#137. The 3 Most Common Email Marketing Mistakes | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Email Einstein, the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. I’m an email marketing specialist at an agency called Flowium. And here at Flowium, we really love what we do. We love ecommerce, we love ecommerce email marketing, and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you, delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. And normally we do talk about all of the best email marketing practices, the ways that you can improve your email marketing and stuff like that, but today we want to focus on the worst email marketing practices. Not necessarily the practices, but we will be talking about 3 most common email marketing mistakes that we are still seeing across the industry in the year 2023. Now, this episode, it will be slightly different from what we normally do because it will be much shorter. It will be very concise and to the point. And we want to basically do this little experiment when we’re explaining something really quickly in a very short time, but also provide you those like extra research resources. So if this topic is like applicable to you, you can go and study some more. So Um, let’s start this. Let’s do this. And here comes mistake number 1. Mistake number 1, failing to optimize for mobile. Mobile accounts for approximately half of all of the web traffic worldwide. However, this mobile traffic is converting at less than half the rate of that of a desktop. And mobile does not necessarily mean just like a smaller screen. Here are some things that you can do today to make sure that all of your emails are mobile optimized. First of all, stick to single layer or single column email templates. This is very important. This single column email templates, they are easier to navigate. They will look good on all of the mobile devices and people just like them. Make sure that all of your images are optimized and they are maximum at 1 MB and even better, 500 KB. And the last but not least, make sure to add the alt text, which is like a description displayed when the user can’t see the image, to all of your image to make sure that your email are accessible and they are easy to view even when the image does not load. And now here are the 2 resources that you might like if you want to learn more about the topic of mobile optimization and how to improve your emails. So number one, blog, How to Increase Your Mobile eCommerce Conversion Rates. Amazing blog where we explain in details what can be done to your email, to your website, to your store to deliver the best mobile optimized experience to your customers. And number 2 is the podcast that funny enough is called also How to Increase Your Mobile Conversion Rates, episode number 49 of our podcast. Just go and Google it or scroll down to the description box where we will link all of the resources that will be mentioned in this episode.

Andriy: 3:34

Just in 2022, we helped our e-commerce clients generate over $250 million in revenue through effective email marketing strategy. And now, we can help you too. Stop missing out on the potential revenue your email could be generating for your business right now. Take advantage of our free email marketing audit today and let our team help you optimize your email for maximum conversion. Go to flowium.com/audit and book your audit today. today. It’s flowium.com/audit. flowium.com/audit.

Vira: 4:24

So mistake number 2, a lack of segmentation. Batch and blast or sending the same exact message to your entire list is a huge email marketing mistake that you definitely want to avoid. Listen, customers don’t want to receive an email that is not relevant to them. 70% of millennials said that they are frustrated with all of the irrelevant messages they get into their inbox. And whooping 91% of all of the customers said that they would rather purchase something from the brand that provide personalized offers and product recommendation. Now, how you can slice your list? First of all, based on engagement, whether or not the customer is engaging with your email. Based on purchasing behavior, who are they? Are they first-time buyers, two-time buyers, VIP customer? Based on whether or not they purchased this product in the past. Based on the product interest they expressed. Based on demographic, geography. Location, where they are in the world, and of course based on all of the zero-party data that you collect about your customers. So here are 2 really cool resources if you want to learn more about segmentation or if you feel that you’re lacking that like segmentation knowledge or segmentation ideas. First of all, definitely check out the blog that is called All You Need to Know About Email Segmentation. This is literally your email marketing segmentation 101. There are some basics but also a few advanced strategies that we are sharing there, but also really cool podcast for you to check is called Golden Rules of Effective Segmentation. This is our episode that we’ve recorded back in the day, but it’s like oldie but goodie, so definitely check it out. Golden Rules of Effective Segmentation. All of the links, as always, will be down below. Email marketing mistake number 3: not collecting enough zero-party data. Historically, there has always been third-party data that was gathered through the sites and sources that are not necessarily yours, like Facebook or Google Analytics. And marketeers, they relied a lot on that data to learn more about their customer interests, behaviors, demographics, traffic data. That’s not a thing anymore since with all of the new updates from Google and Apple, basically it looks like the third-party tracking is going away for good. And the next hot thing is zero-party data. What is zero-party data? Basically any information that your customer intentionally and proactively shares with your brand is zero-party data. It can come in many forms like speaking to a representative in a showroom, sharing their information through signups, quizzes, post-purchase questionnaires and stuff like that. If you think about it, asking your customer to consent to give you a specific kind of data is a win-win. You gain valuable information for richer personalization, and your customer gets a better personalized experience. And if you want to learn more about zero-party data, why it’s your greatest advantage in ecommerce marketing, how to sort of use and organize that zero-party data, here are 2 really cool episodes of the podcast that we recorded recently with 2 pretty cool tools that can help you gather and utilize that data. First one is called— the episode is called Why Zero-Party Data Is Your Greatest Advantage in Ecommerce Email Marketing. It’s episode number 111, and it’s with, again, Furukawa. And another episode that I really enjoyed recording and listening to is called How to Gather and Organize Your Valuable Zero-Party Data. It’s episode number 135. Definitely check it out if you want to learn how to sort of utilize that zero-party data for the segmentation purposes. So there you have it. 3 big, huge email marketing mistakes that even big brands are doing all across the industry. If you want to learn more about all of the things that we discussed today, scroll down to the description box where you will see all of the resources that were mentioned in this episode. And as always, if you like what we do, please leave us a review. After you leave a review, make sure to screenshot it and send it our way so you could get your very own pair of branded Flowium socks. They are amazing. I love them very much. And if you want to be a part of socks crew, definitely leave us a review, screenshot your review, and we’ll be sure to send you your very own pair of Flowium socks. Thank you so much, and we’ll talk to you next Tuesday.