, you might be about to send emails out to thousands saying 'Hi NAME', which, if it happens to you, you’ll kick yourself for. I think I’ve made this boo-boo at least once).

You could also add an aspect of personalisation to your email subject line, if appropriate. Here’s a simple example:

Think about whether you have enough information about your mailing list recipients to try and incorporate certain nuggets into the main body of copy. For example, if you have all the job titles of your recipients on hand, you could add a sentence along the lines of:

“Do you find that, in your job as [TOKEN (job title)] you’re always up against the clock?”

Things like this are really nice, subtle touches.

Takeaway tip: It’s common practice these days to incorporate some kind of personalisation into your emails. In fact, studies have shown emails that include personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened by mail recipients, compared to those without. So by not doing this, you’re missing the chance to create more resonance with your end reader.

Also, don't have a ‘heart sink’ moment. Double-check that any personalisation tokens you add to your email drafts, whether it's in the subject line and/or in the main body of text, are all present and working perfectly. Always test before you send!

Fail #4: The wrong tone has been used

Tone of voice, yes. Most of the time, people seem to get this right, but there are occasions when getting the tone wrong can confuse people - or worse, rub them up the wrong way.

I receive an email like this every so often. I remember one occurrence in particular when I received an invitation to get involved in a (pretty established) content marketing agency's new initiative. Here's a line from their email which particularly annoyed me:

"From marketing influencers like ‘xxxxx’ and LinkedIn's ‘xxxxx’ to scrappy B2B marketers just like you, speakers will be...."

Erm. Sorry, what. “Scrappy?”

To this day, I'm unsure as to whether something was lost in translation across the Atlantic Ocean, but to me - the tone was terrible. I actually got a bit annoyed by it (wouldn’t you be?), and I contacted them with a one-liner to make my point.

I didn't hear back. Fine. *Hits unsubscribe*

There is also the old “we need to use these particular words in our marketing email because senior management/subject matter experts think they mean something to our audience, but actually, they only mean something to us in our internally focused, tunnel-visioned world.”

Examples could be acronyms. Vague names of services and products which are not easy to understand for anyone working at your organisation. Things like this serve to alienate your audience and put a barrier up between you and them.

Takeaway tip: Try and remove yourself from any internal language and assumptions made about your audience (i.e. ones which are not based on any primary or otherwise reliable insight/research). Assess your draft objectively - does it really make sense? And in a tone of voice that is appropriate for both your brand and the end audience?

Fail #5: The content is not relevant to the end reader

You’re not going to send out a bunch of marketing emails about ‘x’ to a mailing list where half of the readers are more interested in ‘y’? Well, it happens more often than you think - or notice.

There’s also the fact that sometimes, as marketers, we can be pushed into a corner in terms of the time and resource we have to complete a task. It means that sending one email out feels far more ‘realistic’ and achievable, compared to sending three different versions that are targeted at three different audience segments (and of course you have to spend the time creating these lists too).

The problem with this of course is that - typos and such aside - if someone starts reading your email and it’s not at all relevant to them, they’re going to switch off. In fact, they might well unsubscribe altogether, which means that you won’t even get the opportunity to ‘correct’ your behaviour on your next ‘go’!

Takeaway tip: It really pays to properly think through what you’re going to send (and to whom) in detail before you start drafting and building out your campaign on-screen.

It might feel like a massive ballache and five times the effort to do so, but if you can tailor the content of your marketing emails properly so that trainer-loving Todd gets an email about the latest Nike styles, rather than one about Birkenstock sandals, you’ll probably find that your open rates, CTRs (click-through rates) and ultimately - conversions - work out better.

Fail #6: There’s no call-to-action (CTA)

So you go to all that trouble to draft the email copy, maybe make template changes, do all the admin associated with pulling out your mailing list, testing it, optimising all the fields you’re meant to, and after all that, you kind of forget to put in the instruction of what you want your mailing list targets to do when they open your email. That was the whole point of creating this bloody email! 

There's not really much point to all this effort if you’re not going to make the call to action associated with your messaging really clear.

The takeaway? Include at least one really clear CTA link (whether it's shown within a big button, an image, a banner..), and try to keep it to just one CTA* if you can (e.g. ‘register now’, ‘sign up’, ‘book now’ etc).

Don’t forget you can pepper your email with this same link in different ways, like hyperlinking your email’s masthead image, a selected image, or a portion of main body text.

(*There are some instances where multiple CTAs can be warranted of course. Like, for example, when you’re sending content in ‘newsletter’ format.)

Fail #7: There’s no visibility regarding subscription preferences (aka “where do I unsubscribe?”)

I'm sure many of us are being spammed on a daily basis by someone or other - in my case, some connections on LinkedIn seem to really like sending me unsolicited marketing emails which either talk about something which is pretty irrelevant to me, or it’s about how great their company is and which new joiners they've hired 🤷🏻‍♀️.

It feels only natural in these instances to hit ‘unsubscribe’… but ever noticed those times where you’ve tried to do this, but there’s been no link to do this? Or when you click, it’s broken or takes you to a page that isn’t relevant to managing your email preferences? It smacks a bit of a company or organisation that do not have a clue what they're doing. And it’s kind of against the law now too, with GDPR and all that.

Then, occasionally, there'll be the 'hidden' unsubscribe link - which kind of irritates me even more. Look at this company's line below. They think they're trying to be clever, but they're actually being unhelpful, unprofessional and sneaky: 

“Are you sure you don’t want to unsubscribe? [Yes] [No]”

I mean, this is just bad practice. 

The takeaway? As I've said in previous blogs about email stuff, if you're using a reputable platform to send your marketing email campaigns, they'll factor in the whole 'unsubscribe' shizzle by default. You won't even have to think about it.

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