Email Marketing Tips at the Atomic Level: Doing Your Quality Control
In email marketing, you usually have a couple of chances to impress your reader. After all, it takes more work to actually click the unsubscribe button and confirm that you don’t want to be on the list than to just hit the delete button. As a marketing medium, therefore, email can be a bit more forgiving than some others. However, if you consistently disappoint your readers you have not only missed an opportunity now … but destroyed an opportunity in the future. Disappointing email messages create not just an indifferent impression, but an actively negative one, and the fastest way to disappoint is with messages that don’t work properly! These email marketing tips detail the quality control steps that expert internet marketers use, and can trip up the DIY crowd of email marketing fairly quickly.
Broken links
These are just as much of an annoyance in email communications as they are on the web. Use copy-paste when you are inserting links into email messages, and test links yourself (especially important ones) before sending out to your entire list.
Duplicate messages
People may be interested in your message the first time they see it. If it appears more than once, they’ll likely feel a little annoyed (which may be transferred onto your company). Any more than that, and your credibility in the customer’s eyes is starting to be seriously affected.
Personalization fields that aren’t personalized
Personalization adds a great deal to email marketing, especially when it goes beyond just inserting the customer’s name. However, it can have an even greater negative effect when the fields aren’t working properly! It feels low-quality and sort of seedy to receive a message that says, “Hello [Customer name]! We’d like to follow up on your recent purchase of [Product description].”
Faulty unsubscribe pages
Not only is it in violation of the CAN SPAM Act to not provide a valid way for people to opt out of the email list, it is plain annoying. Your customer may wish to return to the store to purchase something, or come back to your website for another reason, and might simply not need the unsolicited contact any more. If you don’t let them out, you’ll make an enemy forever.
Missing images
The most valuable email marketing tip you will hear is also the simplest … Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V! This is usually the remedy for missing pictures as well as broken links. Ensure your picture uploader is working correctly, also.
Email marketing tips focus so often on content, when more often it is technical issues that sabotage effectiveness. Getting expert help can make a big difference to your campaign.
