I read a great post today by Ken Magill entitled, Let's Play the Email Blame Game!
As usual, Mr. Magill's material is frank and sensibly presents the notion, dare I say fact, that bad things happen when you stray from email marketing and deliverability best practices. And, wait for it... Often, there's no one to blame but yourself.
Amongst the cardinal sins mentioned in the post is that dusting off the house file and sending to really old addresses will get you into trouble.
Although not mentioned in the post, another holiday treat for receivers (and subscribers) is the thought that if sending to a list once a week gets X number of opens, clicks, and conversions, then sending to it twice a week or four times a week is going double or quadruple those metrics and ultimately, sales.
That's an excellent philosophy if you want to see your mail end up in the bulk folder or worse. Doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your send volume is a big red flag to receivers and with their resources strained as it is you're just asking for trouble.
Once you've gone there, it's not typically easy to put the horse back in the barn. Reputation and deliverability issues don't often get resolved overnight, but rather take weeks or months to recover from.
So, let's be safe and smart this holiday season and try to keep our subscribers and mail receivers happy by thinking through the implications of our actions rather than having to come up with excuses and lay blame as to why mail isn't being delivered.
Comments for Sometimes We Are Our Own Worst (Email Marketing) Enemy
blog comments powered by Disqus