Common Email Marketing Mistakes

This is is the final of a three-part series written by our email marketing solution partners, MailingManager, in an attempt to cover every aspect of spam and ensure you are making the most out of your email marketing efforts.

If you haven’t read the first two parts of this series just click here and here to be redirected to part one and two respectively.

Common Email Marketing Mistakes

CAPITAL LETTERS in the subject header
There’s really no need to do this anyway as it makes your mail look unprofessional. People in a bid to stand out in the inbox of their recipients put the whole subject header in capital letters. Instead of grabbing their attention it has the complete opposite effect as the recipient will only ever view it if they look at the junk folder.

!!!
Yes we get it, you have a cracker of a sale on. There’s more effective, more original, and less spammy methods to grab their attention than exclamation marks throughout the email and subject line.

The Clumsy Mistakes
There are a few slips that sometimes people don’t realise they’re doing or are just forgotten when creating a campaign that are worth remembering when sending out campaigns.

“Dear xxxx”
Spam filters flag this and give it a reasonably high score if you put Dear as the opening sentence to your campaign. Try doing “Hi” “Hey” “Good Morning” etc. instead.

Text part doesn’t match html content
This is one of those lazy mistakes that can give your email quite a high spam score. You’ve created your email and asked for it to be multi-part but instead of creating the text version, you’ve left it as the standard “your email can’t view this email, view it here online”. The filters don’t like this. Luckily for the lazy ones, mailingmanager has an auto text content creator within the system so use that to create an easy text version of your campaign.

Being too Spam word free
I have to put my hands up and say I only ready this a week or so ago and it was new to me then. I also can’t for the life of me remember where exactly I read it so I apologise for not linking through the original article.
Apparently having an email that has zero spam keywords in is also bad and raises the alarm in the spam filters. So whilst watching your spam keywords, make sure you don’t go over the top.

“Test” subject header
Obviously this will never go out to your customers but when you’re testing your campaigns, avoid using the subject line “test” as you may find yourself baffled as to why your email is going into the junk folder.

Sending tests to multiple people within the same company
So you’ve finished your email and you want to send it to everyone in your department to see what they think. One or two get it but the rest either don’t or it takes ages for them to receive it. The problem you’ve experienced is that your companies Spam filter has flagged your test as a Spam attack. Try to keep it to only a couple and test across addresses. This also helps you look at the rendering at the same time – handy!

All LCN.com customers can get an email marketing campaign off the ground with a full Mailing Manager account topped up with 500 free email credits by logging into the LCN.com control panel and selecting ‘bonus features’
For more information about the Mailing Manager email marketing solution please visit: www.mailingmanager.co.uk