Want To Become More Successful In Marketing? Learn From These Email Marketing Fails

Email marketing is a highly effective strategy with the best customer conversion rate among the other digital marketing strategies. This type of marketing rarely fails, unless done by someone who does not have any tiny bit of knowledge about the proper practices. If it fails then chances are the person doing the email blast did something that does not really correspond to the strategy best suited for him or his business.

Learn from the following email marketing mistakes.

This tops our list of email marketing fails. Beginners might be asking why this is such a thing when this digital strategy is about email blast - or sending the same message to many recipients. Here's a friendly tip for our newbies: a successful email marketer does audience segmentation. Meaning, you would group your subscriber list according to a significant factor that you think might affect the conversion rates. One common example is segmenting the new subscribers from the old ones.

There are certain top brands whose email marketing has gone wrong in the past. In 2014, Shutterfly mistakenly sent an email campaign to all their subscribers congratulating them for their newborns. Most of the recipients did not even fit the ‘parent’ criteria. A spokesperson apologized for the incident, saying that their intention was to send the email blast to their customers who recently subscribed to their birth announcements. 

The email marketing strategy itself is an effective business tool to engage with customers and generate sales. However, the content of the campaign is totally dependent on the marketer. One cannot compose and send out emails with inappropriate or insensitive messages, wonder why the sales plummeted instead, then conclude that the digital strategy is a failure and ineffective. 

Take this marketing fail as an example: In 2017, Adidas apologized for sending an email congratulating the Boston Marathon finishers and participants for surviving the marathon. The words were harmless but the 2013 Bombing Marathon bombing incident claimed lives and injured many.  Recipients labeled the message as insensitive even if the bombing happened years before the email blast.

This one is similar to the above. Some designs in the email campaign can have a connotation that might be offensive to some. We can learn a lesson from this design mistake by Airbnb in 2017. The company sent an email to its subscribers advertising water-themed homes for tourists and travelers and contained in the campaign is a floating house. The email blast was sent during the onset of Hurricane Harvey which caused devastating flooding and claimed more than 100 lives. 

The top reason for sending out email campaigns is to entice people to buy through the link provided. It is indeed a major email marketing fail if you forgot to include the link to direct the customers to your products page. That won’t be a problem if the subscriber is interested enough to search for your website and manually look for the products to make a purchase. But that’s not usually the case. Imagine the potential revenue loss from this simple mistake. 

An email campaign may be likened to an elevator sales pitch. Subscriber must be enticed at the short content of the emails. If a message contains too many images and takes forever to load, a subscriber would just close it and the opportunity to make a sale is gone. 

These email marketing fails happen when you fail to proofread emails and check the recipients list. Every marketer should carefully craft messages with valuable information and attractive enough to entice the appropriate audience. Conversion does not happen unless your campaign is clear enough to the right people. 

I hope that these examples will change the way you send out your newsletters to make better sales next time!