Cheat Sheet: Marketing Email No-Gos

May 31, 2022 Stan

Most marketing email articles and blogs focus on when you SHOULD send an email, so I decided to write about the lesser-known topic of when you should NOT send a marketing email.

Below are examples of when you should NOT send a marketing email.

You do not have permission

Marketers have all experienced this before. Sales insists you must email the entire database. You know it’s not a good idea, but you still must send the marketing email campaign anyway. Then they ask you to send the same email multiple times to the same people! They figure the more you send the email, the more opens and clicks they get. Wrong! That is called spamming.

It is important to make sure that you have permission to send your contact list marketing emails. Not only will it help improve engagement and deliverability, but it will also result in fewer spam complaints. The best way to get permission is through a double opt-in process using a signup form and an automated email confirming subscription.

You purchased a list

Purchasing a list might seem like a silver bullet to marketers. A purchased list of contacts can quickly and effortlessly increase the size of their database. However, many ESPs (Email Service Providers) prohibit sending to purchased lists. If you can get the new contacts into your email system, you will still encounter additional issues. The data you purchase is typically “dirty,” meaning it may not be up-to-date or accurate. Most likely the contacts in the purchased list do not know who your company is and mark your marketing email as spam. If you are lucky and they don’t mark you as spam, most likely they will not open or click, lowering your deliverability and sender score.

You have not sent to a list in a long time

You should never send to a stale list. An email list or database will go stale pretty quickly if you don’t send to it on a regular basis. Even if the list was not purchased and added through a double opt-in process, it can still become old. If you don’t keep in touch with your subscribers often enough, they may forget who you are or that they signed up for your emails in the first place. This can result in high bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes.

Some ways to prevent your lists from getting stale are to create a campaign schedule or to send monthly newsletters, blogs, and reengagement emails. You can also create a marketing email campaign to reconfirm their subscriptions.

You have already sent too many

One of the most frequent mistakes email marketers make is over sending to their subscribers. Determining how much your audience actually wants to hear from you, not how much and often you want to speak to them, is key to the success of your marketing email efforts.

A few ways to do this is asking for email frequency preferences, surveying, and using segmentation. Finding the sweet spot of email frequency for your subscribers will result in less unsubscribes and more engagement.

Your email has not been proofed or tested

The final step before hitting send on your marketing email should always be testing and QA (Quality Assurance). Whether it’s a checklist on paper, an Excel spreadsheet, a form, or a system, it is vital to check your email for correct grammar, spelling, and for accuracy. Other items to verify are whether your links work, that your tracking is present, your personalization and variable content is displaying properly, and you have a way for contacts to unsubscribe. Any ESP you use should allow you to send an email test to yourself or to preview a live version on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

If you want to take your email testing to the next level, you can use a tool called Litmus to view how your email will render across various email clients and devices that are popular with your audience.

Your email is all images or has no images

There is a fine line between using too many images or not enough. You should use at least one image in your marketing email, but don’t use one big image or a bunch of images to build the entire email (which can be considered spam by filters). If your subscribers have their “images off” their user experience will not be a good one.

It is also important to not make your images too large which can affect email load times (Litmus can provide this information in addition to rendering). Make sure to add alt text to your images as well. Alt text is written copy that appears in place of an image in an email or on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen.

Your marketing email does not follow CAN-SPAM laws

Getting your marketing emails marked as spam is bad enough, but it’s actually illegal to not provide a way for your subscribers to easily unsubscribe from receiving your emails. Most country’s email marketing laws also stipulate that people need to give you permission to email them for you to send them campaigns

You are not allowed to use misleading header information, such as the from name, subject line, and reply-to address. You must also not try to purposely deceive your audience and pretend that you are sending a personal email from a friend.

A valid postal address for your business must be clearly included in your email campaigns (this is usually put in the email footer) along with a way for contacts to opt-out of receiving future emails from you. You can find more information on the CAN-SPAM Act here.

If you need help deciding when you should not send an email, or when you should, Relationship One is always here to help! We can build and implement a double-opt in program, utilize segmentation, and analytics to improve your deliverability, and most importantly–help you send to the right people at the right time.

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