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The easy mistakes to avoid with your email marketing

Email marketing: Whatever you think of an inbox rammed with emails from organisations you love, like or vaguely know, email marketing isn't going anywhere any time soon. And with the post-pandemic need to crank up sales, it might be you need to reengage with it.

An image of a cases of the tinned food SPAM, piled up so that that is literally all you can see in teh photo. Each tin has the word SPAM written clearly in yellow, on a blue background with an indistinct photo of the heavily processed meet slices. Spam in this image is suggesting that email marketing can sometimes be dealt with as spam, i.e. something unwanted and treated as junk.

Whether you’re driving content marketing through newsletters or more direct email marketing through a customer relationship management system, there’s a lot that goes into making a success of it your emails.

The chances are that, after a pandemic, you need your emails to work and to generate sales, business or whatever the right outcomes are. While a lot of good marketing is trial and error, or the process of iteration if you’re wanting to sound fancier, you can remove some of the more basic missteps with these little tips and make sure that all that work doesn’t end up being unread or in the spam filters. A little care can go a long way.

Don't buy or rent email lists

You can legally buy email lists, but it’s a bit dodgy, even if the potential recipients have apparently ‘agreed’ to receive communications (though the world of genuine permissions is a murky one).

More pertinently here, the chances of them being responsive to your missives are pretty low, not least considering they are unlikely to have heard of you. In the buying and selling of email addresses, the truism remains that people hoard high quality email data, they don’t pass it on.

If it bounces, give it up

When emails bounce back, it’s because of invalid or non-existent email addresses. So they aren’t going to work, no matter how hard you try… That means that not cleaning your email lists of those emails means you will have high bounce rates, which is one of the key factors internet service providers (ISPs) use to determine an email sender's reputation. Having too many hard bounces can cause them to block your campaigns altogether, and being blacklisted will kill your email plans stone dead.

DON'T BE SHOUTY IN THE SUBJECT LINE!!!

People who receive subject lines all in capital letters or with a long line of exclamation marks tend not to open it (open rates plummet according to most data). And if they don’t open it, all those carefully crafted emails will just go to waste. No-one likes being shouted at.

Don't use video, Javascript or forms within your email

It’s unlikely you’ll be using Flash anymore (it was blocked by Apple Safari last year and by Google Chrome in January 2021), and most email clients don’t allow video embeds of any kind. So don’t even bother to try, no matter how good it looks to you at your desk.

Use an image and a play button to link through to a web page, instead. Javascript is similarly problematic, while most email clients block any forms inside emails for security reasons. Always link out instead.

Don't include attachments to your emails

Many schools seem to do this - emailing to their lists and attaching letters them as separate documents. It’s an infuriating user experience (not least on a mobile) and also increases the chances of the email being blocked by spam filters. Either put the message in the email itself or, if you must, link to a file location on your website. And stop blocking up people’s email accounts.

Don't over-use the trigger words or keywords

One of the simpler ways of avoiding the spam filters is to carefully pick the words in the subject line to avoid common spam triggers. As a rule of thumb, the more horrifically salesy it sounds, the more likely it is to be a spam issue - ‘free’, ‘’no obligation’, that sort of thing.

It’s the same thought with keywords - while they may not trigger the spam filters in the same way, it just reads robotically. People react to humans, not robots so write in a way that’s engaging and not as if you were writing for Google to find you. There’s a place for keywords and this isn’t it.

Don't forget to use spell check

Bad spelling is not only grimly unprofessional, they’re also yet another spam trigger. Check your work. Come on, you don’t need us to tell you that.

Avoid large images (or large numbers of images)

Large image files, or lots of smaller ones, mean the message is likely to disappear into the spam filter. If you have to use some images, then compress images so they load faster, or make the file size as small as practical.

Outlook doesn’t recognise background images, so avoid those completely.

Telling you what not to do always sounds a little negative, but avoiding this range of small(ish) mistakes means that the creativity you can unleash will make your email marketing so much more effective. Making sure that the calls to action are clear, and always measuring what works well (and what less so) means that you can drive your lead generation and sales and get business back on track as the lockdown ends.