Email Marketing - What Not To Do

With the explosion of Internet popularity email marketing, advertising and trading it seems that every new, or well established, business is trying to get a foothold in this market space and the opportunities that it presents. Such ambition is to be applauded and encouraged as email advertising is quickly becoming a top method of reaching customers quickly with a fairly low overhead for the business in question. The drawback with this method is in its very popularity as many businesses in Calgary, and other major Canadian cities, are competing for the customer’s attention and any given email address may be bombarded with dozens of advertisements a day.

There are many ways to try to make your email marketing campaign or ezine stand out and catch the customer’s attention, however, there are also many things that can stand in the way of being successful at this type of marketing as well.

Some of the mistakes made in email marketing are basic marketing problems. An advertisement with bad graphic design or organization is a concern no matter the medium. In electronic medium this issue further extends to whether your advertisement is an html formatted ezine or email, or if it is text formatted. Both are acceptable but the option to switch between them should exist as some email servers will not properly display the html code. Graphics and sales pitch that your customers are unable to see will not properly carry your message or bring sales in the door.

Beyond the actual message in the advertising and the format of your ezine or email the other major pitfalls in an email marketing campaign exist in the marketing techniques used. These techniques often seem like a good idea when you are first creating your strategy for getting names on your mailing list and reaching the most customers, but can often lead instead to email that is discarded immediately, blocked as spam and, potentially, your entire mail service may be blocked by one or more ISPs including your own.

Therefore, things to avoid:

• Purchasing mailing lists.
• Sending unsolicited emails.
• Using Software bots or spiders.
• Denying opt out of mailings.
• Providing false contact information or no contact information.

Each of these techniques has appealing angles, but should be avoided as they tend to generate more customer ire than sales. Let’s consider each in detail.

Purchasing Mailing Lists

Many small web companies base their businesses on selling out lists of email addresses for email campaigns, much as some offline companies gather phone numbers for use in telemarketing campaigns. The problem with these lists is that the vast majority of the time many of these addresses are invalid and will simply bounce back. Those that get through often are not going to your target audience and are immediately deleted or blacklisted. This becomes a major problem when you have a product that the customer may want, but you’ve been blacklisted for a previous email or ezine for products they did NOT want. With most mailing lists you can expect 80% of your list business to come from 20% of the list. This number goes up if the list is highly focused on customers that have chosen to join the list voluntarily, therefore showing they are interested in your company and products, and goes down significantly when your list is a broad range of email addresses lacking any kind of audience focus.

Sending Unsolicited Emails

As mentioned previously the business return on a mailing list is around a 20/80 split, where 20% of the mailing list will provide 80% of the business that is generated by the mailing list. In many cases this seems to be an encouragement to make the list as padded as possible and send out as many emails as possible. The problem with this logic is that the ratio of business from your list decreases greatly when the bulk of the advertising being sent out goes to uninterested parties that did not choose to be on the list. More frequently these unsolicited emails cause the customer to be annoyed and to quickly mark your emails or ezine as spam and blacklist all further communication with your company. The more effective technique is to provide many opportunities for the interested to sign up for your mailing list. A raffle requesting email addresses, or newsletter and updates opt in link on your home pages are both much better ways to gather the information of the interested and created a highly focused email campaign. On top of these concerns is the issue that these emails, commonly referred to as spam, are valid reasons for multiple ISPs to block email sent from your domain, and your own ISP may even close down your email services.

Using Software Bots or Spiders

Software bots or spiders are terms used to refer to programs that comb the internet, pulling down email addresses, or any other text formatted as an email address. IE: Blah@blah.com. This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Gathering email addresses with these methods leads directly to sending unsolicited emails and the problems associated with such a campaign. For the expense that is associated with these programs it is much better to provide legitimate methods for customers to opt onto your mailing list and receive targeted advertising. This increases your advertising to sales ratio significantly without the expense of these net sniffing programs.

Denying Opt Out of Mailings

Few things annoy email customers more than getting unsolicited emails, unless it is not only receiving unsolicited emails from a list, but not being able to get off of it. The way most consumers deal with such situations is to simply blacklist all email coming from the list and report it as spam to their ISP. Some businesses fear that by giving the opt out link on their mailing list that potential customers will remove themselves from the list before any advertising can be sent. If you are using good business practices as far as the creation of your mailing lists this should not be of concern, and the opt out link simply reassures the customer that you are not being pushy but trying to provide them with a valuable service, and one they are interested in keeping. Trapping customers in a situation does not make them buy, but causes a great deal of irritation.

Providing False Contact Information or No Contact Information

The best email campaigns will include contact information for the customer. Leaving this information off or giving contact information that doesn’t directly reach you can be quickly detrimental to your business. If a customer is having problems purchasing your product or receiving your emails they may try to contact you to get the problems resolved. The harder it is for a customer to reach someone to resolve their problem the less likely the customer will be to purchase anything from your business. The best advertising is that which invites the consumer with relevant information and strong customer support. The more confident the customer is with your service and your support the more comfortable they will be to place an order with your company over your competition. As well, for many ISPs a lack of contact information in marketing emails is a valid reason to black list your domain.

As the amount of business conducted over the Internet continues to increase the advertising niche for email marketing will increase. In order for this increase to benefit your company you need to develop good marketing habits and techniques that will keep your emails off of the spam list and in the hands of interested customers who are the heart of your business!