Worse Than Biting Your Nails – 7 Email Marketing Habits to Break

Worse Than Biting Your Nails – 7 Email Marketing Habits to Break

With the GDPR now fully in effect, you may be thinking email marketing is dead – but that cannot be further from the truth! Now that you’ve taken all the necessary steps to be sure that your business is compliant, don’t drive those opted-in contacts away with irrelevant emails and sloppy copy. We’ve put together seven email marketing habits you need to break to keep your contacts engaged and fill your sales funnel.

1. Using the Same Sender Name

Utilize the “friendly from” can help increase open rates and add a layer of personalization to your emails. Rather than use the name of your company, try using an employee’s name. This can be a salesperson, a member of your marketing team or even a C-level executive, such as your CEO. Get creative, but be sure you’re still be honest and not misleading – abusing this aspect of email marketing can violate the CAN-SPAM act (which we all know is NOT good).

2. Literal Subject Lines

When scrolling through your own inbox, what jumps out to you? Chances are you skim over monotonous, bland subject lines and gravitate towards the witty, creative, and/or funny ones. Keep this in mind when choosing your own email subject lines, and make small tweaks to see what boosts open rates.

3. Your Preview Text is on

Auto-Populate Preview, or pre-header, text can be a great opportunity to make your email stand out from the crowd, so don’t waste it by allowing it to auto-populate. You can use it as an extension of your subject line or even just as a means of breaking up a screen full of text with some white space. Either way, this is an excellent creative outlet for you hardworking email content creators!

4. The Copy is Too Professional

A good brand and content strategy ensures that there is a distinct voice across all communications and collateral. Why stop at whitepapers and social media when you can work a voice into every single email you send? Copy that is too professional, full of jargon or “salesy” will dehumanize your brand and turn off a prospect who may have opened the email because of a great subject line. Instead of writing your emails as a means of promotion, think of them as a conversation and inject personality wherever it is appropriate. The goal is to create a connection that leads to a conversion – remember that!

5. Your CTA isn’t Compelling

Writing marketing emails is a detail-oriented craft, and no word or space should be overlooked or skimped on. It is no secret that your email was sent to a consumer with the intention of eliciting some sort of action, but that doesn’t mean that your Call to Action (CTA) needs to be dull. Whether you use witty copy or catchy design, experiment with different ways to catch the readers’ eye and entice them to click.

6. You Neglect Design

So you wrote a hilarious subject line clever preview text, use a “friendly from” in the form of your most-active-on-LinkedIn sales executive and have some killed copy in the body of your email – what next? No matter how much work you put into what you believe to be the “perfect email,” bad design could kill your chances of getting click-throughs and responses. Make sure that your email is laid out in an easy-to-read format, the text is not too large and that there are relevant visual elements (think a fun banner image or eye-catching CTA button). Further, add social sharing capabilities (as well as links to your accounts!) for more growing room.

7. You’re Talking About Yourself Too Much

As marketers, we have but one goal – drive brand/product awareness to generate leads and increase conversions. That being said, no one likes a braggart and everyone wants to know “what’s in it” for them. Keep your messaging aligned with your organizations values and culture, but don’t focus too much on the sales effort or risk turning people off. Instead, offer value-adds and thought leadership around topics that relate to your product without sounding too self-promotional. This allows you to engage with consumers that are like-minded and passionate about similar topics, and keeps your brand top-of-mind in those same areas. More engagement leads to more conversions, every time. Has your business put any of the above into practice with great success? Maybe we missed something? Let us know in the comments!