Email is still the primary form of communication in the digital age. For this reason email marketing is stronger than ever as a direct marketing strategy. With that in mind many businesses still make some very basic mistakes when it comes to email marketing.

Not Using the Right Subject Line

The subject line is probably the most important part of an email. The subject line is going to determine whether the person bothers to open the email or sends it to the spam folder or trash. A bad subject line may get flagged for spam from the very beginning and your customer may ever even get the choice of opening or deleting it.

Use subject lines that are likely to get attention, avoid spam keywords and also avoid using all caps.

Not Sending During the Right Time of Day

Sometimes instinctively companies will send emails first thing in the morning and at the beginning of the week. Traditionally this when people cull the bulk of their emails. This means you have less of an opportunity to stand out , and it is the time when people will only scan subject line sand will be preoccupied with starting their task for the day.

Not Sending The Email From a Person

Customers tend to ignore emails that don’t come from an actual person. Avoid sending emails from addresses like “info@website.com” or “sales@website.com”, send them from an email address with a persons name like “johnsmith@website.com”. This makes the email more personal and improves the odds it won’t be flagged as spam or ignored all together.

Not Sending to Good Email Addresses

Companies often buy email marketing list where many of the email addresses bounce or are no longer being used. If your email marketing software doesn’t track bounced emails and give you a list of invalid addresses, you could be putting out a lot of effort to reach very few people.

Not Creating Valuable Content

One of the biggest problems when companies send emails to customers is that the emails only focus on achieving the companies goals, rather than putting information the customer may want or need in front of them. Often times email marketing is a scheduled task for a company, which means sometimes they are not in a position to develop content that may actually be useful to the customer, this means customers are more likely to delete or ignore their emails.

Not Think About Design and PresentationIn marketing presentation is more important than ever. You are constantly competing for people’s time and attention, and if you don’t have a clean and professional presentation in your marketing materials, people are likely to just ignore it and decide it’s not worth their time. Part of this when developing email marketing campaigns is to make sure they are designed for mobile devices, and that it looks consistent in different email applications.

Not Tracking Email Statistics

If you’ve done everything else right, you’ll never really know if you’re not tracking it through your email marketing software. You will want to track things like open rates, bounce rates, link clicks and also what time of day your emails were opened. This will help you make informed decisions to improve your email campaigns.