Mistakes to Avoid in Creating Email Campaigns

Creating a successful email campaign can be an overwhelming challenge. Especially when you’re learning a new tool or targeting new audiences. That’s why we created the Email Template Creation guide to help you with the process.

At SalesNexus, we’ve helped thousands of businesses succeed with email marketing.  Over the past 16 years, we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Here are some of the tips and tricks to crafting effective email campaigns.

Mistakes to Avoid in Creating Email Campaigns

There are a few things that most newbies to sales email marketing tend to get wrong initially. Let’s make sure you don’t have to learn these things the hard way

Test early and often, then adjust

One of the great strengths of email marketing is that it’s very easy and affordable to try. It also provides instantaneous feedback about results.

So, you can send out an email today and see what happens… then make adjustments and do it again tomorrow.

Don’t let perfection be the enemy of performance. Too many first time email marketers spend WAY too much time trying to create the perfect email before they ever send anything.

Let Data be the Guide to Success

Use measurements of opens and clicks to tell you how to improve your email results. What customers will respond to is often very counterintuitive. Plan to use the open and click rates as a part of your strategy.

Keep it Simple

SalesNexus as an automated CRM can automate on-going sequences of emails. You can automatically switch each individual customer to the right sequence at the right time, based on their specific situation.

However, trying to figure out the specific sequences for every scenario in your business can be extremely overwhelming.

Start small and build over time..

The data should guide you to success. Start by creating the emails intended for the broadest audiences. Then, start using them and using the results and data to tell you what to do next.

Understand the Reader’s Process

Do you love checking email?

Do you allocate lots of time reading long emails, responding, or taking next steps? Probably not.

Here’s a more typical process:

1. Busy executive has 5 minutes between meetings to look through the inbox which has 20+ new emails in it that have arrived since the last time they looked at their inbox earlier in the day.
2. Their goal is to quickly identify the important emails from customers, team members, and friends/family and then get rid of the rest.
3. They just don’t have time available to digest all the emails they get. They look at the From Address to find important people they recognize and start with those emails (that’s probably NOT your email!).
4. For the emails whose From Address they don’t recognize, they glance quickly at the Subject Line to see if it seems important or interesting.
5. Emails for which the From Address is not familiar and the Subject Line is not interesting are DELETED. That means they never look at your email. (not opened)
6. The emails that have an interesting Subject Line get opened, but are only glanced at for 1 or 2 seconds. A quick decision is made… Is the email engaging, clear and related to the Subject Line?
   • If so, the reader will invest a few more seconds reading the email.
   • If not, the email is deleted within 3 or 4 seconds of opening it.
7. Now you have their attention, it’s important to get to the point before they run out of time or interest. The reader at this point is saying “OK, I’m interested, how can you help me?”
   • If they see something to click on that seems like it can help, they will.
   • If they have to read 4 paragraphs to figure out what’s in it for them, they’ll either delete the email or leave it in their inbox, thinking they’ll return to it later… but, never will because they’ll be 100 other emails on top of it.

The point here is that we’ve got to keep it short and be clear about how we can help the reader or we’ll lose their attention before we ever get our point across.