Not every email marketing best practice is an obvious one. In fact, in my experience there are quite a few best practices that companies seem to ignore. Here are 10 email marketing mistakes that you should avoid, the good news is these are all easy best practices to adapt and adhere to.
Below are the common mistakes, and what you can do to avoid them:
1. Not Having a Marketing Plan
Make sure you have a strategy in place before you launch each and every marketing email. Decide on a theme that matches with your business goals and will help you achieve them. Create articles, promotions, tips, and offerings that are in line with the strategy.
2. No Permission
You must have permission from every single one of your recipients before you can send email. It’s more about quality than quantity. Before investing your time and money in an email marketing program, start by getting permission from your customers. It’s easier than you think, and it’ll result in fewer spam complaints, better deliverability, and better open and click results.
3. Unrecognizable Address and/or Domain
Keep a static “From” address and/or domain — subscribers determine if your email is spam or not if it’s not relevant or recognizable. Ask to be added to the recipient’s address book or safe sender list at the top of each email.
4. Poor Subject Lines
Because the subject line is the first thing a reader sees and reads, it is really important to make one that will capture their attention. It should make them want to open the newsletter and read some more. Your subject line should be seven words or less (or 35 characters). Using the following conditions in a subject line can lead to being flagged as SPAM:
- Percent of Capital Letters: Too many uppercase letters compared to lowercase letters
- Repeating Capital Letter: Too many upper case letters in a row (e.g., SALE)
- Gaps: When the words have gaps between letters like s*t*y*l*e
- Repetition: When letters or characters are repeated (*****)
- Special Character Flag: Overuse of special characters (e.g., & $ # @ ( )[ ] !)
- Punctuation Flag: Too much punctuation (…) or the type of punctuation (!)
- Word/Space Ratio: Spammers use blank spaces to catch the recipient’s attention resulting in a high ratio of spaces to words
- First Character Flag/First Word Flag: Subject lines starting with a special character or punctuation. Words like “Free”, “hey”, “Sale” etc.
5. Too Much Unnecessary Content
Keep in mind that you should never put information that is not related to the main topic when writing a newsletter. Be straight to the point. Make it as short as possible but with quality. There will be times that you can’t avoid making your newsletter long — if this is the case, make sure that it will not bore your subscribers to a point that it would make them want to unsubscribe.
6. Bad Code
Set the pixel width to 600. This prevents the need to scroll to the right—and the potential to lose interest if someone feels they have to do too much work to read your email.
Don’t use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in your HTML coding. It is stripped out by many ISPs, so if you want to avoid more testing and revisions keep it basic.
Many ISPs suppress images by default. Do not create your email message out of one big image or your subscribers may only see a blank page with a little, tiny red X. If you use any images, to be on the safe side, feature a view in browser so they have another way to see images if they are suppressed.
7. Failing to Use Call To Actions (CTA)
The top one-third and the left-most area of your emails are the most valuable real estate. Try to place a CTA in those areas, in text and as minimal images. Include two to three instances of your CTA above the fold. Make sure to include at least one graphical and one textual CTA.
8. Poor List Hygiene
Practice good and consistent list hygiene. Most people know to honor opt outs in 10 days to be CAN-SPAM compliant but you should also clean your list(s) of hard bounces after each send, plus monitor soft bounces and remove from your list as needed.
9. No Unsubscribe
Don’t make people jump through hoops to opt out. The unsubscribe link must opt out on the first step, per CAN-SPAM.
10. Not Testing in Different Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
HTML emails look different, depending on which email program you use to view it. Just because it looks good in the preview window, or when you send a test to yourself, it doesn’t mean it’ll look like that for all your recipients. Test your email in all ISPs!
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Amber – Thanks for the tips… The little things can make a huge difference in an email marketing strategy… This is very helpful!
Nice article, Amber. Thanks!
This post is great!
Even when you’re subject to EU regulation over mail marketing these are nice tips. I would say, even more : with these can you show your clients that some of the things they want to do are bad ideas even in an “opt-out” mode.
great tips