8 Poor Email Marketing Practices to Avoid

Using email marketing can be an effective way to attract new subscribers while simultaneously boosting your profits. Needless to say, it is important to understand that a haphazardly thrown-together email marketing campaign isn’t going to cut it. In order for your email campaign to be effective, you must avoid bad behavior. In this post, we will discuss some of the worst email marketing practices that must be avoided at all costs.

1. Not Using An Opted-In Email List

Many people involved in social selling believe that spreading the word about their business will be helpful – no matter how they do it. This could not be further from the truth. It is important to directly target people who will be interested in your product or service.

With this in mind, you should never use or purchase a pre-created email list. This type of list has been assembled without any standards, and will most likely contain emails of people who may not be interested in what you are offering. While getting people to opt-in might be time consuming, your email list will be far more effective for lead generation and boost your sales in the long run. Remember trust is always earned, not bought.

2. Using and Sending the Same Email Repeatedly

Some marketers get busy or lazy and end up sending the same email to their list numerous times. This will be detrimental to your business. First and foremost, the receiver will immediately spot the emails and mark them as spam. Secondly, if the email was not effective the first time, it probably will not be effective the second time. If you are looking for a more effective sales hack to boost your brand, then do your due diligence and send freshly created emails every time.

3. Using Bad Content

Another major mistake that social marketers frequently make is using content that is not worth a penny. If your content is not engaging, you are going to have a big problem on your hands. Readers will lose interest over time and decide that your email list or blog is not worth following.

At the same time, you should never send out emails which are littered with misspellings and grammatical errors. Believe it or not, this will immediately ruin your chance of making a sale. By sending out a poorly written email, you are signaling to your reader that you have poor quality control. If so, how can they trust the product or service that you are marketing?

Always make sure your content is top-notch and thoroughly engaging before hitting the send button. Likewise, you should carefully check your landing page’s content. Is your email sending your reader to your website? If so, ensure that the landing page is engaging. The last thing you want to do is send your potential clients running in the other direction – into the arms of your competitors.

5. Not Honoring Unsubscribe Requests

There is nothing worse than discovering a bunch of spam in your email inbox. Not only do you have to take the time to open each message, but you also have to unsubscribe, send the email to spam, and hope you never receive another one like it. This can take up a lot of time that most busy people simply do not have to spare. If you are looking to expand your sales pipeline, you should not send emails to people who have already submitted unsubscribe requests from your list.

If someone unsubscribes to your emails, you should comply by removing their name from your email list. By doing so, you will be showing your email users that you are a reputable and trusted social seller.

6. Failing to Practice What You Preach

Do you continuously give advice to people? For example, telling them to utilize white-hat methods, but yet choosing to use black-hat methods yourself? If you want to come across as a trustworthy social seller, then practice what you preach and avoid dirty marketing practices.

7. Overloading Your Email With Too Much Content

We often hear the phrase “content is king”. While this may be true when you are creating a 3,000 word blog post, the reverse applies for your email.

Understand that a large portion of your subscribers are likely to check their emails on a mobile device. As such, overloading your email with pictures, wild graphics and design elements is only going to annoy them, not to mention the time it takes to download the email.

Keep your message simple and have a single call-to-action. Do not try to accomplish several goals in one email.

8. Baiting Your Readers

Ever heard of “clickbaiting”? It is creating content with the sole purpose of attracting the reader’s attention, and encouraging them to click on your desired link in order to generate advertising revenue.

Clickbait can exist in many forms, one of which is email. Relying on sensational headlines or a controversial thumbnail to drive traffic to your site is not going to bode well for you. Presently, people are getting better at spotting clickbait-type content and will not hesitate to block you from their social networks immediately.

Make no mistake – there is a difference between creating a headline that converts, versus trying to purposefully exploit a reader’s curiosity. The lesson here? Never take advantage of your readers.

Final Thoughts

We’ve gone through 8 forms of poor email practices to avoid. Take a look at your marketing schedule and analyze your upcoming content. Are you recycling old emails? Is your next post full of HTML elements or colorful GIFs? If so, your best course of action now is to start fixing what you can. Building a great email list takes effort and time, so make sure that whatever you send counts.

Koka Sexton

The leader in social selling methodology and ranked #1 in Forbes for social selling. Bringing the science of social selling to the business world and delivering ROI on social media.