5 Email Marketing Halloween horrors...

A list that will make any email marketers skin crawl and have them hiding under their desk in terror....

1.       Emails containing all images

The majority of email clients will turn images off as standard.  This means the recipient has to physically choose to turn them on before they are displayed; but 40-60% of people will not do this.  Don’t put your most important content into images or chances are most people will not see your message!  Remember the 60:40 rule (60% text to 40% images – 70:30 is even better!)

2.       Spelling errors

Arrrrrrrrr!!  There is no need for spelling errors in your email – check, check and check again!  And don’t forget to send a live test of your email to yourself for a final check before broadcasting.

3.       Emails going into the junk folder

An email marketers worst nightmare... if your inbox placement is not good and your emails are going straight to the junk folder chances are they will not be seen.  Work on your engagement with recipients and how they respond to your emails – whether you are watching out for this or not, the ISPs are.

4.       Emails not displaying correctly in different email clients

There really is no excuse for this.  Before broadcast you should always test how your email displays in a variety of major email clients, both with and without images turned on, as well as how they display if the recipient is viewing the email in a preview pane or on a mobile device. If your ESP does not allow you to do this, there are other third party providers who allow this kind of testing; most notably Return Path.  How your email looks is really important to test as different ISP will render your HTML code in different ways and you don’t want the recipient to see the email they receive wrongly (images in the wrong places, fonts not displaying correctly, copy being centre aligned when it is supposed to be left aligned, misaligned borders etc) – it looks very unprofessional.

5.       Not sending in MIME format

Some email clients will not allow recipients to receive HTML emails, so always make sure you send a text only version alongside your HTML to allow the receiving system to choose the appropriate version to display. ALL ESPs will allow you to do this, so if you’re not, why not?!  You’re missing out on clicks!

Happy Halloween!