Five E-mail Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Not paying enough attention to your e-mail marketing effort can lose you customers and compromise selling opportunities. While e-mail marketing is a great way to stay in contact with your customers, if handled badly it also has the power to ruin the relationship. You’ll respect your customers and get the most out of your e-mail marketing efforts by avoiding these five critical mistakes:

1. No Opt-out Clause

The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act 2003 requires that your commercial e-mails contain an unsubscribe link making it easy for a list member to unsubscribe from your e-mails. It also makes good business sense.

To avoid your e-mail being perceived as spam, make sure that every outgoing e-mail contains an opt-out link that the recipient can click to unsubscribe from the list. Make sure that the link works and make sure that the system is in place for managing the process effectively. Respecting your list members by doing this is a way of saying that you care about your business and your relationship with your customers.

2. Make Subscribing Too Difficult

Don't just make it easy to unsubscribe - make it easy to subscribe, too. If you don’t absolutely need certain information from subscribers, then don't ask for it. I have bypassed signing up for many an e-mail list because it required me to provide information I’m not comfortable providing just for the privilege of receiving a marketing e-mail, and I’m not alone.

You need to find a balance between the information that you ask subscribers to provide (knowing that the more that you ask for, the less likely it is that they will sign up) with your desire to build a quality list that not only helps you market your business but also, over time, develops into a valuable business asset.

3. E-mail Too Much or Not Enough

This is a Catch 22 problem. If you e-mail too often you run the risk of being perceived as a nuisance by your subscribers, and people may unsubscribe because there’s simply too much e-mail from you.

On the other hand, if you do not e-mail your subscribers often enough there’s a chance that they will forget that they subscribed to the list, and you may find yourself fielding questions as to why you’re sending them e-mails.

Whatever you do in terms of frequency of e-mailing always honor any statement that you made to the person when they signed up for your list. If you promised monthly e-mails then you should send out e-mails each month, not every two weeks.

If you’re going to increase the frequency of your e-mails, create a second list for new signups and only e-mail at the new frequency to the new list participants. Offer existing subscribers a means to move to the new lists but don't change how you e-mail them without their permission to do so.

4. No Feedback

If you don’t know what your list generates in the way of business, then you really have no way of knowing if your e-mails are a total waste of your time – for both you and your subscribers.

Good e-mail lists have tracking built into them so that you can analyze the response to your e-mail messages. At a minimum you should know how many people received your e-mail, how many e-mails bounced back, how many were actually opened and which links were clicked and how often.

Analyzing this information lets you target your e-mails better in future. For example, if no one clicks on a particular link, perhaps that link is in the wrong place in the e-mail or perhaps it just isn't interesting enough. Consider moving the content elsewhere or rewording the link and see if that gives better results. Analyzing your e-mail success helps you create e-mails that are more likely to sell.

5. No Added Value

If you’re reading this article, it’s a fair bet that you have an e-commerce site. But that doesn’t mean that all your efforts should be toward selling to your customer in a direct way. Your e-mail newsletter should be informative as well as a selling vehicle. Use your e-mails to inform your customers about your products, how to use them and how to maximize their use as well as to advise customers about special offers or new products.

An e-mail newsletter that combines information and a sales pitch is more likely to be opened and read on a regular basis than one that contains only the sales pitch.

Remember too that you don’t have to provide all the content in your e-mail message. You can include a few descriptive sentences and then place the rest of the article or story on your Web site or blog and link to that. This will help you get feedback as to how attractive these informative elements are to your readership as you can track who clicks the links.

Everyone who signed up to receive your e-mail newsletter has made a commitment to you and your business. They’ve said they want to receive information from you, and they trust you to provide it to them the way you said you would when they signed up.

Make sure that you honor the agreement. Provide your list subscribers with regular, informative content as well as offers that are relevant to them. Make sure to respect the relationship you have with your customers, and use your e-mail list to build a quality, long-term relationship with your customers.

Source -- MultiView, Helen Bradley is a respected international journalist writing regularly for small business and computer publications in the USA, Canada, South Africa, UK and Australia. You can learn more about her at her Web site, HelenBradley.com