What Not to do in Your Email Strategy

The name of this game is deliverability and the majority of the eight things to avoid in your email marketing strategy are aimed at getting your messages into your customer’s inbox. Most of them are common sense tactics that you can incorporate into your next blast.

Overlooking Mobile

A worthwhile exercise is to examine your google analytics traffic and see how customers are accessing your site. You may be surprised at how many are reaching you via a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet. If they are accessing your site this way you can be sure they are probably checking email that way too.

Using Copious Amounts of Keywords

I’m sure you know that keyword stuffing — the art of cramming a keyword onto a page as many times as possible, thus compromising the integrity of your content — is taboo on your website, but did you know it can have a negative effect on your email marketing as well? Cool it on the keywords and keep the frequency around one percent to make it through the corporate filters.

Emailing People Who Have Bounced Repeatedly

High bounce rates are an instant red flag to spam filters and could get your domain blacklisted or your account disabled. Create a plan to remove bounced email addresses on a regular basis to keep your contact list clean. Plus, it will make you look good and you can brag in your next marketing meeting that you got the bounce rate down.

Forgetting to Test Before You Send

We’ve all been there. Pressed for time and an email that has to get out so you figure, just this once you can skip the test email. You hit the SEND button only to realize minutes later there’s a glaring typo in the subject line. Here is a quick list of questions to ask before you send your email to avoid having to send a mortifying apology email.

• Is the subject line catchy and spelled correctly?
• Do all the links work correctly and go to the right landing page?
• Are the mail merge fields functioning as intended?
• Have you included a call to action?
• Is your content clear of typos and grammatical errors?
• Are the images showing up and loading quickly?
• Does the email look good across all technology and email clients?
• Is your email going to the correct contact list?

Including Caps, Exclamation Points, Misspellings, Red Font, Spam Trigger Words

While high bounce rates are a red flag to spam filters, excessive use of capital letters, multiple exclamations points, bad grammar and spam related words are red flags to readers. These types of tactics drive recipients to report you as a spammer without even reading your content.

Buying or Renting Email Lists

It is so tempting and you might be bombarded daily by list brokers ready to give you thousands of emails for a bargain but buying or renting email lists is not something we suggest making a part of your email marketing strategy if you want long term success. These lists often have high bounce and high opt out rates making you look bad to your email marketing service provider.

Employing Videos, Flash, and JavaScript

Creating a flashy, sexy email using videos and other moving elements is a great idea. In theory. Unfortunately, even in 2017 Outlook and Google do not support video playback and other fancy flash or JavaScript effects, thus rendering your efforts null. If you get creative though, you can achieve a similar effect. Include a video thumbnail to link to the video or get on the GIF train and use animated images to make your emails stand out.

Embedding Forms and Attachments

This is another deliverability issue. To make your email marketing strategy as successful as possible, avoid embedding forms and attachments when sending mass emails to your contact lists. As an alternative, provide a clickable link to these types of elements and use them as a lead generation tool instead.

Stay in the Friend Zone

Avoiding some of the pitfalls mentioned above into your email strategy will keep your domain in the delivery friend zone and off the spam lists. If you have an email going out soon, check it against this list and see how it stacks up. Kudos to you if you are already there and if not, don’t worry there’s still time before you hit SEND.