Email Marketing Mistakes That Could Be Killing Your Email Click-Through Rate
1. Untargeted List
If you’ve spent time building your list using lead bait that is not targeted and focused enough, you may have a lot of freebie seekers on your list. To clear your list, run an aggressive and targeted campaign to get them to pay attention and if they don’t, cycle them off your email list.
2. Meaningless “From” Name
Set up a “from” name that makes sense to your email recipients. Many people use their real name, and this has proved to be one of the best choices. You can also make it personal by using a name that means something to the audience like “Your Life Coach” or something that speaks to them in that way.
3. Weak Subject Lines
Most people don’t open emails that they feel are too sales oriented. Therefore, put something in the subject line that directly tells them what’s inside, and makes them want to read more. Break up your list and test at least two different subject lines to see what works best.
4. Poorly Worded Opening Sentence
Most people view part of your messages in the view screen of their email software. What do they see when looking? Make it interesting enough right up front so that they want to open it to read more.
5. Lack of Personalization
Even when audiences know that personalization is automated, they still prefer it over the lack of it. Personalization increases click-through rates enormously. Make sure it is working properly. Wrongly coded personalization is worse than no personalization. Test your messages.
6. Broken Links
Nothing is worse than having a great message, a perfect call to action, fabulous subject lines and getting people to click through… and the link is broken. That’s why testing messages before sending them out is so important for your success with email marketing.
7. Not Using Analytics
Your email marketing software offers the ability to test many different analytics, from open rates, to click-through rates and more. Learn how to set it up to work for you so that you can use that information to improve your marketing.
8. Emails That Are Too Long
While long blog posts are a big deal today, long emails aren’t. People get bored reading emails that don’t get to the point. Avoid emails that are much longer than 450 to 500 words. Get to the point.
9. Bad Formatting
This is yet another reason to test how your emails look on a variety of systems. Make sure you check for formatting issues. Formatting that makes the email hard to read, lack of word wrapping, and unresponsive messages all lose clicks.
If you’re making any of these mistakes, you can start right now fixing these problems. The hardest one to fix is proper targeting of your market, but the rest can be fixed today with just a few tweaks.
