3 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

While email marketing may seem old school compared to Tweeting, texting and uploading pics to Instagram, it still tops customer preferences for gaining useful insight on retailer sales, promotions, events and more. Plus, it’s affordable to do – which any business owner can appreciate it.

Mistake #1: Poor Quality Subject Lines 

While you may not have a background in marketing, advertising or PR, you should still strive to create subject lines that are catchy and interesting for your audience to respond to. And by respond… we mean actually opening your email. Too often, retailers invest their time in creating a strong email to send to their audience, yet fail to give the necessary TLC to the subject line heading that it deserves (and needs). Take the time to commit to this, and if you are still stuck, consider leaning on Snap Retail.We love what they have done to make this easy for retailers, offering email templates, catchy subject lines, pics and even marketing ideas /social media campaigns and more that you can customize for your store. Basically, they do all the work for you because as we know you know, indie retailers (despite our best efforts) can’t do it all.

Mistake #2: Irrelevant Content

Have you ever followed someone on Facebook, thinking they would share news and updates on one general topic (such as retail, their store, etc) and instead, they post about a million other things you don’t really care about? This same concept holds true in email marketing. If your subscribers sign up for your store emails, they expect content to be shared with them about your store. News about the charity race you are running and racing money for certainly deserves some attention, but think twice about sharing personal or off the “retail road” path updates via your email blasts. The last thing you want to do is lose subscribers… which non-relevant emails can quickly cause to happen. Another tip? Do not send emails out just to get one done and off your t0-do-list. Make sure each email you send is useful and exciting for your audience to receive. Less really is more when it comes to sending emails, unless – of course – you have very useful emails to send often!

Mistake #3: Non-Shareable 

Since tweeting and texting are a common habit and preferred method for some, it’s important to make your emails “shareable”. What does this mean? Essentially, offer your readers the chance to tweet it, post it to Facebook or LinkedIn, pin it to Pinterest, forward it in a message and so forth. Not only does this expand your reach of readers, it also increases your chances of a sale. Now if that’s not worth caring about, what is?

Finally, take the time to edit your emails before you hit that magical button called “send”. It’s amazing how many errors pass through email boxes – both factual and grammatical. Your ultimate goal, though? To avoid being the business that your clients “delete” before they even open.