It’s important to avoid these five mistakes because they have negative impacts for your company. Your recipients will stop reading your emails after opening them, they’ll stop opening the emails, and they’ll begin to ignore them altogether in their inbox.
Before hitting send check your email against these five “bad practices”.
- Don’t use noreply@company.com
- Don’t use all caps in the subject line
- Don’t overuse emojis or exclamation points
- Don’t overuse images (and compress the images before sending)
- Don’t be wordy or slow in getting to the point
Your open rate and click-through rate will increase if you avoid these bad practices for writing marketing emails. Your contacts will look forward to your emails because they will not be over-hyped but will be short and clear.
Why Avoid Using “noreply” Emails?
When recipients reply to an an email it’s a positive indicator to the email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) that the original sender, sent something worthwhile. The more of these positive flags you get, the higher your chances of getting into the inbox and avoiding the promotions tab or the spam folder.
Making your recipient work to contact you is also one of the bad results when using a “noreply” email address. Make it easy for your customers and leads to ask you questions.
Why Shouldn’t I Use All Caps?
A subject line with all caps does not grab attention. All caps is overused and emails using all caps in the subject line, get lost in the noise of inbox ocean.
Look at your inbox and take note of the subject lines of emails from your co-workers.
Mimic those subject lines as closely as possible. Marketing emails that look and feel like an email from a co-worker are more likely to reach the inbox and avoid the spam folder.
Why Should I Hold Back?????
Overusing exclamation points (and question marks) makes your email look like spam real quick. The same is true for emojis. You can use them but don’t overuse them to try to be emphatic.
What’s Wrong with 5 Images in an Email?
Remember, the goal is to make your marketing email look and feel like a normal one-on-one email. Most emails don’t have images in them. If you need an image, use one or two but make sure they are compressed.
Uncompressed images take up more space and can stop your email from reaching the recipient. Different email providers have different limits on the size an email is permitted to be before it’s rejected. By using 1-2 images and compressing them, you will not need to worry about having an email rejected because it’s too large.
If you don’t know how to compress an image, use Squoosh. It’s a web-based tool that will compress and resize images.
Words Are Free. Why Cut Back?
This isn’t a school assignment where you need to reach a certain word count. Say what you need to say and then stop.
No one does this better than Sticker Mule. Not only do they have a great product but they also send simple and clear marketing emails. There’s a screenshot below but first answer these questions:
- What are they selling?
- What’s in it for me (the reader of the email)?
- What action do I need to take to get the promotion?
Here’s the Sticker Mule email:
Here’s a follow up question. How many seconds did it take you to read the email and answer the first three questions? It probably took about 10 seconds.
Unfortunately most marketing emails take 10 seconds to get to the offer (or point) of the email.
This is one area you can get a leg up on your competition. If they are sending long and cumbersome emails and you are sending short and clear emails, you are gaining ground where they are losing it.
I don’t ignore emails from Sticker Mule because I know I can read it and understand the offer within 10 seconds. It’ll be easy for me to decide if this is an offer I want to accept or reject.
For many other brands, I ignore their emails altogether because I don’t want to take the time to wade through weeds of words and stumble of their long sentences.
You Can Have Successful Marketing Email
Avoid these five mistakes and your open rate and click-through rate will increase. Over time your audience will begin to look at your emails because they will learn there isn’t a huge time commitment required from them.
Check Out the Email Marketing Course by Touchdown Tech
This online course includes step-by-step video guides for setting up email marketing software, getting email ideas, and organizing your contacts/email in a way that makes sense and is scalable. Check out the course today to learn the steps we take to set up our clients for success!