Common Mistakes That Can RUIN Your Email Success

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There are plenty of mistakes that companies can make when crafting email campaigns or creating transactional emails. Fortunately, being aware of these mistakes will allow a company to easily avoid them and craft more deliverable emails.

Don’t End Up as Spam

Ending up as spam is probably the worst case scenario for business emails. There are certainly some common mistakes that can land your carefully crafted messages in the spam filter, and possibly even worse, your company on a blacklist.

1.       Too many links – using an abundance of hyperlinks in any particular email is a great way to end up in the spam folder. Of course links are vital to your strategy, so using them is important in email, but be sure to not overdo it.

2.       Too many images – Images are another great path to end up as spam. Much like hyperlinks, images are important but too many will definitely give the email a “spammy”, promotional vibe.

3.       Overly promotional content – “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck”, well, you know the rest. Craft subject lines and messages that truly inform the audience and educate them, rather than try to persuade them.

Employ Good Strategies

Diligently maintaining a series of best practices and protocols is important for any email strategy. Anyone involved should have a very clear understanding of what needs to be done when as it relates to the email campaign.

4.       List hygiene – More isn’t always better. The number one most important thing is that your email is delivered to the right people, not the most people. Pruning your subscriber lists on a regular basis is an essential practice to maintain high delivery rates to those subscribers you actually want to reach.

5.       Balanced content – Above I mentioned too many links or images can be detrimental. Too few can be as well. While it will not land you in spam folders, giant blocks of texts are not appealing to most readers. Diving text with images, headings, bold and italic fonts, and hyperlinks is important to balance the email.

Utilize Help

Email campaigns and strategy isn’t something you have to do alone. Nor do you need an army of employees. There are great tools are any company’s disposal to help manage their email efforts and save time and money.

6.       Automated programs – There are many programs that will help automate the sending and replying of business email. This can be monumentally helpful in reducing the time and resources needed to manage email lists.

7.       Deliverability services – Similarly there are applications and services that will help ensure you are maximizing deliverability. Analyzing the effectiveness and delivery rates of your email campaigns is crucial to improving their success in the future.

Jonathon Mahon is a content marketer, writer and designer based in Boston. He writes for various digital publications and blogs specializing in the cloud, email automation, software, and technology.​