Taking a quick break from the strategic email posts/analysis to make a couple of points re: some very tactical email usage mistakes I’ve been noticing a ton lately as we’ve been spending more time looking at the nature and content of incoming email. This is specifically directed at anyone who is sending out sales/marketing emails. It’s amazing how much stuff you notice about emails when trying to automate the process of putting them in the right bucket. Here are two big things that stand out.
Tip #1 : This is re: email marketing messages sent to broad audiences. Test to see if your email is by default going to be spammed by the default Outlook Junk Mail Filter rules. This is the easiest test in the world to do, and one of the easiest to address. Yet companies continue to send emails that automatically get junked and never even make it to the inbox.
Tip #2: This is re: directed/targeted email marketing messages send by and to specific individuals. When you’re sending an email pitching your services to a specific individual at a company, spend an extra minute or two checking their website or doing a quick search to see if they publish their email address. Sending an email to their real inbox rather than hoping an email to "[email protected]" will make it to them will increase your response rate significantly. Pitch emails sent to generic inboxes are so much likelier to just be insta-deleted.
It’s pretty surprising to me that with email marketing having been around for so long, these fundamental mistakes are so common. As email clients become more and more sophisticated, not making mistakes like this will become even more important.