Identifying the Top Email Marketing Mistakes: Are You Guilty?
As marketers, we tend to scrutinize commercial email more than the regular consumer. We are quick to mock bad creative and compliance issues, and we may even forward bad email examples to our friends or laugh about them over drinks. Sometimes proofreaders and spell checkers do not catch all the miscues in our email advertisements. Increased quality control can prevent embarrassment and more importantly, lost revenues and even legal trouble. Let’s take a look at the top ten mistakes made by email marketers — see how many you are guilty of!
• Deceptive “from” and “subject” lines
This is CAN-SPAM at its simplest — a no-brainer, so I won’t spend much time on this topic. Everyone reading this should know not to use deceptive From or Subject lines, or expect a lawsuit.
• Not redirecting links
Most email marketers, especially those using their own proprietary mailing systems and/or software, redirect or mask links in order to track clicks. Additionally, many advertisers require that email publishers redirect or mask the advertiser’s links. This is required so the advertiser’s domain does not get filtered, or even worse, listed. This logic makes perfect sense — the more mail out there with “domainX.com” in the creative, the greater chance it’s going to get noticed.
• Using “illegal” characters
Have you ever seen an email creative or even Subject line riddled with seemingly ambiguously-placed question marks? This has to do with the translation of some characters into HTML. When using Windows character sets “Windows Latin 1″ or “ISO Latin 1″, certain characters translate into question marks when the email is passed through an MTA (mail transfer agent).
These characters include the trademark symbol, the “long dash”, and “left-and-right” quotation marks and apostrophes. When encountering these symbols in an email creative from an advertiser, make sure to send a test email through your system to see how these characters are translated.
• Not hosting images
Nothing is uglier than receiving an HTML email with missing images. It is a good practice to host creative images on your own web or image server rather than leaving an email creative pointing to an advertiser’s server. This way, you don’t have to worry about your advertiser’s image server going down. Also, advertiser’s servers are often taking on too much traffic anyway, which would cause images to load slowly. Finally, hosting your own images can help get around filters, especially for very popular campaigns where filters may be looking for a certain image source.
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