5 Mistakes Email Marketers Make (And Why They're Bad)

Email marketers must, by nature, be multi-talented. We do everything from coding, to design, to client interfacing, to planning and strategy, at some point (and for some of us, as our daily job requirements). But when you're just starting out, it can be overwhelming. Here are few tips from mistakes I've seen around my inbox.

• Broken forms/not testing links

This one isn't exclusive to beginners. I recently signed up for a major retailer's (let's call them "Plate & Carol") email list through their signup form and received an email nearly a week later, which read something like this:

, We appreciate your taking the time to contact us at ___. Your email has been forwarded to a ___ representative who will contact you shortly. If you need to contact us in the meantime, please call...

Note the space and comma for the insertion of my name, which is missing - and was not even a field on the signup form. Not such an excellent welcome. Fixing this error would have been simple - by testing the subscription form. Many beginning email marketers use the "set it and forget it" approach when creating forms... or when asking the developers to set up a form. Whether it is you, yourself, who does the QA or someone in another department, be sure it gets done. You don't want a "Plate & Carol" moment.

And broken links? I can't even begin to count the number of emails I have received that included at least one (or in some cases, all of them) link that went to a "Page Not Found" or other error. Test your links, make sure they work, that the product is still in stock, that the other site you are linking to isn't down. In short, make sure every single link works. Including your navigation and other links that are part of your template and included in every email you send. Better safe than sorry.

• Cross-client compatibility

Oh, Outlook 2007. How your Word rendering engine plagues email marketers everywhere. Though Outlook is infamous for its compatibility issues, there are other caveats with other clients that you'll want to remember when creating an HTML email. Most email clients don't support stylesheets the way they are usually used on the web, so all styles need to be inline - that is, within the tag that contains the text that you want to be styled.Campaign Monitor offers a great cheat sheet for which email clients support which CSS tags. As you can see, there are few clients that support every tag, and it's very difficult to design a template that will work flawlessly in every ISP. Again, test, test, test. Create test accounts with every ISP you can, including Hotmail/Live Mail, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, and if you can, Outlook 2007 or 2010. Look at your email in each client, in all the major browsers. Use your actual subject line, to ensure that it doesn't go in the Bulk or Junk folder. Services like Litmus are also good for this, though you shouldn't consider any service a 100% guarantee that your emails will render properly when you send them.

• Assuming addresses are valid if they don't bounce

Once upon a time, you could safely assume that if you didn't get back a failure message from an ISP, your email had safely landed in the inbox. In this day of spam filters, whitelists, and Priority Inboxes, nothing about email delivery is certain anymore. ReturnPath estimates that nearly 20% of all permission-based email simply does not get delivered. This is a scary prospect to any legitimate marketer. ISPs are also watching you. They create what are known as "honeypot" addresses, which are abandoned or inactive addresses that are transferred to the ISP, who then posts them online to be picked up by scrapers and unscrupulous list brokers. If these addresses wind up on your list, and you continue to send to them (because, hey, they didn't bounce!), you will see your delivery rates plummet.

• Landing links on the home page/making people search for a product

If I have entrusted you with my email address, and honored you by spending my hand-earned dollars on your site, the least you can do is send me directly to the product you are advertising and not waste my precious time by having to search your site for it. Because, chances are, I won't.

• Waiting to send or not sending a welcome message at all

As I mentioned in the first point, "Plate & Carol" offered a double whammy by sending a "Welcome" email out nearly a week after I signed up. Your customers will forget they wanted your emails, or checked a box when they placed their last order. Catch them while you are still on their radar, and you'll see your conversion rates go up and your spam complaints and unsubscribes go way down. When you meet someone for the first time, or see them again, you say hello, right? But by not sending a welcome message at all, you are basically telling your customers that you don't enjoy seeing them, and don't appreciate their business. That's not a good way to start off a relationship. Greet your customers, thank them, and offer them some valuable information. It's the least you can do.

Tax-Free "Holidays"

These days, retailers are using any excuse for a sale. What used to be the usual Christmas sales and Back to School sales have now mushroomed into Columbus Day sales and Black-Friday-in-July sales.

One month of the year, though, has long left retailers (at least in the U.S.) scratching their heads - what holiday can you possibly promote in August? Short of Back to School sales with early starts (and August isn't even early; I can clearly recall seeing BTS specials in newspaper ads back in June), my adopted home state, North Carolina, has chosen to make its own "holiday": Tax-Free weekend.

These "holidays" have, of course, lead to every retailer under the sun advertised how you can "save big with Tax-Free Weekend sales!" The thing that really gets me though, is this: I received an email from a certain sporting-goods retailer (who I will not name here) with the subject line: "Shop Tax Free in Honor of Your State's Tax Free Holiday!"

In HONOR of? What a bizarre choice of phrase. It was rather offensive when some stores suggested we "honor" the veterans by shopping their Blowout Veterans' Day Sale - but why would you use "in honor of" here? Not only is that particular weekend not a "holiday", it's not in "honor" of anything!

File this one under "Things That Tick Off Email Marketers"...

Spam Pre-Tests, Revisited

We have continued to see issues with delivery to Comcast addresses, as well as with a few organizations, such as Universities and Non-Profits which probably use their own spam filters. In my testing on Litmus, I found yesterday that an HTML email which has a large (in this case, ~90%) quantity of text as content, will pass the Barracuda spam filter tests, but not the Postini tests. The very same email will also be delivered to Comcast subscribers. So it would seem a good rule of thumb is to assume that if your email fails the Barracuda spam filter testing, it will not be delivered (or not be fully delivered) to Comcast subscribers.

Also interesting to note: for yesterday's email send, I broke the Comcast addresses into their own list, and sent just the text-only version to those recipients. I had no Comcast delivery issues. These results tell me the problem is not with my actual content itself (i.e., there was not "spammy" wording in the email), nor is it within the links or link structure (i.e., none of the links was malformed, and the tracking automatically inserted in each link by our ESP was not causing problems), as the text version (not spam blocked) had the same links as the HTML version (spam blocked).

If you are suffering with Comcast blocks also, my suggestion to you is this: In the short term, try sending a hybrid version just for Comcast subscribers, similar to the old days of AOL, which combines text with very little HTML... or just send your text-only version. Doing so will ensure that those subscribers will at least receive some version of your message, rather than nothing at all.

Of course, this method is not an ideal long-term solution. Get the deliverability team at your ESP involved as soon as possible - they should have, or should establish, relationships with the correct people in charge at the major ISPs, and may offer valuable insight from past experience as well.

Michele, My ... My!

For some reason, a few months back I began receiving emails from a company called Michele. Other than my middle name being Michelle (spelled with 2 l's), I can't thing of a single common thread between me and this company. I've never purchased from them, and in fact haven't a clue what they sell, despite receiving many emails over that time period.

Anyway, I decided time had come to end the non-existent relationship between my inbox and Michele. This is the most recent email I received, on July 23:



This email has its share of issues, not the least of which being - Where is the unsubscribe link?!?

Can you find it? I couldn't. So, I marked it as spam. Hopefully Michele's ESP has an auto-unsubscribe feature when a complaint code is returned, or I'll keep getting these... since I still can't figure out how I am supposed to unsubscribe. If I get another, I'll reply to the email address from which it was sent, but something tells me it will bounce.

Hiding an unsubscribe link won't get you fewer unengaged subscribers, but it will give you a huge complaint rate and most likely, a blacklist entry. Make your unsubscribe link easy to find and easy to use, so that people who don't want to receive your emails, won't. You don't want indifferent subscribers!

Update: I did, finally, find the unsubscribe link. It is buried at the very bottom (in WHITE on BLACK, shame shame) in mouse type. When I clicked it, it opened a new window with just "Your e-mail address has been unsubscribed" floating in plain Times New Roman (at least it was black on a white background!). I'm guessing it was their ESP (Silverpop)'s default unsubscribe message. What a bad user experience.

Spam Pre-Tests Suck Wind - a Five-Hour Saga of Frustration

Yesterday, I spent five hours (and our development team joined me for 2 of those hours) attempting to get the Spam Score on a legit marketing email down from an original score of 8 to below the recommended threshold of five.

Is it just me, or is that timeframe WAY out of line?

Here's what happened:
The email in question involved a client who runs an auto dealership in California. It was a standard sales and service email marketing piece - current deals, a finance app, terms & conditions... nothing out of the ordinary at all. Due to the nature of the client's business, there were of course the usual red flags in the content (financial wording, "Deal", "Offer" "Special" repeated ad nauseum, etc.), so I did tweak the content a bit prior to loading it into our email deployment solution to be tested.

Upon loading the code into the messenger system, I ran the in-solution spam score testing, which is based on SpamAssassin's algorithms (this makes sense, as SpamAssassin's algorithms are widely used by many filters). That's when things started to go south.

The spam score for the original piece was an 8. An 8! I've done email marketing for over 10 years, and I have not once seen a score as high as an eight for a legitimate marketing piece. I have had scores over the recommended 5 before, but it was always for a reason that was easily rectified, such as a specific, obvious trigger word or phrase. Having done this for so long, I'm pretty familiar with what sets these filters off.

But in this case, the main causes of the high score were codes I'd never dealt with before: FB_GET_MEDS (BODY: Looks like trying to sell meds), and MPART_ALT_DIFF_COUNT (BODY: HTML and text parts are different). The first thing I did (being the easiest issue to address) was to go through and change the ALT tags on all the images in the HTML to match text from the text version. Reran the test - no dice. After about 15 minutes of tweaks, I finally copied a paragraph directly from the text version and pasted it into the bottom of the HTML. Lo and behold, that error was no longer on the report.

But the score was still a 5.1, and unacceptable. Since the 1.5 point penalty for have a low text-to-image ratio was going to stay regardless, since the HTML was so image heavy, I turned to the problem of the Meds rule violation. That rule was adding a hefty 3.6 point penalty, so it had to be addressed prior to sending.

Since there were no mentions of Cialis or Viagara or anything remotely close to that, I figured, well, maybe the section discussing free diagnostic fees was the trigger? I changed it to "free code check fees". No change.

After about an hour of this, I was fed up. So I enlisted the help of the tech team. After explaining my conundrum to the CTO, he asked a couple of the developers to take a look, as well as our HTML programmer. They threw out possibilities, and I continued to test each one.

Our frustration built as we made dozens of content changes, including: removing many of the "special" "offer" "coupon" type phrasing; taking out many of the adjectives (one sentence said "big" and "huge" very close together... perhaps that was causing the problem?; removing % signs and $ signs; even editing the word "enjoy" - just in case. Nothing dropped the score below 5.

Finally, after 3 hours and a missed deadline, we found the culprit: one of terms I was using for Google Analytics tagging, "ViewOnline" was the trigger term. When we changed it to "WebView", the score dropped to 1.5.

My takeaways from this horror show:

1. What the Spam Score tool says the error is, is not always the cause of the violation.


2. SpamAssassin's support truly stinks. I tried checking their Wiki, Googling, searching their site... while I understand that they don't want to reveal the actual trigger words to spammers, I expected to at least find another marketer who shared the same frustrations. But I didn't. So I'm writing one myself!


3. Don't dismiss any seemingly harebrained roots for these violations. Who knew that a section of a GA tag would trip a spam filter, let alone one that dealt with meds?


4. Document, document, document. I wrote down each violation and how we solved it, and am building an internal Wiki for our future emails.

Have your own tale of woe trying to solve spam trap issues? I'd love to hear about it. Please post it in the comments section so we can all help one another out.

Buy a List, Kill a Puppy?

Why in the world any email marketer would even consider purchasing a list these days is beyond me. It flies in the face of any and all best practices for multiple reasons, including: 1, it is about as un-permission-based as you can get and still be legal; and 2, you know nothing about the origin of those names. Adding them to your list, or sending from your IP, is risking your reputation, as well as (most likely) violating your ESP's terms of service.



Check out this video from "EMAPP" (The Email Marketing Association for Puppy Protection):

Render Me Unimpressed

I received an email from B & Lu today, which is an e-commerce site specializing in women's clothing. When I tried to view it in my Yahoo inbox, I saw this:




Not very compelling, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt and figured it might be a Yahoo issue. So I clicked the "Having trouble viewing this email?" link.



Guess what? Same blank page with the empty boxes in Firefox, too.






Moral of the story: Make sure your image server is up, and will remain up and accessible after you send your emails. This should be common sense, but... apparently not!

Raleigh Food Bank Summer Stock Social Media Mixer, Charity, and Paying It Forward

Last night, I went to the Summer Stock Social Media Mixer at the Food Bank in Raleigh. The event was sponsored by the wonderful TweetDivas, who made the event a smashing success. Unfortunately, it happened to be scheduled on the same night as the Triangle Tweetup event for June, so there weren't quite as many people there as I thought should have been.

Regardless, it was a great event - tasty appetizers, fun people, and a raffle, with all proceeds going to the food bank. More on that in a moment.

What I Learned

I learned a lot of things last night. On a tour of the food bank facility, I found out just how many people are struggling with hunger in the local area, and how many people are involved in assisting the food bank and its agencies to alleviate that hunger. 34 NC counties are served by the food bank in some capacity, including ministries, outreach programs, rescue missions, and options for needy seniors in our community.

I met several of the volunteers, who started their work with the food bank for a variety of charitable and not-so-charitable reasons (mandatory community service was mentioned). What a dedicated, passionate group they are. As someone who has done thousands of hours of volunteer work myself (Radio for the Blind, local theatre groups, animal shelters, you name it) it did my heart good to see how happy these folks were to be making a difference in their community.

At 8 PM, the crowd gathered around a makeshift stage (made from pallets - how awesome is that?) to hear the announcements for the raffle drawings. Among the prizes were signed books by local authors, lovely jewelry, some Carolina Hurricanes memorabilia, a weekend stay at a gorgeous cabin near Boone, a cool wooden marble slide toy, a movie night package from Regal, and 10 prepaid cell phones donated by Best Buy. I donated $20, which got me 40 tickets. That's a lot, considering all the prizes available. I played the odds and put a bunch in for the cell phones, as there were 10 to be given away. I also put a few in for one of the children's books (my sister is having her first child today or tomorrow) and of course that cabin stay.

Several of the volunteers won prizes, which I thought was a great reward for them. One volunteer, Sterlina, won the mountain cabin stay (jealous!). Then Jen moved on to the phones... at the end of the night, I had won 5 of the 10! Plus the children's book for my sister's baby.

I felt rather awkward - I mean, who needs 5 cell phones? Then, one of the kids there came up and offered me a dollar for a phone. I gladly handed one over and told him to keep the dollar. Then, I learned that Shirley, from the food bank's member agency Praise Worship Tabernacle, had broken her phone just a few days prior. I spoke with her briefly and she went home with a phone, too.


The Loot - minus the two phones I gave away.

It was an amazing thing, to be able to help someone out with so little effort. And really, that is what volunteering - and community - are all about. Giving a little of yourself for the good of others. I think 2 of the other phones are going to go to charitable organizations - they need them more than I do.

People I want to give a shout out to for making the night so great:
@CharityJen
@LisaSullivan
@CarterHCrain
@NCStateFair
@FoodBankCENC

I'm sure I am missing people... if I am, please @ me or DM me on Twitter, so I can apologize and add you!

Thanks for a terrific night.

Gmail Rendering Changes

As if the awkward rendering of most emails on Gmail wasn't poor enough already, they have made a few tweaks which result in extra white space around images.

Fortunately, there is a pretty simple CSS workaround for the problem. This is similar to the Hotmail/Firefox rendering issues widely reported recently, but in this case Gmail ignores the display block tag when it is applied as an overall style. So it must be added inline to each and affected image. Plus, the Gmail rendering issue appears to be happening in most browsers, not just one, making it much more vital to fix.

Here is the additional code you need to add to each img src tag:
style="display:block"

Like so:
<img src="http://www.domainname.com/images/image.jpg" style="display:block" height="150" width="300">

You can, of course, place the style wherever you like within the img src tag.

Driving New Traffic

Today I began a new position at 3Birds Marketing as their Digital Marketing Director. We are working on getting the product fleshed out and the marketing materials finalized so we can go get some new clients. Exciting times are ahead.

Always test your emails... and your subject lines

This morning, I received an email from TGI Friday's restaurant. The subject line was "
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Football=20Draft=20+=20T.G.I.=20Friday=27s=AE=20==20Touchdown=21?="

Wow, compelling! Makes me want to open it.

Below is the email as I received it in my Yahoo! Mail.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad...

Wel, perhaps I was a bit too hasty to applaud Lane Bryant (see March 25th post). After heading down to the store and picking up my order on the 25th, on the 30th I got another email... reminding me to pick up my order at the store.

You mean to tell me, their CRM system doesn't have a pickup flag that can suppress these emails? I have to wonder now, how many more I will get. This thought doesn't make me want to use their in-store pickup again.

You should always have a suppression system in place for these sort of transactional emails - e.g., don't send an email asking for a product review on an item someone has returned; once someone has submitted said review, don't send them a follow-up reminder to review it; and so on.

A Smart Cross-Channel Tactic

So I decided to try Lane Bryant's new ship-to-store service, since it's free. When I received the confirmation email a few days later, letting me know that my item was ready to be picked up, I was pleasantly surprised by the ad at the bottom:




A coupon for 30% off at the store, which is only valid when I come and pick up my online order. What a great way to get someone (like me) to purchase, rather than just walking in, grabbing my order, and leaving. Do you have site-to-store? Do you cross-promote your channels? It can drive incremental revenue!

Easy Ways to Make Your Analytics Program Work for You

First off, if you have someone internal who does analytics for your company, it is worthwhile to log in and do some exploration yourself. Many analytics people have to be focused on several departments' goals at once, and may not have the same ideas in mind that you do about what is important for your email program.

Looking at customer behavior in depth can give you some amazing insights into buying habits and engagement. Here is an example from my own experience.

We send 5 consumer emails on a regular basis. One of these emails converts at a significantly lower rate than the others. In digging into the data, I discovered that the most popular time historically for sales on that site is around 5 PM on Wednesdays. We had been sending our emails out on Wednesday mornings. This week, I ran an A/B split test, with half of the emails going out at the regular 10:30 AM, and half at 3 PM (allowing for ESP throttling, so that the emails would definitely arrive by 5).

Since the emails were just sent yesterday, I don't yet have the data back to see which was the winner. I'll share those results next week. The point of all of this is, you never know what you are assuming about your customers and your program until you dig into the numbers yourself. And, of course, test like crazy.

Bad for Business

I received the following "cold-call" email yesterday, along with a follow-up voicemail (which was left at 7 PM ET - West Coasters, not everyone works your hours....)

While I usually delete these unsolicited "we have great services" emails, this one I kept around to use as a great example of what not to do when trying to get a busy professional to respond to you.

See if you can spot the problems. (Click the image to see it larger.)



Here is what jumped out at me:

• Bad Grammar & Spelling: Always, always have someone else look over your emails before you send them out, especially if you are fuzzy on your grammatical rules. Not only do several of the calls to action not even make sense ("Are you currently doing any media planning or any of your products/services?"), but there is no better way to look completely unprofessional and as though you don't really care as to send out an email that is rife with easily-fixable grammar and spelling issues. If I were the Academy of Art, I would be very upset that my marketing partner spelled my name incorrectly!


• Not Doing Your Homework: I do online marketing for a company that sells sporting equipment. Our main audience is male, between 30-65. Look at the Audience section: mostly women, stay-at-home moms? Why would I pay you to reach exactly the opposite of my target audience?


• Who Are You Again?: This email really does an awful job of explaining to me why you are emailing, beyond trying to sell me something. While the sender mentions he has "taken over the territory" (which sounds like a gang turf war or a military coup), he doesn't tell me how I was introduced to his company or where he found me. I have no known associations with your company; why should I take time out of my busy day to read your email?

Have any other ideas how this email could have been done better?

Step Away from My Inbox

Oh, Carlson Hotels, what were you thinking?

There are at least 3 things wrong with this email I received a few weeks ago. See if you can spot them.



1) The entire crux of the email is a pitch trying to get me to sign up for their email program. Um, if I asked you NOT to send me emails, why would you then proceed to email me? Just because it is technically permitted by CAN-SPAM, does not mean it is a good practice.

2) No unsubscribe link. That's right, not only did they send this email without my permission, they also didn't provide a way for me to make sure they don't email me again.

3) "This is a post only email. Please do not reply." These words should never appear in any customer-facing email. Ever. Customers should always have a way to contact you. Plus, in this case, it makes this email in violation of CAN-SPAM since there is no way whatsoever to opt-out - no unsubscribe link (see #2) and no way to reply with an unsubscribe request.

Carlson Hotels, major fail on your part.

How could this campaign be improved? I gave you permission to snail-mail me. How about sending me an enticing offer via mail, encouraging me to sign up for your emails? While it won't deliver immediate responses, or probably have as good of a return rate, it also won't be illegal. And it won't make me do what this email did - close my account entirely.

Survey on Bounce vs Inbox Placement Rate

ReturnPath and the EEC have put out a short survey on Bounce Rate versus Inbox Placement Rate. Took less than 5 minutes:

Take the Survey

Why isn't there a SPAM button on my mailbox?

When picking up my mail a few days ago, I realized something: it is a heck of a lot easier to get yourself removed from an email marketing list vs. a direct mail marketing list.

As email marketers, we're painfully aware of the trials and tribulations of trying to keep that customer from hitting the "This is Spam" button when they receive our emails. But, some print marketers are still living in the "They didn't say no, so it's ok" age, that says you can send anyone, anywhere a print catalog, and Hey! It's all right, because the FTC doesn't say that's against the law!

Case in point: I moved into a new apartment in March of 2009. The old tenant was receiving a few catalogs that I have absolutely no interest in, so I went to the catalog retailer's website and requested that the old tenant (or, in this case, it had reverted to "current resident") be removed from the catalog list. 10 months later - and I'm still receiving that catalog. Despite 3 different requests to be removed.

And why, exactly, do retailers assume that because you purchased something from them online, you must want to be added to their print catalog list? How about asking me when I check out, if I'd like to be added, as they do for their email list? Oh, that's right.... because the FTC requires it for the email list!

The average household gets 41 pounds of bulk mail per year. That's astounding! Think of the costs to the marketers, the environment, and the negative connotation in the customer's mind. Definitely in THIS customer's mind - it is usually ludicrously difficult to remove yourself from these bulk mailing lists (though there is always a link to subscribe, there is rarely a link to unsubscribe from catalog mailings).

It's time to look at print the same way we do email - permission based, relevant, and above all, wanted.

How late is too late for a Happy New Year email?

I opened my inbox today - January 7th - to find a Happy New Year email from KnockKnock.



The subject line was "Happy New Year from KnockKnock!" Now, while I realize that, yes, it is January, and yes, the content of the email definitely supported the New Year theme (very well, I might add) it seemed somewhat jarring to me to get a New Year's email this many days into the year. Most of the New Year emails I received were sent anywhere between the last week of December and the 5th of January. Even though that was only 2 days ago, it was much more timely than this.

Although the New Year isn't a date-specific holiday, like Christmas or Thanksgiving, readers still expect to see New Year's content around January 1st. To me, this was like getting a Valentine's email on the 18th of February.

And on a related timing note, I also received this email from Organize.com today:


Is it me, or is it REALLY premature to offer the "biggest sale of the year" 7 days into said year? Doesn't leave their customers much to look forward to for the other 11 months of 2010.

Did your emails reach the inbox during the Holiday Season?

We've been having issues with getting our emails delivered lately. Starting a few weeks ago, I saw a significant drop in the open and clickthrough rates for our emails. Then, all the Comcast.net and Roadrunner email addresses began bouncing. As these addresses comprise nearly 10% of our in-house list, I immediately reached out to our ESP to get the situation resolved.

Although the bounces are easy to catch, what about the emails that simply aren't getting delivered, or are winding up in the Spam or Bulk folders? A recent report by Pivotal Veracity indicated that on Cyber Monday 2009 (the Monday after Thanksgiving) only 76.2% of marketing emails made it to recipients' inboxes.

So what about the other 24.8%? For our largest email list, that number is about 56,000 customers... Customers who opted-in to receive email from us, and now, for whatever reason, will not. These deliverability issues mean lost revenue, as well as less connection with customers.

As email marketers, we need to carefully consider our strategies for Christmas 2010. Oversending, which by all indications was the biggest catalyst for this year's problems, isn't going to help us in the long run.