17 Ecommerce email marketing mistakes you cannot afford

Email marketing mistakes are the worst things you can do with your eCommerce marketing campaigns.

Mistakes not necessarily happen with the newbies. Even the email marketing experts are likely to make mistakes because they might not know that they’re making a mistake doing a few things.

Email marketing mistakes covered by other experts talk about mistakes happen across all industries. But, we are exclusively covering the mistakes your eCommerce brand should not be making.

After all, your purpose behind email marketing is to get conversions.

Let’s discuss each of the eCommerce email marketing mistakes to avoid

1. Not using email conversion hacks

Have you ever realized why your email marketing campaigns are not successful?

Because you don’t follow the eCommerce email conversion hacks. Now, what are they? Check out here.

If you follow these, you’re saved right from the start. Conversion hacks are very tiny things that affect the impact that you want to create at your customers’ end.

When you fail to do so, your conversions are quite likely to affect.

Now, even if you don’t follow these conversion hacks, you may make the following eCommerce email marketing mistakes.

2. Starting email marketing without a solid plan

What are you going to promote in your next email series? Have you decided what the purpose of doing a particular email marketing campaign is? Will the emails be the same for all of your targeted audience? How many emails will you send in a week and at what time? What are the KPIs to measure the email marketing campaigns?

There is no end to the questions when looking to plan your email marketing campaign.

So, if you don’t have a concrete, organized, and managed plan, your email marketing is going to fail.

And, this would be your most prominent email marketing mistake. The planning must start before three months to ensure you don’t miss anything important in your email series.

3. Unsolicited emails

Just imagine-

If you haven’t subscribed to Nike emails and they start sending promotional emails to you, what will be your reaction?

You lose trust for Nike and its products. Also, you never subscribe to their emails.

That’s how your customers feel if they’ve not opt-in to your emails, and you send them.

Also, I have noticed that when you don’t specifically subscribe to some company’s email, there are higher chances of them going into SPAM. See a brand who sends me unsolicited emails and they are by default in the SPAM folder-

So, this becomes your first and foremost email marketing mistake, which you should NEVER make.

4. No welcome mails

Now, what if a user subscribes to your email? Or what if a user registers on your eCommerce store?

Your first responsibility is to welcome the user. And, most eCommerce businesses fail to do so.

Then there are all kinds of promotional emails delivering to the newly-joined users except for welcoming him/her.

Apart from all your email marketing campaigns, your welcome email needs to make a solid impression just like-

5. Sending too many emails

Do you know how many is too many? Well, that depends on your subscribers or customers.

Coschedule gathered email sending frequency insights from 20 email marketing experts. One of them is Smart Insights. It reports that fashion eCommerce brands, Net-A-Porter, increased their conversion rate when they reduced email sends from 10 times per week to two.

So, test and try such experiments with your customers to see how many emails they expect.

Well, Amazon does not send me too many emails until I browse some products on the site or app-

6. No testing before sending

One of the worst email marketing mistakes is to send emails without testing them.

What happens if the product links you promoted, are not working? What if the images used, are not supported by all of your customers?

You are disappointing your customers with such silly errors.

Test your emails and test them rigorously until you’re sure they are fantastic.

7. Not as per expectations

When a customer opens your email, he/she opens with an expectation. That expectation is created by past experiences or your email subject line.

What happens if your email consists of something that is not as per your promise/impression? 

For example, you specify a FREE gift in the subject, and you charge a small fee to grab the gift in the email. It helped you gain higher email open rates, but it decreases your conversion rate.

Never make this mistake of not serving as per expectations.

8. Missing CTAs

Another worst email marketing mistake for eCommerce businesses is to skip the call-to-action buttons.

The success of your email marketing campaigns depends on the number of conversions taking place from the email clicks.

And, one missing CTA can cost you thousands of dollars of revenue. You cannot compromise on the revenue. That’s the reason why testing makes it easy to catch these errors and work on it there and then.

9. Promoting too much

Customers wait for your emails when you have one or the other discount offers on your products. But, what if you keep on sending them promotional emails one after another?

They feel frustrated and might unsubscribe from getting your emails.

That’s a direct loss of a loyal customer.

10. No personalization

Whenever I receive an email addressing me as “Hey there,” I feel like this is certainly not for me. It does not matter how beneficial an offer is. But, if it doesn’t talk to me, I don’t entertain it.

See how Club Factory welcomed me-

The CF team addressed me with my email address. How unpersonalized it is!

But, let me clear this-, email personalization is not limited to using a person’s name. 

As per The State of Personalization Report, over 60% of North Americans, 88% of Asians, and 80%+ Europeans claimed they would respond favorably to an email that is personalized specifically for them.

If you are still not using email personalization, this is one of your loss-making email marketing mistakes.

11. Not segmenting contacts

Do you know what your subscribers look for when they receive your email? If not, you’re making the most significant mistake.

Recently, when discussing with a client about their email marketing campaign, the first thing I noticed was the same email going to every contact.

What if some of your subscribers are looking for guides in newsletters? But, some of them might be looking for only products. Then you’re disappointing the subscribers who don’t get what they expect.

And, when it’s not as per the users’ expectations, your email marketing fails.

Your eCommerce store may consist of buyers with specific needs. If you’re a marketplace like Amazon, you cannot send emails with feminine beauty products to male subscribers.

Segmenting your contacts is one of the crucial things to take care of and skipping this cost you not just money but also the high-valued customers.

12. Not considering mobile users

If your email marketing campaigns are not designed for mobile users, you are making the industry’s worst email marketing mistake.

Check out these email marketing device statistics-

• There is a 100% increase in email open rates from mobile devices since 2011 (CampaignMonitor)
• 61% of emails are now opened and read on mobile phones (Constant Contact)
• 70% of subscribers delete the email immediately if they are not optimized for mobile devices (MAPP Cloud Report and hosted on SuperOffice)

Whether you’ve got B2B or B2C customers, you need to use responsive email design.

13. Avoiding text links

“Text links, seriously? Ecommerce emails do not have text links.” If you are thinking this way, you are making a mistake.

As discussed above, not all emails should not be promotional. Sometimes, there may be guides, videos, and more that needs to be sent in emails.

Those emails can be designed in plain text and using the text links within the same helps you grab the highest clicks.

Jonathan Aufray from Growth Hackers says- 

Plain-text emails perform better for our team and we usually recommend these types of emails for most of our clients.

Why? First, because plain-text emails get a higher deliverability rate. Second, because plain-text emails look more personal and less salesy than HTML design emails. Finally, because these emails look more natural and personal, their conversion rates (e.g., clicks, responses) are much higher.

So, when you don’t use HTML email design, consider putting your text links to get accurate results.

14. Too long emails

Oh, yes, this is one of the most common email marketing mistakes most marketers make.

That happens even with even the top eCommerce brands. 

Too long emails can bore your subscribers, and they may feel your emails as too promotional. Until and unless you are coming up with quite an exciting offer or some big offers, you should not opt for too long emails.

15. Data redundancy in contacts (sending one email to one contact two times because they registered twice)

Data redundancy is seen very rare, but it exists. When you send one specific email to a person twice, it leaves a bad impression about your eCommerce brand among that person.

Making this mistake in your email marketing campaigns can result in an increased number of unsubscribe rates. And, unsubscribes are not healthy for any eCommerce business.

Does any marketer purposely make this mistake? No. It’s that you need to have a system in place that does not create two separate contacts for one unique email address.

16. Not regular in sending emails (day, time)

I have subscribed to many eCommerce brands, and hence, I get too many promotional emails.

But, not every eCommerce email marketer know how consistent they should be in sending emails.

If you don’t know when your customers will open your emails, a few studies Coschedule has covered. It says Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are the days when emails are opened the most.

Recently, a study by Litmus showcases at which time you should send emails to gain highest open rates on mobile, desktop and webmail- 

17. Not improving campaigns based on analysis

How much time do you allocate in analyzing the email marketing campaigns you do? If not much, then it's a massive mistake because without it you’re not going to improve them.

What if your emails don’t get enough CTR on Fridays? You need to analyze which day you get the most CTRs. 

Do your subscribers open your emails at a particular time? Have you ever noticed this earlier? If not, it’s time you do.

So, analyzing your past, email marketing campaigns help you plan your next ones effectively.

And, to keep up with the subscribers’ email expectations, analyzing plays a vital role here.

Beware of making these email marketing mistakes

Ecommerce experts say without email marketing, it is difficult to win the eCommerce game. If you make even the slightest mistake, your investment is wasted. And, this could be uncompromising.

Hence, it’s still not too late. Prepare a checklist to make sure you don’t make any of these email marketing mistakes.