Everyone makes mistakes while running and promoting their business. Some of these mistakes are trivial, others are brand damaging and expensive. Marketing and business mistakes, big and small, have one thing in common—most of them are avoidable.

In online marketing alone, there’s an endless possibility of email marketing mistakes an uninitiated business owner can commit. So in this post, I’ll only list the biggest mistakes that have the power to ruin your chances of selling your products and building your authority through email.

Money-Draining Email Marketing Mistakes

1. Not A/B Testing

What is your email marketing strategy based on?

Instinct?

Tips from a fellow business owner?

Maybe you routinely send discounts because you think it works, based on the number of discount coupons you’ve received and used. Perhaps you chose an email layout based on what your friends thought looked good.

What works for other businesses, may not work for yours. What looks good for your friends may not bring you more subscribers or sales.

A/B testing, also called as split testing, is the process of testing your marketing assumptions and then making a decision based on the available data. For instance, your friends chose a blue themed newsletter layout because they taught the colors made you look trustworthy. You can check if that assumption is correct by A/B testing two layouts.

Send one email with the same message using the suggested layout and a different one for control, so that half of your email list gets the blue-themed layout while the rest get a different one. Whichever layout gets a higher open rate wins.

You can test every aspect of your email marketing campaigns, such as:

• Email subject line
• Images
• Call to action buttons
• Pricing
• Anchor text
• Email frequency

2. Not Testing on Different Platforms

Email looks differently on Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. Even email read on Gmail’s website looks a tad different if read on their app. Layout can vary depending on a user’s browser too.

Different email platforms show HTML coding differently, that’s why you need to check how your email looks on different devices and browsers before blasting it to everyone.

This is one of the most avoidable email marketing mistakes, yet I keep receiving emails with funny formatting and bad links.

Most email marketing tools, such as Hubspot, have a preview feature that allows users to check how their email will behave on different screens and devices. Don’t take this feature for granted. You can also use free email testing tools like Litmus.

3. Not Using a Mobile-Friendly or Responsive Design

Do you know how many people check emails on their phones every day?

According to Litmus’ State of Email report, 54% of emails are opened on mobile while only 16% are opened on desktop.

If that usage statistic isn’t enough for you, here are the top complaints of people with mobile email, according to LiveClicker and The Relevancy Group:

• Too small to read: 32%
• Landing page and website isn’t optimized for mobile viewing: 26%
• Email not formatted for mobile phones: 21%

More and more people are relying on their smartphones to read their email. It’s time your email format gets mobile-friendly. If your readers get impatient pinching and squinting just to read your email, they’ll stop reading your messages.

4. Too Much Self-Promotion

Email marketing is an effective sales tool, but you can only get to that point if you take the time to build a relationship with your readers first.

Yes, your main goal is to sell your products and services. But you have to put your readers first. Think about their problems, goals, hesitations, and see what you can do to help them.

Sure, some of your products might be helpful in a given situation but you don’t have to mention it in all of your emails. In fact, some of your emails should have no mention of your products at all.

5. Sending Everything to Everyone

The average person receives 500 marketing emails a month, but only opens less than 1 in 15 emails received. How can your email rise up above that much noise?

The only effective way to do that is to personalize and segment your emails based on data. Send your subscribers only the emails they’re interested in based on their reading behavior, age, job, purchase history, location, reading habits, and other data.

6. Sending Image-only Emails

Only 33% of readers turned on the ‘display image’ option on their inbox. What does that mean for you?

Majority of your readers won’t see the images you send them. All they’ll see is a big blank box, or the alt-text description of the image, like the example below.

If images are crucial to your email, combine it with some text to describe what’s in the picture. Don’t rely on the images to convey your message. You can also include a link to the web version of the email, so subscribers can click it to see the images and original formatting you intended.

Email marketing platforms allow users to create an HTML and text-only version of their email, so use both options to make sure all of your readers will receive something readable.

7. No Call to Action

All your efforts writing a compelling email will be wasted if you forget to include a call to action (CTA). The bottom line of any email is to get your subscribers to take action, whether that’s to read your blog post or to check out your new product.

If your readers made it to the end of your email, that means they’re interested in what you have to say. Not including a call to action wastes the attention they gave you.

Below is an example email from Zapier with several CTAs.

8. Not Cleaning Your Email List Regularly

Bad email list hygiene can cost you a lot of money, as explained in this post about deleting subscribers. A poorly maintained email list leads to more unopened emails and bad conversions.

Below are some tips to keep your email list healthy:

• Remove purchased email leads
• Remove emails not tied to a specific contact, such as info@domain, admin@domain, or hello@domain.
• Run a re-engagement campaign to determine if some of your recently cold-leads are still worth contacting.

Do Better in Email Marketing

Are you guilty of any of these email marketing blunders? There’s still time to correct course and save the day.

Implementing all of this might be overwhelming, so just take it one step at a time. Eventually, you’ll have a healthy email list and better engagement rate.

You have a new subscriber.

But you can’t celebrate yet. You only have a name and email address, and whether that info leads to a conversion depends on the emails you’ll send this new subscriber.

In email marketing, they say you should write as if you’re speaking to the individual, not the crowd on your subscribers list.

How can you ‘speak to the individual’ without spending hours emailing your subscribers one by one? It’s easy if you segment your email list.

With email list segmentation, you have unlimited ways to divide your email list so there’s no excuse to keep sending mass emails.

Creative Email List Segmentation Strategies

1. Survey Results

Less is more is the popular mantra when it comes to opt-in boxes. Asking readers to answer lots of questions will send them bouncing off to another site.

So how can you get information to personalize your emails and offers to them? How can you even segment your readers if you don’t know anything aside from their name and email?

Send them a survey!

Ask why they signed up and what kind of content they’d like to get from you. Don’t just create a list of questions and send it off straight away. Make sure the questions are tied to a specific marketing goal, such as leading your subscriber into a sales funnel, or figuring out what kind of product to offer them.

You’ll also get more responses if you offer an incentive to answer the survey, such as a raffle entry or a discount.

2. Job Title

Your subscriber’s job title can tell you whether he’s just researching information for a task, or has the power to make purchasing decisions for his company. This should affect the type of emails you’re sending them.

3. Shopping Cart Abandonment

A customer is about to purchase, and then for some reason, they don’t push through. Abandoned shopping carts are a huge challenge for e-Commerce stores.

With email segmentation, you can send targeted emails to these shoppers to nudge them into continuing their purchase. Your email can also include a survey link to find out why they didn’t go through with the purchase.

Maybe the customer found a better deal elsewhere, or they experienced a glitch in your online store—whatever the reason, fixing it will help you avoid future losses.

4. Previous Engagement Rate

A subscriber’s engagement and open rate will clue you in on who’s more interested—or have more time—to read your content.

With this data, you can convert more engaged subscribers with exclusive deals like discounts and early access to your programs. Less active subscribers can be further segmented to identify if they’re just busy, or just a few weeks from turning into a cold lead.

5. Past Purchases

Use a subscriber’s past purchases to determine the topics and products that him.  For instance, if a subscriber previously purchased your book about investing in stocks, that signals he might be interested in your articles about other high-risk, high-profit investment options, like P2P lending or Forex trading.

6. New Subscribers

Don’t just send new subscribers the freebie they asked for. Send them a welcome email—or a welcome sequence if you’re up for it.

If you have an online store, you can send subscribers a discount or bonus like what Shopback did.

If you have an SaaS or an online app, you can send a welcome email and invite new subscribers to it. Here’s how Buffer encouraged new subscribers to use their browser extension.

7. Reading History

Ask your readers how they like to read their emails, and how often they want to hear from you. Budget airline Cebu Pacific, for example, gives readers a way to manage their subscription, so they’re not forced to unsubscribe if some of the emails aren’t relevant to them.

8.  Location

Segmenting emails based on location helps business owners avoid marketing in locations where they don’t do business, or stepping on their colleague’s territory in the case of national franchises.

Meetup, an international website where users can post about events and gatherings, segments users based on their location. They only send users emails about meetup groups within their location and the groups they’ve joined, if any.

9. Lead Magnet or Opt-in Freebie

Do you have several magnets to entice readers to subscribe? You can use that to segment your email list.

For instance, Noah Kagan at OkDork offers different freebies at the end of his blog posts. There’s one about getting more traffic, another on getting more subscribers, and a bunch more on different topics. These lead magnets can be used to segment subscribers, so he can send them content related to what they’re interested in, which he probably already does.

Get Creative with Email List Segmentation

Use these ideas as a stepping stone for more in-depth and creative segmentation strategies. Experiment with different segmenting techniques to see which works best for you. Granted, you might lose a couple of subscribers because of this. But once you get it right, you’ll convert more subscribers and earn more leads than what you lost before.

Why would you want to delete an email subscriber from your list?

You spent hours and possibly hundreds of dollars to build your online reputation and email list, so why would you even consider deleting even one of your subscribers?

The Radicati Group, a California based Technology Market Research Firm, forecasted that 269 billion emails will be sent daily in 2017. To curb this onslaught of information, email providers are continuously advancing their techniques in filtering unwanted and questionable emails. Gmail’s filter for social updates and promotions is a good example of this.

What does this have to do with you, the business owner?

This means that fewer—or none—of the emails you’re sending are actually reaching your subscriber’s inbox.

The ones that miraculously make the cut are often buried in the avalanche of other emails, which means your emails must be awesome or super important that they’d actually want to read it.

Why Deleting Inactive Subscribers is a Necessary Sacrifice

Sending emails to people who don’t receive or read your emails is a huge waste of money. It does nothing to build your online authority, much less sell your products.

Constant Contact’s monthly price for up to 2500 subscribers is $45 ($540), anything beyond that up to 5000 subscribers cost $65 ($780). If you have over 3000 subscribers, a huge chunk of which don’t reply or even open your emails, it makes sense to prune your list to save $240 a year.

Cost isn’t the only deciding factor here.

Inactive and disengaged email subscribers affect your email’s deliverability rate. The more subscribers don’t open your email, the more email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo sense that you’re not a ‘reputable sender’ and that your email is most likely spam.

So inactive subscribers aren’t just costing you more money, they’re also ruining your chances of getting your message through the inbox of other leads. Yikes.

How to Choose Who to Delete

In the age of multiple email barriers and information overload, it’s important to identify subscribers worth cutting from your email list. The success of your email marketing campaign depends on it.

Here’s how you can choose who to unsubscribe.

The Obvious Targets

These are the emails subscribers you don’t have a chance of re-engaging or connecting with, or people who didn’t want to be on your list in the first place.

• Purchased email leads
• Frequently bouncing email leads
• Previously unsubscribed but still on the system leads

You might be hesitant to delete purchased leads. But if they already went through at least one full email campaign, and they’re not responding, that just means they’re not interested. Or maybe the list was burned out in the first place.

Remember, purchased leads are sold multiple times so it’s possible these once legit leads got tired of receiving too many promotional emails.

The Lowest Open Rate or Inactive Subscribers

Find all the email subscribers who have been on your list for at least one year. Then check the last time they opened on of your emails.

Have they opened anything you have sent in the last three to six months? If you send at least two emails a week, and they haven’t opened any of these emails, that means they are not interested in your content.

Create a separate list for these people, so you can put them in a targeted campaign that turns inactive contacts into warm subscribers.

Low Engagement Rate Subscribers

These people open your emails, but don’t click on any of your links. They might’ve been interested in your blog posts, products, or services before, but not anymore. Whatever the case you’re not getting any traffic or conversions from them.

Don’t delete these subscribers straight away. Put them into a separate list then send them a re-engagement campaign to find what it would take to win back their engagement.

Rebuilding Your Email List

Here you can try to reactivate two types of cold leads – the ones who haven’t opened any of your mails, and the ones who open it but don’t reply or click on any of your links.

For the Non-Openers

Send them a simple email saying you’ll unsubscribe them from your list.

SUBJECT: I’m removing you from my email list (unless you read this one)

“Hi (Name),

I’m emailing you this message because you subscribed to my list some time ago, but haven’t opened any of my emails in the last three to six months.

That’s okay, I understand that you receive a lot of emails. I don’t want to keep sending you information if you’re no longer interested.

So if you don’t read or open this email, please know that I am unsubscribing you to my email list.  

If you were just curious, and accidentally opened this email, please take a few seconds to unsubscribe if you’re no longer interested in hearing from me. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.

Thank you.”

The above message is polite and straight to the point. And in most situations, the subscriber doesn’t have to do anything. If they haven’t opened any of your emails in a while, and they don’t open this one, you’ll just unsubscribe them from your end.

Wait three days up to one week before you start deleting inactive subscribers or non-openers. Some people might be away on vacation or business, so they may not have access to email.

Those who respond or open your email should be kept on your list, or at least on an engagement campaign to recapture their interest.

For Low Engagement Subscribers

Re-engagement campaigns come in different forms. You could send them a new eBook or freebie, a discount, or a poll to see what kind of information interests them. The end goal is to see what it would take to rev up their interest in your brand.

Need inspiration on what to send your disengaged subscribers? Check out these examples from Impactbnd.com, Emailmonks.com, and MyEmma .com.

Conclusion

Yes, deleting inactive subscribers feel counter-intuitive. But if these subscribers are inactive, disengaged, or bouncing, emailing them like you always have will accomplish nothing.

It’s better to have a smaller list of active subscribers where you can build your authority and convert more leads into paying customers.

You just started a blog for your business.

You’re writing quality content as fast as you can, and you’re getting decent traffic. But for some reason, majority of your first time visitors don’t come back. At least that’s what Google Analytics’ data suggests.

Didn’t they like what you wrote? Weren’t you helpful enough?

They share your posts, so how come they don’t come back?

The Missing Link in Many New Websites

Then you read somewhere that as an authority, you should start collecting email addresses as early as possible. Like, right NOW. You read article after article touting the benefits of building an email list.

It will boost your engagement they say. It will help you sell more products and get to know your audience, they say.

So now you’re curious to give it a try.

But you have no clue where to start.

Your Yellow Brick Road to Building an Email List

Start here.

I’ve compiled 11 proven email list building tips from around the web then categorized them into beginner, intermediate, and advanced level advice.

Start with the easy tips that only take a few minutes to set up. Then progress into the intermediate strategies once you’re getting the hang of things. When you’re ready to invest more in building your email list, take a crack at the advanced strategies.

Beginner, Intermediate Advanced and Email List Building Strategies

 

Beginner

 

1. Use a Feature Box

Remember those big rectangular boxes positioned at the top of a website? You know, the one usually offering a free e-book? It’s called a feature box. It contains a short copy convincing readers to give their email address in exchange for a free e-book or newsletter updates.

Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers, says he increased the email opt-in rate for his site by 51.7% using this strategy.

 

Notice how the feature box sits below the navigation bar, and at the top of every blog post to ensure people will read it before scrolling down.

Here’s another example of a feature box, this time without a free e-book or report.

You can create a simple feature box of your own using SumoMe or Magic Action Box.

 

2. Don’t Waste Your Sidebar

For some reason, many new website owners waste the top of their sidebar to tags and categories. While helpful for readers, these features do nothing to help you, the business owner.

Who’s to say they’ll come back of their own accord after they find what they’re looking for? There are hundreds of websites on any given topic, so it’s up to you to lure them back.

The human eye naturally reads left to right then top to bottom. So it’s only logical to prioritize what you want them to see first. Put the email opt-in box at the top of the sidebar. Then if you want to include categories, popular posts and other stuff, just put them below it.

Here’s an example of a sidebar opt-in box optimally placed on top of other widgets, such as the “about me” box.

 

And here’s another example from Legal Marketing Review.

 

3. Use a Welcome Mat or Welcome Gate

Your website is your business’s home in the virtual world. What better way to make it more inviting than a welcome mat, right?

Like a ‘welcome home’ rug, an online welcome mat greets first time visitors to your site with an irresistible free offer. It’s like a feature box, except it dominates the whole screen and only pops up for new visitors.

Of course, if you have both a welcome mat and a feature box, you can use the same freebie for both. Just vary the copy written in each one so it doesn’t look like a spammy pop-up. If you can give different freebies for each, that’s even better!

Here’s Make a Living Writing’s welcome gate.

 

For Mixergy, only the CTA button prompting you to “Get 9 Interviews Free” are visible. I suspect it was deliberately done to minimize indecision on the part of new visitors.

 

4. Add a Sign-up Button to the Navigation Menu

A subtler, although less effective, way of getting more subscribers is adding a sign-up prompt  on the  website’s navigation menu.

It’s a good add-on strategy, but not something you should use on its own. You can use a direct CTA, such as “Subscribe,” or go with “Free Updates.”

 

5. Ask Readers to Sign up at the Bottom of Every Blog Post

They say online readers prefer to scan. So it means someone who reads ‘til the bottom of your post must like your writing. If that’s really the case, don’t waste the opportunity!

Convert new readers into subscribers by putting an email sign-up box at the bottom of every blog post.  You can use anything from a simple sign-up button, or a more noticeable sign-up box like the one from Social Triggers.

 

 

Intermediate

 

6. Create an Irresistible, Gosh-Why-Is-He-Giving-It-Free Offer

Freebies are such a commodity now. Most of your visitors think twice before giving up their email address just to get ‘another free e-book.’

Sign-up bribes are still effective, don’t get me wrong. But for this strategy to work, your offer has to stand out from the mass of average Joe freebies out there.

First of all, stop thinking you have to write an e-book! While e-books are truly effective, they are not the only format for a giveaway.  And don’t think of this as something you create just for the sake of having one.

Creating a genuinely helpful freebie takes time. It should be something your visitors will gladly    pay for, if you weren’t such a nice guy to give it for free.

Need inspiration? Here are some amazing freebies:

• Free 28 Day Email Course on How to Become a Morning Person from Little Green Dot
• Copyblogger’s collection of 16 e-books and 20-part marketing course (okay, still an e-book but with 16x more value and content)
• Bidsketch’s sample proposal template
• Firepole Marketing’s Beacon Community (includes a forum and e-book series)

 

7. Ask Existing Email Subscribers to Forward and Share Your Emails

While relatively easy to do, this strategy won’t make a noticeable impact in your numbers unless you already have a solid foundation of at least 1,000 opt-in subscribers to begin with. Emails harvested through LinkedIn or some other database won’t help.

Once you have that, it’s easy to add a “Forward to a friend” link in the text of your emails. This simple trick gives you access to more leads, who are more likely to sign up because of the referral.

 

8. Turn Non-Confirmers into Subscribers

Someone signs up to get your free organizing check-list. Then your trusty mail service sends an opt-in confirmation email. But a week passes and it’s still not confirmed.

Did he change his mind? Did he not want your free checklist, after all? Did he enter the wrong email? If you’re just starting out, such non-confirmers might drive you nuts.

Don’t over think it. Things happen. Your confirmation email might’ve landed in the junk folder, or the he forgot about it for whatever reason. Whatever the case, you owe it to him and yourself to re-send the confirmation email. This person already gave you his email address, so you have a better chance of converting him into a new subscriber.

Go to your email service program and search for unconfirmed email sign-ups in the past two days.  Then just re-send the confirmation email to everyone on the filtered list. This process will only take less than fifteen minutes, but it can yield you anywhere from 5% to 20% more subscribers.

 

Advanced

 

9. Include Social Proof in Opt-in Copy

This tip is easy to implement but like tip #8, you can’t do it until you have enough subscribers. And this time, 1,000 isn’t gonna cut it. You’ll need a number huge enough to shock people of how awesome your content is.

Would you be more likely to sign-up for a newsletter if you knew more than 205,000 people already did? Peer pressure is a strong motivator and its effects do not diminish online.

When other people in your tribe, group of friends, or professional affiliation, think a certain newsletter is valuable enough to be allowed in their inbox, your brain instinctively agrees. That’s exactly the tactic that convinced me to sign up for Linda Formichelli’s mailing list for freelance writers.

 

10. Ask Commenters to Subscribe

Several plugins allow you to invite first-time blog commenters to a pre-determined page, such as a squeeze page set-up to collect emails.

Here’s an example of a page readers are redirected to after commenting on Yoast.com

 

11. Special Content Upgrade

Building your email list within the blog post is effective, because people are most engaged at the middle of the website (i.e. the blog post), not the headers and footers. Noah Kagan of SumoMe and OkDork credits this technique in a “daily email growth of (about) 30%.”  

How can you take advantage of the increased engagement?

Offer readers a specialized freebie download. In this post at Backlinko, Brian Dean lures readers into signing up for his email list by offering a checklist for using content upgrades, the exact topic covered in the post.

After reading Dean’s helpful tutorial, readers will be primed to download his checklist so they can try it out for themselves, and so they don’t forget what they read. The freebie is a win-win for everyone.

But don’t confine the content upgrade at the bottom of the post. You can insert it at the middle, too, like what Dean did.

Not the Only Email List Building Tips Around

Whew, I hope you’re still with me at this point. There are a hundred other ways you can grow your email list but I only included the strategies that really work so you’re not overwhelmed with options.

Quick Question:

Which of these methods are you using for your own site? Is there another strategy you’re using not listed here? Let me know in the comments.

Platform conference review series: Amy Porterfield’s tips on unpublished page posts.

Amy Porterfield is perhaps the foremost authority on Facebook, so when she says to focus on building your email list and not solely on getting likes, comments, and shares, it comes from a true place of authority.

Like Michael Hyatt, she said, “The entire energy of your business is tied to the size and quality of your email marketing list.” Without it, every day is a struggle, and yet getting your list on track doesn’t have to be that hard. Facebook ads, according to Amy, are one of the best ways to start.

3 steps to building your email list

1. Create an irresistible offer

While fans equal community and social proof, the ultimate goal is to turn fans into leads, and prospects into customers. On Facebook, 99% of the time, Amy never sells anything. She leaves the selling to email marketing.

She suggests that whatever your offer is, make sure to align it with what your emails will be about.

Examples of irresistible offers or email sign-up magnets

Simple Green Smoothies 30-day free challenge:

Also check out my recent post with Michael Hyatt’s list of irresistible email offers.

2. Create an opt in landing page

Not only do you want to have a nice call to action graphic of what your e-book or offer looks like, but you should have a landing page with more information. Amy likes leadpages.net for creating amazing sales pages. I recently did a webinar from Lead Pages and I can’t wait to try it.

This is what a basic landing page looks like: Guide to Landing Page Copywriting

3. Create a Facebook ad

Amy told a nice story about one of her $97 products and how she spent $7,000 on Facebook ads to make $35,605 in return. She recommends spending $10 per day as a test. Even if you just tried for a month, it will be a worthy test. Especially if you have a product to sell.

What type of Facebook ad should you create? Amy doesn’t use sidebar ads much and prefers unpublished page posts. An unpublished Page post will appear in the News Feed but not on your Page. This way you can create and test as many ads as you want, without annoying your main fans.

If you’re wondering how to create an unpublished page post ad, instructions are below:

You can link to your landing page from the ad. It’s a good idea to create powerful text that entices the reader by addressing something that might be a problem for them. You might say something like “Are you struggling with Facebook? Try my webinar.”

Using action words like “click” can be helpful. Interestingly, “learn more” is the least popular button and she finds that words like discover and watch get more attention. It is also important to say who the content is for – e.g. this webinar is for coaches and entrepreneurs. This creates a connection that makes people feel like it is just right for them.

Amy likes PNG images versus JPEG’s and suggest 1200 pixels by 627 pixels. She also likes Canva, which is a fun free tool for creating good-looking images. They even have a 1200 x 627 template.

Interestingly enough, paid clicks actually help your regular organic posts! Your score actually increases via paid.

3 places to potentially put your ad:

1. Sidebar
2. Desktop news feed
3. Mobile news feed going to a mobile lead pages landing page

The mobile news feed often gives the best results. Just make sure your ad looks good on mobile devices.

Selecting targeting for your Facebook ads

Under interests, you can select things such as people who like Amy Porterfield’s page. Targeting other Facebook pages and the people who like them can generate highly targeted customers.

Play around with graph search and targeting.

Don’t underestimate the power of Facebook ads. Using paid ads is a simple way to not only increase activity, but also allow you to generate downloads of your offers and help you build your email list.