Top 4 email worst practices and solutions

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1. Not honoring unsubscribe requests.

“You need to unsubscribe users as soon as they make the request. The CAN-SPAM Act is very clear on this issue that you are legally required to remove all opt-outs from your email marketing list within 10 days’ time. CRM software can help with this process as the opt-out request is processed immediately. The problem comes with when people choose to remove unsubscribed addressed from your list manually. If you choose to go that route, make it an absolute high propriety to manually process this request as quick as possible as to not lose sight of it,” said Matt Zajechowski, Reachmail.”

2. Emailing those who never opted-in.

“One of the worst practices you can do in email marketing is add someone to your email marketing list that never opted in to your list in the first place. Besides the fact that the CAN-SPAM laws prohibit this practice, your open and click-through rates are likely to be far poorer than emailing someone who opted in,” said Zajechowski. “Take the steps to grow your email list is an honest and open manner. You can offer deals and rewards to help grow your list naturally. By doing this your brand’s likeability is much less likely to suffer. Nobody wants to be solicited with emails they don’t want to receive.”

3. Not including a clear call to action.

Zajechowski says without a clear call-to-action, subscribers will be confused, and will most likely delete that email. He advises giving each campaign a clear purpose.

“Give your recipients a very easy to follow next step to take. Make you’re messaging as clear as possible with action your desired outcome prominent. Believe it or not, this is very frustrating for the email receipt as well. Without a clear call-to-action your recipient is more than likely to just give up on the email and delete it. Make your wording clear and make sure that your links or buttons within the email are displayed prominently,” said Zajechowski.

4. Not optimizing for mobile.

“As of August 2016, 55% of all emailed are now opened on a mobile device. If you are not optimizing your email marketing for mobile devices, you are really ignoring a large part of the marketplace,” said Zajechowski. “With many people now reading and checking their emails exclusively on their mobile devices, email marketers need to make mobile optimization a top priority. You should best testing all email messages to see how they display on mobile devices and tablets before sending it out. When things’ aren’t displaying properly, you should be taking the time and effort that is necessary for it to display properly. It can be hard enough to get opens and click-throughs on desktop emails, so don’t make it harder to do on those smaller mobile devices.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Knight-1
Kristina Knight, Journalist , BA
Content Writer & Editor
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Kristina Knight is a freelance writer with more than 15 years of experience writing on varied topics. Kristina’s focus for the past 10 years has been the small business, online marketing, and banking sectors, however, she keeps things interesting by writing about her experiences as an adoptive mom, parenting, and education issues. Kristina’s work has appeared with BizReport.com, NBC News, Soaps.com, DisasterNewsNetwork, and many more publications.