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17 Things That Scream

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You assume everyone wants to hear from you. Assuming everyone wants to hear from you is tantamount to ignoring your customers.

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Cadence & Timing Matter How often you send email is just as important as the time you send it. A restaurant sending an email about lunch specials at 11:45am might miss the mark.

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You ignore responsive design & think it’s a fad. It’s not a fad. It’s what makes emails look good on mobile phones & tablets.

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You keep trying to send even after hard bounces. Disrespecting the hard bounce may make you look like a spammer to an ISP.

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You think buying a list is an email marketing strategy. This might be the number one thing that makes you look like a rookie.

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If an IP gets blocked, just route the mail onto another one! Again, this is a tactic commonly used by spammers. If you do this you will only decrease the likelihood your email will arrive to the inbox. Setup an IP for commercial email, and one for transactional and build positive sending reputations on both. That’s the only route to success.

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You think unsubscribes are for losers. Unsubscribe mechanisms are not only a good practice, but are required by the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.

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You think you’re going to make email great again by sending as much of it as possible! The right amount of email will change from business to business, but using data to gauge how and when they consume your email is the key.

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You feel you have no time to target Ever heard the phrase the right email for the right person, at the right time and optimized for the right platform? Targeting an offer to a person most likely to be receptive to it requires past purchase history, preference centers, opens, clicks, unsubscribe data -- all of the things that help you be smart about your digital comms.

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You don’t understand how to get to a segment of one. A segment of one means you know so much about your customer you personalize the heck out of every communication, making it a unique experience.

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You’ve landed on a blacklist and don’t know about it

Having integrated tools such as 250ok in your arsenal will alert you if you’ve been added to a blacklist and help you remedy it.

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You don’t think you need to pay attention to the acronyms: SPF, DKIM, DMARC: These are all part of email authentication and help you protect your brand and your customers from phishing and spammers.

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You try to win back unsubscribes by re-subscribing them. Whoa! You should try to win them back, but re-subscribing unsubscribers is a major no-no.

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You make your subject lines need to be big bold and say anything to get them to click.

No, no they don’t. Check with the FTC’s guidelines on the value of truth in advertising.

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Stuffing offers into shipping and receiving confirmation emails. Transactional email closes the loop on a transaction, generally initiated by a customer. There is an unwritten rule that says 80% of the content in a transactional email should be transactional, 20% marketing.

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Making the font for your unsubscribe link white, like the background.

Refer to the FTC’s guidelines: clean and conspicuous. The alternative? If they mark your message as spam because they can’t find the unsub link

(or you didn’t include it) then your entire reputation suffers.

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A real physical mailing address is required You might think you’re being snarky by putting in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as your mailing address, but the FTC and CAN-SPAM won’t think so. Snarky may work on your audience in other forms of communication, but when it comes to

email, it just makes you look like a spammer (and a rookie).

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For a more insight (and the snarkier version), read the full blog post here:

https://sparkpo.st/td4bz