The essence of a good email is sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Unfortunately, many email marketers make several common mistakes:
- Assuming that Email is Free
- Assuming that “Good” content is the same for all recipient personas
- Assuming that more content is better
#2 and #3 are understandable. After all, your team might have spent a lot of time and effort to create quality content and you want to get your money’s worth. Reusing content, combining it with other pieces, or calling it out in different ways are marketing best practices. However, there are some other best practices that need to be adopted as well.
Generic is boring
There is an American electronics retailer that emails me several times a week. Unfortunately, the content is often the generic “We have new products!” or “We have a sale!” with a call to action that really means “search on our website (to maybe sorta, kinda see if there is anything relevant to you)”. Why should I bother? It’s lazy, generic marketing that makes me work to find any value in it. It’s a throwback to the Sunday newspaper advertisement circulars that had a little bit on sale for everyone; but that is now obsolete.
If you are sending a generic email like this, stop now. There are better ways to engage potential customers through simple segmentation or self-selected segmentation. For example, this retailer could send out an email by brand (Samsung, Apple, LG, etc), or by category (appliance, PC, mobile, smart tv, etc.), giving the recipient enough information to entice further interaction with their site. While still somewhat generic, it is more targeted and there are is direct value to open it if I resonate with that brand or product. Even better would be a tailored email of new and sale items based on prior browsing and purchase history.
Brevity is the soul of wit
Brevity is also the key to engagement. Do you read long emails from advertisers? Most people don’t. A short, direct email with a clear call to action gets more attention than a lengthy email, no matter how well written. This is easier to accomplish once you stop sending generic emails.
A picture is worth a thousand words…
And, many pictures can be confusing… One or two images per major idea should be sufficient to communicate your brand values and the ideas you need to get across. Just as with brevity in verbiage, more meaningful, connected images make a larger impact.
A broken link goes nowhere
A broken or malformed link also does you no good. Checking the number and endpoints of every link, especially calls-to-action will improve the quality of your email and may potentially save you from looking like spam.
Email Delivery
While these Best Practices are written to improve content to achieve better email performance from a marketing, they will also improve your email delivery. Inbox Providers are attempting to serve users by prioritizing relevant email. Large, generic emails, or emails with many images or links look suspicious. In addition, because these types of emails tend to have poor open rates, they are also more likely to be mistaken for spam.
How can MxToolbox Help?
Our Inbox Placement tool analyzes your campaign emails before you send them. We determine if the email will make the inbox at major Inbox Providers like Google, Yahoo! and Outlook.com/Office365. We also analyze important technology and soft factors like:
- DMARC Compliance
- Broken or copious links
- Wordiness
- Broken or too many images
- Spammy verbiage
- Other indicators of spam
Inbox Placement is a feature of all Delivery Center plans, so you can test your marketing emails and improve your DMARC compliance all in one place.
Does DMARC and email deliverability seem too complicated?
MxToolbox Experts are here with a Managed Services approach to your email configuration issues.