Don’t be the Grinch who stole strategic email marketing:
Our biggest email marketing pet peeves & why they peeve us off
We have all opened our inboxes only to groan with annoyance at the influx of cheesily-worded, misspelled email marketing headlines we have no interest in. From mass communications you can clearly tell were not well-targeted through to repetitious messaging that holds only misery on your Monday morning, some emails more than miss the mark: they just suck and in doing so, suck the life out of this otherwise very effective method of messaging.
This lack of effort or effectiveness is the exact reason email marketing has a contentious reputation. We previously discussed in our discussion of the death of this medium and asserted our belief in its branding and conversional prowess. While we maintain we do love this method of marketing, we do not love when it’s clear that the sender has thrown together something and sent it out in a shot-gun approach to stay in touch. So, what are our email marketing must-hates?
- There is NO excuse for email marketing with errors
There is nothing that will destroy your credibility faster than penning an email with punctuation and spelling errors. People interpret these rookie mistakes as being demonstrative of carelessness, which translate to a lack of respect for the reader’s time and value. Double and triple check any communications you are sending out to ensure they are error-free and exude the level of quality and competence you want associated with your brand.
- Inconsistent branding may make your audiences cringe
Your email may be well-designed and beautifully written, but if your click-through CTA’s send customers to a foreign looking landing page, they will be thrown off. Ensure your email marketing campaigns are structured in such a way that they boast consistency and thoughtfulness from beginning to end. Upfront, this requires a good deal of work, but once you have established the right templates and conversion funnel, small tweaks should help you avoid this email faux pas.
- Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but bad design will destroy your email marketing campaign
Why do you think Marie Kondo is now a multimillionaire? It’s because people like order. We want to feel like we have our lives together and we want to have that same sense about your brand. This is why templates and well-managed design are important. If you have too many fonts, too many photos of all shapes and sizes and no sense of organization, your customers may go so far as to think your email spam or, at the very least, something that does not deserve their time and attention.
- Keeping with the design failures: let’s talk about unimaginably icky image optimization
Even the best-intentioned designs will not save you if your email marketing campaign includes a variety of pointless pictures that don’t serve a purpose. If your images are not optimized properly, they will either get marked as spam or appear as that stupid little puzzle piece that indicates the file was too large to download. Either way, not a good look for an email marketer who needed that spicy banner to get their strategic point across.
- We need to take action re: poorly managed calls to action
This may be the most important thing we write today. The point of email marketing is to insight conversions. Whether that is learning about a new product, making a purchase or signing up for an event, you should have an intention at the forefront of every email campaign.
Don’t make people guess at what the action they are supposed to take is. Instead of having five so-so calls to action, choose one or two really potent ones that motivate people to click. Even more importantly, don’t you dare send an email with no actionable statements. A buttonless email marketing piece is like a Covid pandemic without hand sanitizer, simply a nightmare.
Keep it simple. Keep it strategic. And, take care not to Schitt the bed.
Email marketing has a lot of positive potential, but it also has a lot of potential to piss off your consumers. What’s somewhat to extremely frightening about the ease with which email can go wrong is that once your target hits unsubscribe, you are essentially SOL. Thanks to increasingly stringent email marketing legislation and the instantaneous ability to block businesses, you need to invest time, brain cells and branding strategy into every communication that leaves your digital door. Otherwise, you become like the most disgusting food to ever be made: Spam.
Don’t lose out on direct access to your consumers’ inboxes. Do email differently (and better) with CR Creative. We offer comprehensive email marketing services – from strategic campaign planning through to the minutiae of design and consumer targeting. With our support you can click send knowing your email does not suck, but rather, rocks and will actively assist in achieving your business’s goals.
Reach out to our team today and let’s talk about how we can curate email marketing experiences that get a thumbs up, rather than a middle finger.
