3 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid When Growing Your List
If you wanna see a return on your email marketing efforts watch out for these three common marketing mistakes.
I've been in business a few years now, but when I got started I made so many email marketing mistakes that really slowed my growth and kept me from really benefiting as much as I could from email in the early days.
These mistakes are super common. I see them all the time with business owners at all different levels. But if they go unchecked in your business, they can really slow your growth and hold you back. In this post, I'm going to share three common mistakes and tell you what you can do instead.
Mistake #1: Emailing Inconsistently
The first email marketing mistake that I see a lot is emailing inconsistently. When I started this was definitely me. I would go weeks and weeks, sometimes even months in between emails to my list.
And you can bet that it showed in the results that I had. I did not have great open rates. I did not have consistent sales from my list. I really wasn't getting much benefit out of my email marketing at all. People weren't paying attention because they didn't know who I was since I would just show up randomly and they'd forget about me in the months between my emails.
Emailing on a consistent basis really goes a long way towards building trust with your subscribers. You wanna make your emails something they can count on so that they learn that they can count on you also.
So, how do you fix this mistake? It really is just as simple as making a commitment to email your list on a regular basis. The frequency is totally up to you. It can be every week. It can be every other week. It can be once a month. Whatever feels doable to you at this point. Just make a decision and make that commitment to your business and to your subscribers.
Mistake #2: Obsessing Over Unsubscribes
The second mistake I made when I was getting started was obsessing over the unsubscribes. When I got started I was using MailChimp and they would send you an email every time someone subscribed or unsubscribed. I'd go to my inbox and see that someone had just unsubscribed. I'd be like, what went wrong? What did I say? Did they hate that email? Do they hate me?
I got into this really bad habit of obsessively checking my stats every day and over analyzing everything I was doing with my email marketing to the point where I was obsessing about one person's behavior, rather than looking at the whole list that I had of people that were reading, clicking, and opening.
But, here's the thing. Unsubscribes are going to happen and they happen to everyone. It's a totally normal part of having an email list. There are so many reasons why someone would unsubscribe from your list and it doesn't mean that it's anything that you did wrong.
My best tip for this is to turn off any notifications that tell you when people are unsubscribing and stop obsessing about the stats like that.
The other thing to do is focus on the people on your list who do want to hear from you. Let's say, you have 1000 people on your list and had 10 people unsubscribe after an email, are you gonna ignore the other 990 people that are still on your list, still wanting to hear from you and still wanting to learn from you? No, you wouldn't do that. So, stop focusing so much on just those negative stats and think about all the other stats that are in your email marketing platform that are showing you indications that people are actually interested in what you're doing.
#3: Not Sending Sales Emails
That brings us to mistake number three. And for me, that was not sending enough sales emails. My early days of email marketing were lots of free content. I would share blog posts, cool resources, and lots of value based content — but not a lot of invitations to work with me.
I wasn't regularly asking people to work with me because I was afraid they were going to unsubscribe. (See mistake number two on that!)
The truth is, you're in business and people on your email list need to know that. You're not just sending emails for fun as a hobby. You're sending emails to market your business, so you need to be using those emails to actually market your business.
You can totally send valuable emails and sell to your list. It's not an all or nothing type of thing. You can mix those valuable and sales emails in together.
If you're like me and you have a tendency to really load up the value and send all of those types of emails, make sure that you're mixing it up for your list and including those sales emails every so often for your email list so that people remember what you do and that they can hire you.
You can always go by the 80/20 rule: 80% of your emails are value driven and 20% are sales driven. Out of five emails that you'd send, you could do four value driven and one that's a pure sales email.
You can also mix them together where you're telling a valuable story or giving a tip and then you're also inviting them to work with you or sharing a product that you have.
There's a lot of ways you can do this where you're mixing both in so that your email subscribers feel like you are providing a lot of value, but they also are really clear on the next step of how they work with you.
Those are some of the email marketing mistakes I've made in my business. If you’ve made some of these mistakes too, you’re not the only one. I hope these tips help you see even better results from your email marketing!