When Email Marketing Won’t Work

Email marketing is a wonderful communication and marketing tool.  Email marketing can also be abused and overused.  Make sure that you focus on your email marketing being the former rather than the latter.  There are numerous resources available that you can tap on how to become a successful email marketer.  Search online.  Pick a random set of 5 or 10.  You will get more than a few great tips on how to do the right thing.

For a change, I thought I would cover the things that don’t and won’t work with email marketing.  Keep these in mind to as you discover and optimize this powerful communication medium.  Or count on it to go from being powerful to powerless –

1. Don’t send email to mass lists (typically purchased)
2. Careful not to use mis-used/abused words and symbols in the subject line so you don’t get marked as spam – e.g. FREE (especially in all caps) or !!!!
3. Never send an email that does not include an Unsubscribe link
4. Does your content really matter?  Is it interesting?  Don’t send email without first putting yourself in the place of the recipient and assessing its impact.  Do not send irrelevant, mass e-blasts!
5. Don’t send email too often (use your judgement on what this may be – again, put yourself on the receiving end!).
6. Never send email without some tests to ensure that links are working and that images look as they should – at least in the most popular email clients.  Here are some of the top ones – Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail, Gmail, Apple Mail and now a slew of Smartphones as well.
7. Finally, perhaps most important but often overlooked, don’t forget this – have a CLEAR OBJECTIVE for your email.  This will help you determine the recipient list (this may be a subset of all your contacts), the content, the subject line and a clear call to action.

More power to you!