Email anxiety is real here's how to overcome it

It’s not just email marketers who feel the pressure of sending emails. Every day business professionals experience the dreaded anxiety of sending emails out to their contacts. If you feel discomfort when you send out emails - you could be experiencing email anxiety. You may be worried that you don’t have the skills or expertise to send good email campaigns or you might be wondering whether anyone will respond. Whatever the underlying reasons are for you feeling nervous about sending out an email, you need to know and understand that this is completely normal.

To help you overcome your fears, we’re going to look at tricks you can use to help you stifle those nerves and start building your confidence.

How to manage your email anxiety and overcome your fears:

You feel:

“I don’t know where to start!”

How to overcome your fear: When you haven’t ever sent an email marketing campaign, it can be daunting to know where to start and what to do. Take a deep breath and think about what you’re aiming to achieve. Once you have your goal in mind you can start thinking about what your audience would be interested in hearing more about.

To build up your confidence you can go through our article Email Marketing for Beginners.

You feel:

“What if the personalisation doesn’t work”

How to overcome your fear: You are not alone. The anxiety you feel about personalisation efforts not working is directly related to the health of your list and data. As personalisation works with data variables, the easiest way to check whether your personalisation will work as intended is to go through those data fields.

An example of how to do this is to download a list of the subscriber group you intend to send your email campaign to. You can then open your list in Excel and use a filter to check for any blanks. You can then tell how many of your personalisations will appear blank if the fields are empty. An easy way to overcome any of these blank fields is to actually change your text a bit. So if you normally use Hi [FNAME], you can just remove the comma if you have many blank fields on your list.

You feel:

“Will my email look good on people’s phones”

How to overcome your fear: The best way to overcome this fear is to send yourself a test email and preview it on your mobile phone, even better if you can send a preview to someone else too that has a different mobile phone. This allows you to see how your email will be viewed on mobile by different people. Mail Blaze also allows you to preview your mobile email before you send your campaign.

You feel:

“Will my images look good?”

How to overcome your fear: The first thing you can do is to pick images that complement your text. You can repeat important information in your text to further strengthen your messages like a date or a discount. If you are worried about your images not showing, you can keep your file sizes under 100KB and also add ALT text for each image.

You feel:

“No one is going to open my email, then what?”

How to overcome your fear:

Manage your expectations. There is no such thing as one size fits all when it comes to email marketing. To help you overcome this fear and feel less anxious, you need to tell yourself that email marketing is a long-term strategy that offers you the opportunity to keep refining and optimising your experience. The more you send the more you can improve.

Don’t focus on a specific number. Rather run tests to continuously increase your numbers across the board. This includes testing your subject lines, CTA buttons, your layout, etc.

You feel:

“My spelling and grammar is terrible, I don’t want people to point out my typos”

How to overcome your fear:

Every email marketer isn’t necessarily a copywriter, but that doesn’t mean you can’t overcome your fear of making a spelling or grammar error. Firstly, a typo is usually unintentional but can look super unprofessional in an email.

A great way to get over your fear of grammar or spelling errors slipping through the cracks is to ask someone else to proofread your email campaign before you send it out. Another wonderful way to overcome this fear is to use a tool such as Grammarly to help spell check your content. Grammarly is really easy to add as a browser extension to your favourite browser and will help you improve all your business communication.

You feel:

“What if I use the wrong links or my links aren’t working”

How to overcome your fear: The best approach to overcome this fear is to actually test your links separately from all the other elements in your campaign. So instead of testing your campaign content, design, etc. you should set up a separate part of your testing process just for your links. Without working links, your campaigns won’t reach the goals you want to achieve.

Additional tips to help you overcome your fears:

• Remember that you are always talking to one person. Craft your campaign accordingly. You need to ensure that you aren’t addressing the person in the same way that you would address a group of people.
• If a mistake happens, remember that it’s not the end of the world. Mistakes sometimes creep in. See your mistake as a learning opportunity and a way to improve your testing processes. If you make a big mistake, acknowledge your mistake and rectify the situation where appropriate.
• If you see a lot of unsubscribes, don’t be alarmed. A clean list is a healthy list, which means it’s not a bad thing if people unsubscribe from your emails. It means you are getting the opportunity to send your campaigns to people who are more interested in getting communication from you. Don’t be discouraged and keep creating valuable content.
• The more you send email campaigns, the more comfortable and confident you will get.