The Do’s and Dont’s of Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns can get a bad rap. For one, most of us receive 100’s of emails per day. That statistic alone is enough to sour many individuals and marketing departments on the idea of email marketing. Yet the fact remains that email marketing remains extremely effective and efficient in the modern age of endless consumer touchpoints and micro-moments. The key is to send the right email(s) to the right recipients in a manner that drives engagement. Of course, this is more easily said than done. 

With all of this in mind, today we will be giving some of our best tips in terms of email marketing campaign do’s and don’ts.

Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t: Send Generic Emails 

Nobody wants to feel like they are receiving a mass email. Modern consumers are savvy, jaded, and can certainly spot a click-baity email subject line a mile away. So when marketing departments are tasked with sending mass emails to large email lists, how can we get around this problem? The answer starts with the subject line. Users decide to open or ignore an email within a few seconds. Personalized subject lines with a name, past purchase, past action, etc. prompt greater user interaction than their generic counterparts. 

Don’t: Target the Biggest Possible Audience

This tip could be a bit controversial. At a glance, marketers might immediately think that the greatest possible audience might be the best possible solution for creating customers, driving sales, and driving total engagement. This simply isn’t the case. Finding the best audience for your email campaign, not the biggest audience, should always be a priority. Similar to spamming your email list with too many emails (more on this below), sending emails to more and more individuals risks alienating a large part of your potential consumer base. 

Don’t: Send too Many Emails

This could easily be number one. Nothing turns off a potential customer quite like too many emails, too many solicitations, and shameless promotion. Sending too many emails isn’t just ineffective, it can actually potentially turn your customers against you. The goal of email marketing campaigns should be to pleasantly surprise the reader with something that might interest them, not irritate them into unsubscribing from an email list. Understanding how many emails are appropriate boils down to understanding your consumer base and the value add of your product/service.

Email Marketing Best Practices

Do: Prioritize Welcome Emails

For one reason or another, welcome emails drive the largest consumer engagement than any other part of an email marketing campaign. They also afford marketing departments to get off on the right foot and present key concepts, ideas, and materials right off the bat. This is the most effective email in your arsenal and should be treated as such. Unfortunately, many marketing departments send a generic email as a welcome and fail to present any calls to action or other noteworthy materials. Prioritizing what is sent in welcome emails is perhaps the most effective way to turn interested parties into repeat customers. 

Do: Send Highly Personalized Emails

We already talked about the pitfalls of generalized emails. The flip side is the opportunity afforded to marketing departments that are able to produce highly personalized emails within their email marketing campaigns. It is important to understand that “personalization” is much more than simply using a program to insert users’ names into the subject line of an email. Sophisticated marketing campaigns leverage customer data such as demographics, purchase history, search history, and more to curate the materials in an email. This level of personalization is how Amazon drives sales both in their email marketing campaigns and on their site.

Do: Carefully Curate Email Lists

If you ignore every other piece of advice on this list (not that we’d recommend that), ensuring that your email campaign reaches your key audience is a takeaway that always holds true. Much like highly focused efforts like geospatial analyses or drive time analytics, effective email campaigns rely on highly focused email lists. As we mentioned earlier, it can be tempting to cast as wide a net as possible. After all, sending an email hardly spends any money, right? The trap here is casting a wide net in the wrong part of the ocean. Focusing on sheer volume over the best possible recipients is a recipe for wasted time, effort, and marketing dollars.

Email Marketing from Clock Tower Insight

Clock Tower Insight helps our clients to build their brands through any means necessary. We believe in using cutting edge research to deliver unparalleled insight and understanding into today’s rapidly changing marketplace. With over 15 years of dedicated experience, our marketing insight has helped organizations including Belle Tire, Nielsen, Orbitz, and Kraft Foods. 
We are proud to offer a number of services to our clients, including customer experience management, brand positioning in the marketplace, market sizing, market testing, and more.