How To Avoid The Most Common Mistakes In An Email Marketing Campaign

Preparing an email marketing campaign includes many tasks to pay attention to: writing or compiling the content, choosing the best template to display it, selecting the most interested recipients, personalizing the messages … and in each one you can make more or less mistakes. less scope, Unintentionally, you can end up sending an email that throws all the previous effort of the team that has prepared the campaign to the ground.

To avoid this, we recommend looking at those key aspects in which the most oversights usually occur: the subject, the images and the content. But if a mistake still escapes, here are some tips to get out of the way as gracefully as possible and thus not put the reputation of the company at risk.

Three Keys To Avoid Making Mistakes When Preparing The Campaign

Not all email marketing campaign are equally complex, and in each one there are possible lapses that lead to error. For example, a broken link in an informational newsletter will surely have less impact than a wrong price in a new product launch campaign. All could have been prevented from the beginning if the following three keys were monitored while preparing the campaign.

Take A Good Look At The Content

The content is everything that the campaign includes and it is where most mistakes are made:

Text: an error here is impossible to solve once the shipment has been made, so you have to pay close attention, not only to the spelling, but also to those words of special importance for the email marketing campaign, for example: prices, offers, dates , conditions … It can help to read the content with a different font and size, because that way it looks like a new one and is better attended.

Links: when sending newsletters full of recommendations, it is best to use a link checker to detect possible mistakes automatically. This way you will not have to go one by one checking that they are well written, but, if they lead to your own website, it is convenient to make sure that the content of the page they are pointing to is updated. 

Images: In highly visual campaigns, images are more important than text and also a source of major errors. Although most can be solved as we will see soon. Better to avoid them from the beginning, making sure to create different versions to be suitable for each type of profile.

Preview The Layout 

The template is also a source of recurring errors. The main reason is that not enough time is spent previewing campaigns before shipping because a single check is mistakenly believed to be sufficient. But this is not the case because each campaign is different, for example in terms of the use of images. 

Something as common and simple as adding an additional block, perhaps to add information about a product, can make the message clipping in some mail managers by adding extra weight of code to the mail. In addition, it is convenient to see the design without images, because not all users have this option activated and their perception of the shipment can be very different and lead to confusion. 

It must be borne in mind that the squad has been able to undergo changes as it is adapted and then duplicated for each campaign. When this happens, the most common errors are those related to accessibility: losing the contrast between colors, neglecting the size of the font, unbalancing the text and image ratio, forgetting the alternative texts of the images, deleting the text version … Correct and detailed preview avoids all this.

Submit Evidence

Testing is essential in any marketing action to ensure good results, but many times rush or overconfidence leads to skipping this step. From Acrelia we recommend that you do not do it: create a test list, for example with other members of the department, and always send one or more tests.

Pay Special Attention To The Places Where The Mistake Can Be Most Serious:

Subject, preheader and sender: these are the elements that the user sees first and those that influence the opening statistics, especially the matter. They are also some of the components that can land the message in the spam tray, which would be an unsolvable problem. 

Recipients and personalization: choosing the wrong person to send the campaign or showing them information that they are not interested in will increase the number of unsubscriptions, perhaps not the first time, but in the long run, because they will have lost trust in us.

The tests are used to review both design and content and it is time to take care of the calls to action of the campaign so that the email marketing is successful: check that they stand out and work in different browsers and mail managers.

Three Solutions For When A Campaign Is Sent With Errors:

Even after having followed these recommendations, you have hit the button to send campaign and just then you have realized that there was an error: calm down, some can still be solved, the same as if you discover it after a few hours.

The first thing we recommend you do before panic is to assess the range as quickly as possible to act proportionally. Deciding which solution is the best depends on each situation because not all errors are equally serious, and that is why it cannot be said that you always have to send a correction or that it is best to do nothing.

Find a quick solution: Shipments cannot be undone, but it is within our power to fix what happens outside of the mail. For example: correct the text of images taking advantage of the fact that they are downloaded from the server, create a new discount code like the one sent by mistake or change the web version of the campaign so that when viewed in the browser, shared or resent it is done with the correct one. Reaction time will be key so that fewer people see mistakes.

Do nothing: Although it sounds strange, sometimes it is not necessary to look for a solution because it can have the opposite effect and that the new shipment back to be counterproductive. For example: a misspelling in the text that does not affect the compression is passable and, although it does not leave us very well, it is also possible to write badly a personalization code in the subject. Just make sure we don’t make that mistake again and take it as an anecdote.

Send rectification:  Apologizing is not always pleasant, but it is necessary to resort to this last resort when a serious offense has been committed. Unlike the previous cases, a typographical error in the price can be unforgivable if it affects the business directly, the same as wrong promotion dates or if the store is closed just that day. Then it is necessary to make a new shipment rectifying. 

To apologize: By email you have to set the tone very well. It is not the same to explain the reason by making jokes about the situation that has been caused, than a letter signed by the CEO of the company. In the first case, the same content can even be sent with a simple note at the beginning, in the second it will be necessary to prepare a totally new one to detail what has happened and what is being done to solve it. Honesty and transparency are necessary to maintain customer trust.

Finally, the subject also plays an important role when sending the correction of a previous message: adding a reference, such as “MODIFICATION”, can encourage the user who has not yet opened the previous campaign to look at the new one and delete the other one and also alert those who had already seen it.

The last piece of advice has to do with measurement: see how the error and its solution or rectification affect the statistics to better assess the next shipments.

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