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Email marketing is an exciting business. It enables us to connect with our target audience in an efficient way, while still maintaining a somewhat personal approach. And the best part? It’s great for creating engagement and interaction. And those are your bill payers right there. Not great products, not great marketing. Engagement and interaction, for the win! So how do you mess this up? Well, be sure to do any or all of the following…
Not including an unsubscribe link
Unsubscribe links are required by law. I could leave it at that, but I’m not going to. I don’t like the law. It’s an abstract model that will, by definition, never quite grasp the complexity of real life. Do we need it? Probably. But I prefer values. My values. Commonly shared values. Such as kindness, freedom of speech, freedom of travel and having a cold beer on a sunny day. If this makes sense to you, including an unsubscribe link in your (every!) email should make sense too. If people want to leave you, they will. There’s no point in making it hard for them to get rid of you. Actually, all it does is damaging your brand, since people tweet about this sort of annoyances all the time.
Using noreply@Idontwantengagement.com as your from: address
Did you read the part on engagement and interaction? NOREPLY. What the ####? This company is sending me an email, and they do not want me to get back to them? Please, we’re deep into the 21st century here. Interaction is everywhere. It’s quick, it’s swift, and it can disappear into thin air in the blink of an eye. So you need to make interaction as easy as possible. You’ll lose big in terms of engagement if you don’t.
Attaching files to your email
Attachments make emails heavy (in KB) and create lots of bandwith. Heavy emails don’t make it to inboxes and bandwith isn’t free. Also, it means your subscriber have to download and open your file before they can read your content. To many people, this is a very tiresome process. So tiresome in fact, they won’t even think about it. You will have wasted precious resources.
Instead, just upload your file(s) to your webserver (or any other server that is publicly accessible) and link to them from your email. It’s quicker, better and much more user friendly that way.
Buying a list of email addresses
Yes. this still happens – and it makes me sad. Anybody who purchases a list of email addresses and starts blasting emails, is not practicing email marketing. They’re just sending a digital version of a door to door flyer. And you know what happens to door to door flyers, right? Exactly…nothing!
Bottom line: don’t acquire your subscribers by any other means than double opt in or with an optional checkbox on the checkout page of your online store. It’s common decency AND common sense.
