Email Marketing – Some Big DON’TS

I subscribe to MediaPost’s Email Insider newsletter and every day I receive some valuable little nugget of information.  This post by Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop, details some generally accepted best practices for email marketing.  It’s so great I simply had to pass it along to our readers.  I’ve condensed the info to highlight Loren’s important DON’Ts of a successful email marketing campaign.  You can read the post in its entirety by subscribing to MediaPost’s Email Insider blog.

DON’T

1. Make it difficult to unsubscribe.  When you camouflage your unsubscribe link, recipients will click the spam button so frequently that ISPs block your emails. Make it easy to unsubscribe, but also make it easy to give your subscribers alternatives to do what they really want, like changing format, frequency, email address or interests.

2. Forget to include a “Welcome” message and/or wait weeks to send the first message.

3. Overmail. This is typically the number one or two reason people hit the spam-complaint button or unsubscribe.

4. Use a large single image as the core of your email.  Not only does this create a problem with recipients who use preview panes, have images blocked, it can also get your email blocked or filtered to junk folders by ISPs such as Hotmail. 

5. Overlook the use of alt tags.  An alt tag is the HMTL code that describes an image and displays when the email client/ISP blocks the image. Have your email designer and copywriter create descriptive tags for each image.

6. Rely on graphical links.  If recipients can’t see the image-based link, then they won’t click on it.  Use text links, especially for navigation and key calls to action, and create HTML buttons that render even when the email client blocks the corresponding image buttons.

7. Omit a preference center.  Make it easy for subscribers to change their email address, frequency, format and profile/preferences

8. Forget to design your email for the preview pane.  More than a quarter of consumer users and half of all business users read email in a preview pane.

9. Use a person’s name in the “from” line. Tell the recipient the email is from “Company A”. 

10. Hide email registration.  Sell potential subscribers at every possible turn, with an invitation that highlights your email benefits, on every page of your Web site.