Email marketing – how NOT to do it!

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Email marketing is an effective way to for a business to build a relationship with their customers and potential customers. It is a flexible and powerful form of direct marketing or online marketing which enables a business to send customised and personal messages to a targeted set of customers. It can’t be ignored as a part of the social marketing mix.

It is easy to make mistakes, as we can all see from the many, invariably unsolicited, mailings that drop into our email boxes every day.  And none of us are immune! If you haven’t made one of the following mistakes, then you’re either very good or very lucky!

Top email marketing mistakes

  1. Sending an email to a mailing list as cc instead of bcc so everybody on the list sees one another’s names and email addresses.
  2. Not discriminating between people on a large mailing list so they are bombarded with irrelevant emails not just the ones they might be interested in.
  3. Omitting to provide an unsubscribe option.
  4. Not responding to unsubscribe requests so that people get unwanted further mailings.
  5. Sending out newsletters or announcements as huge PDF or JPG files which clog people’s in-boxes. I have images turned off by default in my email anyway, owing to graphic spam.
  6. Sending out information in JPG format and asking others to put it on their websites – I am not going to spend time rekeying someone else’s information as a favour. If you want me to put your information on my website make it possible for me to cut and paste text easily into my content management system.
  7. Sending out event information as JPGs: If you want me to add your event to my calendar please make it possible for me to cut and paste text easily into my Outlook or Google or other calendar.
  8. Sending out emails with nothing or very little in the body but a link to a PDF, JPG or website. I need to know exactly what I am supposed to be looking at before I open a website or an attachment or it’s no different from viruses and spam.

Originally published on reachfurther.com

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