Do your email marketing campaigns work effectively? No? Probably you make some common email writing mistakes that scare away your customers and kill your sales. If you fix these mistakes, you will double your sales in a week, most probably.
Sounds like a good deal to you?
Here is a list of the top ten email writing mistakes that marketers make. Check it out and learn tricks that will help you improve your email campaigns:
Misspelling the customer’s name
How do you feel when the barista gets your name wrong? The chances are you feel like you are not “the most valued customer” in a coffee shop. And how do your customers feel when you misspell their names? They feel the same way.
As Dale Carnegie says, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” If you want people to reply to your emails and buy from you, make sure you’ve got their names right. Check it manually.
Look through the names on your email list. If you spot typos in first names, don’t hesitate to fix them. For instance, if there are names like “Jescica” and “Luiis” you can correct them respectively as “Jessica” and “Luis”.
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If some names on the list sound like fake ones, you should delete them. For instance, you can’t consider the word “Hgmmcfdlert” as a real name, and you can’t use it in your marketing emails. Probably, the customer typed this word in a signup form by mistake. So, you should better start your email with the standard phrase “Hi there” rather than an awkward one “Hi Hgmmcfdlert”.
Auto-corrected words
Text editing tools are helpful, but you can’t trust them fully. Sometimes they “overdo” their job and substitute misspelled words with irrelevant words. Take a look at the following real-life examples of wrongly autocorrected words:
● Baked => Naked
● Drink => Drive
● Castle => Casket
● Drums => Drugs
Well, if you make such a mistake in a message sent to a friend, it will not cause you big trouble. But if you use a wrongly autocorrected word in your marketing email, that may ruin your campaign.
So, please, don’t rely on advanced technologies fully, even on AI-powered ones. Read the text of your email before sending it to the client.
Not being specific
When you’re writing emails, you should be specific. You should articulate your offers clearly and precisely.
Let’s say you want to offer your customers a discount. Don’t put it this way:
“Click the link below to get a discount.”
Explain what kind of discounts you are offering and to what products these discounts are applied:
“Click the link below to get 15% off on our new dress collection.”
The more detailed information you provide to your customers, the more likely they will click the link and place an order. Modern customers tend to make more informed buying decisions, and you should keep that in mind when crafting your email marketing campaigns.
Misspelled company’s name
Your company’s name is something you write “on autopilot”. It’s a word that you don’t bother to check for typos. You have written your company’s name thousands of times. And you feel like you always spell this word right, even if it has a tricky spelling like Schwarzkopf or Wittgenstein&Co.
But the truth is you can make a typo in any word, and your company’s name is not an exception. You should always check your company’s name, email, phone number, and domain name for mistakes. It will help you protect your brand image and increase sales.
Not adding a call-to-action
Probably one of the biggest email writing mistakes marketers make is not asking recipients to complete a specific action. If a marketing email doesn’t include a call-to-action button, the effectiveness of the campaign will be close to zero.
It’s not enough to craft a valuable offer for customers. It’s necessary to convince customers to accept this offer right here and right now. After reading your email, customers should have a clear understanding of what steps they should take next:
● Visit your website
● Make a call
● Add a product to the shopping cart
● Complete checkout
● Download a file
● Book an appointment
● Buy tickets
● Write a review
● Join your platform
● Get a quote
● Watch demo
● Sign up for your giveaway, etc.
Image source: Email from Starbucks.
Overusing call to actions
While some marketers don’t use call-to-actions, others overuse them. Probably you received such emails where you were asked to complete a few actions: to visit a website, to follow X brand on Facebook, to write a review for Y product, etc. I bet you completed none of the actions specified.
Let’s face it. We live in an age where the attention span is extremely short. To close more sales, we should get rid of distractions that can steal the attention of our customers. We should eliminate the unnecessary call to action and draw the customers’ attention to one action we want them to complete.
A call to action itself should consist of two or three words. It must be straightforward and concise. For instance, if you want prospects to buy your handbag, choose one simple CTAs “shop handbags” or “buy handbags”.
Image source: Email from Jimmy Choo.
Writing too-long emails
There is no such thing as a “perfect length of a marketing email”. Thus, you don’t need to focus on a word count.
However, you should try to keep your email as short and concise as possible. Don’t overload your email with unnecessary details. Provide only essential information that adds value to the customer.
The fun fact is that it’s easier for most people to write a long email rather than a short one. Why? Crafting short emails require more wit, creativity, and writing talent. It is always more challenging to articulate an idea using ten words instead of 100 words.
If you use to write long emails, it’s time for you to revisit your approach to email writing. Consider getting help from a thesis writing company, or start editing your emails by yourself. Get rid of excessive wordiness in your emails, and you will increase conversion rates.
Making typos in a subject line
Will you open an email if you spot a typo in a subject line? The odds are you will decide that this email is not worth reading and move it to the bin.
How does it happen that marketers make typos in email subject lines? This phenomenon is easy to explain. Modern marketers heavily rely on proofreading tools and services. They proofread the text of each email automatically, but not the subject lines. Eventually, marketers forget to check the subject lines manually.
What about you? Do you pay special attention to a subject line when proofreading your email? No? You definitely should. It will help you increase not only open rates but also sales.
Using professional jargon
You should understand that your customers have different knowledge and backgrounds. You can’t expect all of them to know niche-specific jargon. And you can’t use jargon in your marketing emails.
When customers see an unfamiliar word, they get confused and feel stupid. And when customers get emails that include too many jargon words, they feel like the letter is written in a foreign, unknown language.
Your task is to show your customers that you speak the same language. You should write your email in simple language, avoiding industry-specific terms, or explaining them, if necessary.
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Writing the wrong date and time
Grammar and typos are not the only things you should care about. You should also double-check whether you have specified the correct date and time.
If you don’t want to confuse your customers, don’t forget to check how many days are in a chosen month before writing an email. Sounds like obvious advice to you?
Well, it may surprise you, but some inattentive marketers specify non-existing dates like September 31st (there are only 30 days in September) or February 30th in their sales emails. For instance, they write that the “coupon will be valid till September 31st”. You don’t want to make such a silly mistake, do you?
If some of your clients live abroad, it might be tricky for you to understand what format is better to use D/M/Y (European) or M/D/Y (American). The best solution here is to use another format that everyone can understand the right way and write “May 6th” instead of 6/05/2021 or 5/06/2021.
Conclusion
Have you just realized that you make one (or a few) of these mistakes on a regular basis? Don’t panic. Acknowledging the fact that you are making a mistake is the first step in fixing this mistake. You are moving in the right direction!
Now you should revisit your approach to email writing and find a way to create error-free emails. It will help you increase sales and achieve other marketing goals you have set.
You are just a few steps away from huge success. Embrace changes, fix mistakes, and you will accomplish everything you have been dreaming of.
Invited Guest Writer:
Daniela McVicker is a digital marketing connoisseur. Daniela’s interests are related to all things blogging and SEO. Nowadays she is a collaborator of Essayguard and various other businesses where she shares some of her marketing experiences and concentrates on helping them gain awareness in the online world.
