Which Email Marketing Mistakes Should Be Avoided on Your WordPress Website

The modern marketing reality does not allow to create any successful online project without being always in touch with your existing and potential audience. One of the most accessible and efficient way to communicate with your users comfortably is the email marketing.

Most of the beginners in the field of WordPress administration think about email marketing as a simple process of mailing with your website visitors or blog subscribers. But things are much more complicated when you look at them responsibly. Each of your subscribers has different set of demands, needs and wishes. To have an interesting and informative talk with each of them means to study analytics a lot and to experiment with different approaches to reach their attention.

There are thousands of email marketing techniques already. We will try to describe the most important things you need to know about email marketing from another point of view. Let us look at the list of the most common mistakes in email marketing campaigns a beginner can (and in most cases do) make.

Late Email Marketing Campaign Start

While creating a WordPress project we often pay attention to content and SEO strategies but forget about email marketing. The common mistake of any beginner WordPress administrator lies in misunderstanding of the main goal of email marketing: it starts working not only when you get lots of readers who want to become subscribers. The main principle is more like almost contrariwise: email marketing can help you bring new visitors and keep each of them involved.

Just think about the information any modern user needs to digest. It is not a big surprise that your project can be easily forgotten while surfing the great waves of internet. Email marketing is the easiest and the most effective way to remind a user about your website or blog, suggest some new content, product or service, present a gift or anything else.

Moreover, it is much easier to analyze your audience correctly when you start to track its behavior from the very first steps of your project. By reaching some imposing numbers of subscribers you will already know their desires and interests. Otherwise you will be sooner forced to hold the analytics process in a great rush.

Disregard of Split Testing

The testing process is crucial for every email marketing campaign. The modus operandi of email marketing itself is based on ever-changing desires of your target audience. That is why split testing should always be hold on your WordPress website to get the analytics about the most sufficient ways of talking to your audience.

Split testing (also known as A/B testing) essentially provides a straightforward information on the efficiency of any website element by comparing it with its alternative version. When we talk about email marketing, there are lots of elements to analyze with split testing. For example, the performance of your subscription form can be disappointing. Then you try to move this form and/or change its design. Lots of changes` variations are available — which one to pick? Use A/B testing to analyze them all!

Fortunately, modern email marketing services allow you to held split testing nearly without limitations. For example, MailChimp is known for the intuitive and beginner-friendly interface of its dashboard to help even newbies to arrange their first subscribers base easily and correctly.

Bought Email Lists

One of the worst mistakes a WordPress administrator can do is to buy an email list. Strictly saying its illegal and does not worth a cent. First of all, email lists for sale consist of 99 percent fake email addresses. And even if you could find a real person among those fakes and bots, he or she would never be interested in your website or blog by means of spam mailing. You will achieve the opposite effect instead: people who will receive your mail without subscribing to your newsletter will mark you as a spammer forever.

Another important downside of using a bought email list is the great risk of being penalized by search engines. As long as the most popular mailboxes are provided by search engines (Google foremost), these search engines will apply penalization to the website which appears to be the source of the problem. That is how your SEO can be destroyed by using illegal methods of newsletter mailing.

Misunderstanding the Lead Generation Process

Lead generation process consists of three main parts: involving content, seamless user experience and convenient subscription form. If only one of these factors fails to be delivered to your user along any part of your WordPress project, then the whole lead generation risks to be ruined or at least suffer from insufficient workflow.

To understand which content is really involving for your content, which website design provides the seamless user experience and which subscription form is the best option for your audience, you need to held split testing again. Nothing new in terms of method but a whole bunch of new information to analyze and to work with.

Lack of Segmentation

Another important factor to understand is the correct segmentation. In other words, you need to know what content is applicable to any part of your subscribers` list. There is no opportunity to create an involving and in the same time universal content. That is why you need to create involving content for different groups of your website visitors.

The segmentation process is always connected with testing and analyzing the behavior of your users. The more analytics you have, the better you can understand how to divide users by their interests. You can also use polls as the additional tool to gather opinions among your website visitors and subscribers.

Non-Responsive Email

From the beginning of our article we were talking about the “talk” between you and your users. It is obvious, that a talk should be two-sided. It means your subscribers need to have an easy and convenient way to talk back to you any time they want. It is usually called feedback and its importance can not be overestimated.

Another mistake is to think that some feedback form on your WordPress website is enough to communicate with your users. First of all, most users would not look for a feedback form while or right after reading your email. They need to have a quick link to your feedback form, online chat or whatever channel of communication you offer.

No Plan or Strategy

The common rule is: there is no success without a thought-out plan. It is also true for any email marketing campaign. First of all, it concerns to sending newsletter at a certain day and time. If you send your email randomly, then users would never be interested to get them, they would never wait for them.

On the other hand, a certain timetable accustoms your users to receive an email from you and to be interested in its content. Moreover, such a plan disciplines you and puts a visible goal for each day or week in the matter of new content to send your loyal users.

Filler Emails

Filler emails can be one of the downside of the previous paragraph about planning. There will be a temptation to send not-so-interesting emails for just not ruining the plan. The consequences of such a decision can be devastating: much more users will unsubscribe from filler emails, rather than wait one more or a few days for new email from you.

The conclusion is simple: do not sent filler emails just to keep to the plan. If there is no inspiration, then take a little break to reassemble your thoughts. Your users will understand such a pause and will appreciate your concern to create only the qualitative content.