With email service providers such as MailChimp and Aweber, it’s easier than ever to send out great looking marketing mails to thousands of recipients.
But just because you don’t have to be a techie to set up an email campaign, doesn’t mean you won’t make a mistake – there are a number of common pitfalls that every email marketer is bound to fall into at some point or another.
Here are the top 7 mistakes people make when sending mass emails and how you can avoid them.
Related: Maximising the success of your email marketing for events
- Forgetting to Bcc
Forgetting to blind copy the recipients is the biggest sin you can make when sending mass email. Why? You have just revealed potentially thousands of people’s email addresses and consequently exposed them to all manner of follow-up spam.
Even if unscrupulous marketers don’t jump on the gift of a free email list, when disgruntled recipients move to complain and accidentally hit ‘reply all’ they’ll still be bombarded with unwanted correspondence.
Aimee Millwood, Blog Manager at Yotpo.com describes her horror at making this exact mistake.
Writing on Inbound.org, she recalls how she sent a survey to her company’s most loyal blog readers asking for suggestions about content they wanted to read.
“Unfortunately, I made a critical mistake: I forgot to BCC. Seconds after sending, I realised the enormity of the mistake I’d made. I prepared for the impending hellfire.
“At first, it was quiet. Maybe they didn’t notice, I thought. But the storm hadn’t yet started… Soon, the emails started. To make it way, way worse, someone accidentally hit reply all to the email thread and immediately everyone was dragged into a 500-person email thread filled with shameless plugging, angry responses, and quite a few inappropriate comments.”
Luckily her CEO was understanding and she kept her job, but respect for data protection laws makes this mistake especially sensitive. Get it wrong and your customers could lose trust in you.
How to avoid it: This error occurred for Aimee because she wasn’t using an email service provider (ESP) such as MailChimp. She had initiated the campaign from a normal email programme (i.e. Outlook or Gmail), where it is very easy to accidentally select the ‘To’ or ‘Cc’ field, rather than ‘Bcc’. A professional ESP will prevent the names and addresses being seen by anyone else on the list.
- Messing up the merge fields
Receiving a marketing email personalised with our names helps to make us feel like valued customers. However, when it goes wrong, the impression we’re left with can be worse than if the email had simply had a generic greeting like, “Hi there”.
The Labour Party found this out to its expense in the run up to the EU Referendum. The political party sent out an email to its supporters seeking donations which addressed them “Dear Firstname”.
Although it doesn’t seem like a major disaster, disgruntled Labour members flooded Twitter and Facebook with complaints – some even threatened to quit the party because of it.
How to avoid it: The smallest typo or case sensitivity issue is all it takes to mess up substitution tags (merge tags). To avoid this mishap, send a live test to a real list (like a handful of colleagues on your team) to make sure the tags are populating correctly. Check out MailChimp’s Merge Tag Cheat Sheet for copy and paste solutions for personalising emails.
- Failing to proofread
Small spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are incredibly common in marketing emails. And while the odd typo is forgivable – we’re all human after all, it can create an unprofessional image for your company. It can prompt a few sniggers too, if your typo happens to be an unfortunate one.
In the example below, highlighted by the Media Culpa blog, this conference invitation welcomes delegates to its “new home on the whores of Marmara Sea in Istanbul, Turkey.” Whoops!
How to avoid it: Failing to properly proofread is a real risk when the email author is also the editor. When we’ve written something, we’ll often read what we expect to be there rather what is there. Our eyes trick us and we don’t see mistakes. Because of that, always have at least one other person check over your email before you send it.
- Failing to check the subject line
Subject lines often get overlooked because the focus for proofreading is on the body copy, but unfortunately mistakes made here will be the ones that stand out most to recipients.
Cara Olson, writing for Marketingland.com, recalls an email she received from womensware retailer Blue Fly with the subject line, “See it. Love it. Not get it.”
She says: “I’m pretty sure this subject line was supposed to read, “See it. Love it. Now get it.”
“That being said, I did open it, because I wanted to know, “Why do they want me to not get it?””
In this example, the company was lucky the mistake created some reverse psychology that worked in its favour, but for others, a typo in the subject line can just seem sloppy.
How to avoid it: Sending a test email, even just to yourself, is an easy way to spot this one. Although the gaffe might go unnoticed when working in your ESP’s campaign builder, once the email is sat in your inbox, the subject line will scream out at you.
- Sending to an incorrect segment
Segmenting your audience is a great way to personalise your campaigns and improve your response rate, but it does mean you need to be extra careful when selecting the right list to send it out to!
After all, you wouldn’t want to send an email to childless singletons congratulating them on the birth of their new baby. There were red faces all round when photo-printing site Shutterfly did just this.
The company had intended to send the email to customers who had recently purchased birth announcements, but it was sent to a larger distribution in error.
While many of the recipients saw the funny side and posted their bemusement on Twitter, The Huffington Post labelled the incident, “Shutterfly’s Mass Email Goes Terribly, Terribly Wrong.” Ouch.
How to avoid it: When you create segments in your ESP be sure to clearly label them so there can be no ambiguity. For example, for subscribers to your event mailing list you could have segments such as ‘Loyal Customers’, ‘One Time Attendees’, ‘Yet to Attend’, ‘Students’, and that way you can tailor your message to suit each group. You can choose the recipient segment when you set up a new email campaign, but double check it in your ESP’s dashboard before you hit ‘send’. Here’s how to create a segment if you’re using Aweber.
- Accidentally sending the test email
Creating a test email to trial your template is a good idea, but sending it out to your entire subscriber base is not such good practice.
The online retailer Fab confused its customers when it randomly sent them an email containing nothing but a picture of a cat and its usual header and footer.
The email was titled, “[TEST] PM Tracking Test” and appeared to be a mistake, although Fab did succeed in turning it into marketing gold with its humorous cat-filled apology email (see below).
Writing for Marketingland.com Chad White says: “While they used humour in explaining the mistake and saying they were sorry, they also gave subscribers a reason to forgive them in the form of a 10-percent-off offer. They concluded the email on a more serious note to reassure subscribers that they were indeed taking the mistake seriously.”
How to avoid it: Fab’s is a great example of what to do if you do make the mistake of sending your draft email, but in order to avoid this happening in the first place, take extra care to select your ESP’s ‘Send test email’ facility. This will give you the option to either enter email addresses, or select other users on the account to receive the test.
- Failing to check links or promo codes
When you send out a mass mail you’re probably not just writing to say “hello”. You’re most likely hoping to trigger a response, such as buying tickets to your event.
Consequently, you will have spent ages on honing the copy and getting the call to action just right. It will come as a real blow, then, to discover you’ve sent the email out with a faulty link – there goes your click through rate.
Likewise a promo code that doesn’t work is also likely to lead to disappointed customers. When it does happen, you need to act quick; Reebok responded with a 30%-off apology when it sent out a duff promo code.
How to avoid it: This error is easily avoided by sending out a test email and thoroughly checking every element. Click on every link to ensure it goes where you want it to, and if you are sending out a promo code, try a test purchase to be sure it works.
Related: Absolute beginners’ guide to email marketing
Conclusion
Mistakes happen. Thankfully, many ESPs now have recall functions that can prevent delivery, as well as options to remotely change images or correct broken links.
However, if you practice the tips in this article, you should be able to avoid any mishaps in the first place.
