We’ve all made the same mistake. You write the best email, reread it, fix the errors, check the grammar, proofread it again, and hit send. Immediately after you send it, you notice that there’s something wrong.
A grammar mistake that slipped your eyes or a typo is one thing, but some things are much worse. Mistaking your client’s name, forgetting to attach a file, sending the email to the wrong person, or an angry response are the most popular fails. But there are plenty of others that fall in the same category. Here’s how to avoid sending a lousy email to your entire newsletter list.
4 Marketing Automation Fails and How to Avoid Them
The timing fail
When brands set up a marketing campaign, they focus on multiple factors. The headline needs to be perfect, the copy needs to be short and sweet, and there needs to be a call to action. However, the timing is important too.
Most companies send out three newsletter emails per week, which is the optimal amount by industry standards. The mail needs to hit the client’s inbox during the day when they’re paying attention to what’s going on. Well, that’s not always the case.
Imagine being out on a Friday night, having a couple of drinks with your friends, and your phone buzzes with a work email at 11 PM. Instead of scheduling it for 11 AM, a single misclick postponed the mails for 12 hours. Now, that’s not a big deal, except that it’s Friday and everyone’s having fun instead of thinking about work.
The way to avoid this failure is to triple-check whether everything is correct. Call a friend or coworker and ask them to triple-check too. Two heads always work better than one.
The copy-paste fail
Breaking habits is hard, but mistakes work as eye-openers that help. Writers and marketers love using Microsoft Word as their primary writing tool. It’s the generic application for writing, and it’s specifically designed to be a blank page and nothing else. Working on Google Docs makes it easy to click on a new tab and start browsing, so most marketers still stick to the basics.
Well, when you copy and paste text directly from Word, there’s a bit of formatting that comes along with it. Most of the time, it’s subtle and unnoticeable, which is why Gmail and HubSpot inboxes ignore the formatting. But your email list is not made of Gmail accounts alone. From the client’s side, opening a mail with broken formatting is unprofessional and creates a bad image.
You can avoid this failure when pasting only the text with no formatting. On Windows, it’s Ctrl+Shift+V. On a Mac, it’s Option+Shift+Command+V. Or, you can right-click and select the option. That extra key will make a difference.
The personalization fail
Marketing automation does wonder when it comes to reaching many people. You can also automate customer service and sales. But there still needs to be a human element inside every message. No one likes doing business with robots.
Suppose the copy inside your emails is bland, boring, and targeted at every member of your newsletter list. In that case, you shouldn’t be surprised at why it’s not working. Creating a message for the ideal persona for every step of the inbound journey is crucial if you want to nurture leads and turn them into satisfied buyers.
You can set up an automation software to send discounts and promo codes, but that will not work forever. Most marketers estimate that a quarter of their email list decays every year. You need to focus on growth and retention. Write as you talk, and make those messages personal.
The whole point of inbound is to let clients come to you. If you’re just blasting promotional offers, it’s just like handing out flyers or buying TV space to send a message that fills every demographic.
The hacking fail
If you’re a marketer, you already have many things on your plate. This usually includes looking at key performance indicators, monitoring analytics from different platforms, and being up to date with the newest trends. It’s no wonder that a mistake can slip without you noticing it. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario.
When looking at some new practices, you download a free resource from a competing agency to see how they craft their campaigns. Then, you get notifications from your coworkers about something posted from the main company profile. Since you’re the only one who has access to it, the situation seems weird since nothing was planned for the day. When you log in to the social media account to see what happened, it hits you. You’ve been hacked.
The website you visited was a fake one, aimed to take control of extensive profiles and sell them back for large amounts of money. Of course, this was not an intentional mistake, but it still counts as a failure because it could have been avoided.
How can you avoid a hacking fail?
A VPN is the optimal solution for threat and malware protection. In the previous scenario, the hacker had access to your IP address, which made it easy for them to exploit your device. However, the entire premise of a VPN is to mask your real IP address, which makes it impossible to hack you.
Furthermore, modern hackers know how browsers operate. They can add untraceable malware into files that pass through your primary operating system firewall. Luckily, virtual private networks are developed with security in mind. They scan pages multiple times to see whether there are any threats present, which increases your protection.
A few final words
To end things off on a good note, you can learn how to use a VPN to open private sites without your company or internet service provider knowing about it. Since your IP address is masked, you can hide that you’ve made marketing fail without your company or ISP finding out.
