6 Mistakes to Avoid When Emailing Your Subscribers

In the early days of a blog’s inception, attempting to get people to subscribe to receive emails from you can be a bit like pulling teeth. But after a few months and a couple of thousand readers, you have a nice list of people who have volunteered to receive emails from you. The question is now what?

How do you ensure that those who have signed up to your email list actually read the emails that you send, let alone that they continue to subscribe? And how do you ensure that you benefit when people actually read it. Most problems that occur in email marketing for blogs are the result of a few key mistakes as I will now outline.

1- Too Many Updates

The biggest mistake of all is both the most obvious and the most frequently made. Regardless of how interested your readers are in your blog, they are unlikely to want constant updates about it. Not only does sending too many emails to your subscribers make you look like a spammer, do you really admire yourself to such an extent that you think that you have something amazing to say every single day.

The best way to ensure that your subscribers both read your email and continue to subscribe is to only send them the highlights. Therefore I recommend only emailing people once per week with extracts of your best posts.

2- Frequent Changes

Both offline and on, people don’t really like change and this is especially true when it comes to email inboxes.

When people open your email, you want them to immediately be familiar with the layout, style and colour scheme and therefore recognize that the email is from a trusted source that they have received correspondence from in the past. Decide on a particular style and quantity of content at the beginning and stick to it.

3- Patronizing Content

If you have signed up to enough email subscriptions, you are likely to be familiar with the whole “I love you” routine used by many internet marketers. Everybody knows that email subscriptions are sent out to hundreds if not thousands of readers, therefore don’t insult the intelligence of your readers by trying to sound like you genuinely care about them individually.

Your emails should encourage loyalty by illustrating the worth of your blog not by showering them with insincere compliments.

4- Broken Promises

One way of getting people to sign up to your mailing list is to promise specific updates on certain aspects of the niche you are writing in. Or perhaps, in one email, you promise to answer a particular question in the next email. Failing to keep such promises not only leads to a feeling of disappointment being associated with your blog, it also leads to resentment for being lied to.

Therefore only promise to include things that you definitely will include. Any advantages of undelivered promises are almost certainly short lived.

5- No Unsubscribe Button

Many people don’t bother with this and it is a significant mistake. Failing to include an unsubscribe button will never get you more readers.

People either want to read your emails or they do not, therefore not incorporating an unsubscribe option only leads to two things. The first is more unopened emails which benefits nobody and the second is significantly lower trust in your blog.

6- Recommending Poor Products

With so many products offering commissions nowadays, the urge to include them in your emails can be a large one.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with attempting to sell to your subscribers but you need to make sure that what you are selling is both a good product and one that you have reviewed and tested in detail. People enjoy being recommended high quality products and at times, this tactic can even increase the perceived value of your newsletters.

But sending out random product recommendations of poor products that you haven’t even tested is a sure fire way of losing both subscribers and respect.

In conclusion, my final piece of advice is to always ask one question when deciding what to send to your subscribers.

Would you like to receive this information in your inbox?

If the answer to this question is no, you are not only wasting your subscribers time, you are also wasting your own.

Image © NinaMalyna – Fotolia.com

Tagged as: affiliate marketing, commissions, email, email marketing, email subscriptions, Marketing, online marketing, products, readers, signed up, subscribers, trusted source

Tweet

Buffer

Follow @AhmedAlthaf
Facebook
Google+

Blog → S.E.O. Consultant
View all posts by Althaf Ahmed

Article by Althaf Ahmed

Althaf Ahmed is an organic marketer who specializes in Search Engines and Social Media. Althaf has helped dotcom companies, big and small make a positive difference in their marketing campaigns. He is also the author of the Twitter Marketing Guide for 2012.

Write for us a guest post