People are hard to please, aren’t they? Particularly those who have subscribed to your email marketing campaigns, only to lambast you with shirty replies or bunk you off entirely by unsubscribing later on. So what do your subscribers hate about your email marketing?
What gives? Was it something you said?
Possibly. It might also be something you did (even if entirely inadvertently).
With that in mind, here are what we believe to be the top ten pet hates about email marketing. How many have you accidentally subjected your subscribers to recently?
1. You haven’t made it easy to unsubscribe
There’s nothing more frustrating than being unable to unsubscribe from a mailing list.
This is email marketing 101, but is so easily overlooked by so many marketers. Make it ultra-obvious how one can unsubscribe from your mailings. Subscribers hate that.
2. Weird/vague subject lines
An annoying subject line will immediately mark your email as spam in the mind of the recipient. Make it stand taller than the rest!
3. Subscribers hate irrelevant content
If you’re using an email marketing platform like mailingmanager, you can segment, automate and personalise emails to ensure the right stuff gets to the right people.
Why aren’t you using those features?
4. Poor (or no) proofreading
Read the last email you sent that didn’t perform well. Do the words leap off the page or are they dull and full of errors?
5. You spent five paragraphs talking about yourself
Your subscribers care about one thing – themselves. Rambling on about your company and how many awards you have won’t win you any friends (or customers). Make the email about them.
6. Too many emails
There’s a limit to how much email one person can take – particularly if it originates from the same recipient. Do you want your subscribers to hate your very name?
7. No call-to-action (CTA)
What do you want people to do with your email? If there’s no CTA, they’ll be left scratching their heads and you’ll have wasted your time.
8. Way too much design
Email marketing messages should look beautiful, absolutely, but too much design and it’ll steal the limelight from the content.
Don’t over-design your emails. Make them look fantastic, but treat white space with the same reverence you treat that which is occupied. Don’t create something your subscribers are going to hate!
9. noreply@yourcompany.com
Email marketing shouldn’t be a faceless endeavour, yet if you send out an email that doesn’t enable the person to simply hit ‘reply’ and get back to you, subscribers may not take action.
10. Forgetting the text-only version
In an age where we have an abundance of computing power within our smartphones, you might think that text-only emails are rather old fashioned.
The opposite is true; with poor connectivity still rife, the ability to quickly view emails in their ‘raw’ form is still desired, and if you don’t include that option, you might be alienating a huge section of your subscriber base.
Wrapping up
Go on – be honest: how many of the above have you fallen foul of?
Don’t worry – we all do it. It’s the ability to learn from one’s mistakes and move on that makes a brilliant email marketer.
