The Simple Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing
You probably don’t realize it, but the world is inundated with spam, most of which you never see.
A colleague of ours who runs the mail server for a private university in California estimated several years ago that over 90% of the email that reached his servers was spam. That meant all the messages sent and received by the faculty, staff, vendors, affiliates, students, and their families accounted for a single-digit percentage of the total mail exchanged.
Everything else was junk.
The situation globally is a little more positive. The ratio of spam to legitimate email has been steadily decreasing since the late 2000s, probably due to the coordinated efforts to control it.
Spam as a Percent of All Email
Email delivery today is entirely reputation-based.
Senders are scored by email servers based on five key measures:
Send volume
Send frequency
User interaction, especially complaints and unsubscribes
Bounce rate/Deliverability rate
“Spam-like” behavior
Commit too many infractions, and you’ll find yourself blacklisted, meaning all your well-crafted marketing emails will end up in spam folders—if they’re delivered at all. If sending from your brand domain, you may have a long hole to climb out of.
Adhering to best practices is easy.
While larger marketers with mailing lists in the millions will often hire specialists to squeeze a few more tenths of a percent out of their email deliverability rate, most small to medium-sized businesses should be able to meet their objectives—and avoid the spam folder—by following a few simple guidelines.
Here are our simple Do’s and Don’ts of email marketing:
Don’t
Don’t use the CC or BCC lines
Don’t send attachments
Don’t use shortened or bad URLs
Don’t include images over 1 MB
Don’t send to bad addresses
Don’t send without consent
Don’t send too many emails
Don’t try to keep track of all that by yourself
Do
Do authenticate your sending domain
Do include more text than images
Do include alt text for images
Do scrub bounces immediately
Do separate marketing from transactional emails
Do engage with segments & topics
Do include an unsubscribe link
Do test your campaigns where applicable
It may seem like a lot at first, but it really is very simple, especially if you have someone who can walk you through it—or better yet, who can configure an email marketing application like Zoho Campaigns that does most of the work for you.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns can:
Automatically scrub known bad emails BEFORE sending
Automatically remove bounces
Configure a proper header and footer, including unsubscribe link
Warn you if your images are too large
Dynamically schedule sends based on recipient characteristics
Limit the number of emails any one recipient receives
Automate follow-ups and responses
Increase engagement with topics and segments
Automate complex customer journeys
Integrate with your CRM
And more!
