Earlier in the week, I began a discussion about what you should not do with your email newsletters. In his article, “The Eight Deadly Sins of Email Marketing,” Ron Evans talks about the worst things you can do with your email marketing campaigns. Here are the final four “deadly sins:”
- Don’t send out HTML emails with broken links. Suppose you are trying to direct your subscribers to a product page on your web site, but the link is broken. Chances are, this lost opportunity will translate into lost sales for your company.
- Don’t send out un-optimized rich media emailings with large attachments that take a long time to download on a slow modem connection. In general, it’s not a good idea to send out attachments in your email newsletters, as there is a higher probability that your messages will get caught in spam filters.
If you use an email marketing service like iContact to send out your newsletters, you can’t have attachments with your emails because most email clients will block those emails. We do this to keep our deliverability rates as high as possible so that your subscribers will always receive the emails you send them through iContact.
- Don’t send out HTML mailings accidentally as TEXT.
- Don’t send mailings to people who have asked to be REMOVED. Even if you once had someone’s permission to send them your emails, if they ask to be removed from your list, you must remove them to remain CAN-SPAM compliant. Continuing to send emails to people who have asked to removed is the same thing as spamming them.
As Evans states at the end of the article, “Show respect to the individuals on your email lists, and pay careful attention to the details of the mailing itself, and you can reap the benefits of email marketing.” I hope you have a great weekend, and I’ll be back next week to share more tips and advice about email marketing.
Cheers,
Ryan Allis
