Section 1 - Task 1 - Best Practice of Email Marketing and Marketing Mistakes to avoid.

Section 1 – Best Practices of Email Marketing and Marketing mistakes to avoid. 

 

 

What is an Email Marketing Campaign? 

 

It is explained by Lindsay Kolowich from blog.hubspot.com, in a report about 18 examples of email campaigns best practice: That email marketing is planned content distributed via email, with a specific goal of accomplishing the organisations specific goals. 

 

Reviewed from course materials of The British Academy of Digital Marketing: “Role of email in inbound marketing and retention.” The main roles of email marketing are ‘Lead nurturing.’ Which is the process of building relationships with potential customers with the aim of gaining revenue or business from them when they are ready to purchase.

By creating a mutual trust with your potential customers and making your leads confident of your content, they will be more willing to buy from you. 

 

My first example of best practice suggested by Blog. HubSpot. Com (an article by Lindsay Kolowich) is including an email signature. Even if the email is being sent on behalf of the ‘company’ the email should include the signature of a specific person. The signature is the ticket to your audience’s attention because, people are more naturally inclined to read and listen to emails if they know it is directly from a human being. 

 

I personally think that by adding a signature it adds a certain feel of personalisation. 

 

 

 

Supporting reason on how email signatures in classed as best practice - https://email.uplers.com/blog/best-practices-email-signature-marketing/

 

 

To my second example, again suggested by Blog.HubSpot.com is the process of cleaning your mail list regularly. 

Lindsay Kolowich explains that, by cleaning your least – engaged recipients on your mailing list it can kill your open rate. 

Markus Beck (Email list cleaning best practice 2021)  from TYE.IO states: Email list cleaning is an important part of the Email list management, which means it is the overflow of keeping an email list that is comprehensive, standardized, and most of all – usable and trustworthy. 

 

I believe that it is time and resources wasted if you are sending unwanted information to uninterested recipients. 

 

 

The third best practice example is to Personalise your email greeting. (Blog.hubspot.com)

Instead of directing an email towards the recipient as maybe ‘Member’, ‘Subscriber’ or ‘User’, using the person’s name instantly grabs their attention. 

 

-       Email marketing tools allows you to configure the greeting of your email campaign so that it automatically sends with the name of the people on the contact list. 

HubSpot supplies such tools! 

 

I think having such tools to create this automated system makes is less time consuming for marketers and of course helps with the personalisation of your emails. 

 

Keeping your emails at 500 – 650 pixels wide is also classed as a best practice example. 

If your emails are wider than 650 pixels, you are asking users to scroll horizontally to read the entire message. You email pixel width is a critical component of its lead – capturing ability. 

 

In my opinion, for you recipients to have an email received in bad quality and ask them to navigate awkwardly around reading your email, I believe this could result in loss of engagement from your recipients. 

As the content of the email maybe valuable to them, the set out would be very discouraging and annoying. 

 

To my last example of email best practice, A/B testing. (Also known as split tests) can be used to improve almost any of your digital marketing content. 

 

-       Group A receives the normal newsletter.

-       Group B receives the newsletter with a specific variation. 

 

The variation tests to see if your audience would be more or less likely to take action if your newsletter was different. 

 

Neil Patel lists: What items can you A/B test for? 

-       Subject lines 

-       Promotional offers 

-       CTA buttons 

-       Images

-       Links

-       Social Sharing 

-       Email body text

-       Email layout 

-       Personalisation

-       Headlines and Subheadings 

-       Testimonials.

 

Neil Patel also mentions on his website Crazyegg.com that, “There is a joke in the marketing world that A/B stands for ‘Always be testing’. 

 

I consider this format of understanding and remembering what A/B stands for, is definitely useful for marketers to have to their knowledge. 

 

 

Now let’s review three email mistakes to avoid.  – Businessnewsdaily.com (10 email marketing mistakes to avoid) 

 

The first mistake to avoid is ‘No reply’ within the sender’s email. 

‘No reply’ simply stated within the sender’s email address means you are unable to respond to that specific email. 

 

Your customers are more likely to open emails if they know it’s from an actual human being. For example, instead of ‘Noreply@comapny.com’, it’s from Jamie@mycompany.com.

 

As I see it, it blocks that open communication tunnel between customer and company. It stops the opportunities of the process of the building relationships with your customers. 

 

Another mistake to avoid would be the view of selling too hard.  To stop this from happening you need to first:

-       Understand why you are emailing your customers. 

-       You want something out of the relationship, whether that maybe, increased sales or traffic. 

-       Try to find the balance between helpful content and product offers. 

-       Sharing tips and ideas allows you to engage customers through content marketing. 

 

I believe following these steps to creating a non-forced approach towards your customers through your emails, it will create trust and will also help build upon the relationship with your customers too. 

 

And to my last example of mistakes to avoid is the failing of optimizing for mobiles. 

 

Consumers use smartphones to open emails. 

 

A TIP: To test your emails mobile optimization send it to yourself and check all aspects of the email on all devices. 

 

The best emails give customers great experiences both on mobile and desktop. 

 

In my opinion, having full optimization for mobile is so vital nowadays because smartphone use is so incredibly popular and highly utilized. 

 

 

 

References. 

 

 

Introduction on ‘What is an Email Campaign” – The British Academy of Digital Marketing – Email marketing section – “Role of email in inbound marketing and retention.” 

 

17 Email marketing best practices that actually drive results – Written by Pamela Vaughan (updated 2019) 

https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23965/9-email-marketing-best-practices-to-generate-more-leads.aspx

 

10 Email Marketing Mistakes to avoid. – Written by Bennett Conlin (2019) 

 https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7101-email-marketing-mistakes.html

 

Email signatures best practice – (2016) 

https://email.uplers.com/blog/best-practices-email-signature-marketing/

 

Email List cleaning best practice – Markus Beck (2021) 

https://www.tye.io/en/blog/email-list-cleaning/

 

Course materials: A beginners guide to A/B testing – Neil Patel – 

https://neilpatel.com/blog/ab-testing-email-campaigns/