Keep in mind that even the best-written, properly formatted and courteous emails which form part of an email marketing campaign can still be received by some people negatively. Now imagine if you do away with any of the adjectives above and just send email after email to potential customers without much regard for form or substance. You, my friend, will then be just another email marketing jerk, of which the world, sadly, seems to have an abundance of.
Dreadful email marketing has always been there, and most, if not all of us have already found ourselves at the receiving end of such emails. To say that we were annoyed by dreadful email marketing could just be an understatement. However, if annoying potential customers is the end-goal of one’s dreadful email marketing, the following tips on how to become an email marketing jerk could prove to be very useful.
1. Use the wrong name
We love personalizing our emails, and addressing a contact by name is great practice. However, addressing your potential customer named, say, John, as “Paul” will surely annoy him. The same goes for opening with the wrong company or business name. This often happens when you don’t bother to check that contacts actually match and clean up your lists to avoid duplicates and garbled texts.
2. Make empty promises
Are you in the habit of promising “The Only Solution to Your Financial Woes” or “The One Thing That Will Make All Your Dreams Come True” and not delivering? If you are, then you are well on your way to becoming an email marketing jerk. Recipients of emails bearing exaggerated claims of benefits of their products and services can’t help but feel deceived when they are promised things that sound too good to be true. They would much prefer to be persuaded to open your email by setting clear expectations for them and not promise them the moon.
3. Forget to turn the CAPS LOCK key off
Reading a Facebook status that is all caps is annoying enough. Being persuaded to open an email and click a link to a site by a subject line written in big, bold and all capital letters is an entirely different story. In today’s world, entire sentences in all caps are the equivalent of yelling, and no one likes being yelled at. It also makes the sender look like an amateur who hasn’t got the slightest idea what he’s doing. People will only take all caps messages when they’re extremely urgent, or when they’re from angry moms or bosses.
4. Send never-ending discount deals
Sending discount offers to your recipients every now and then is fine. However, when they get an offer for discount after discount for your products day in and day out, they will be very annoyed, even to the point of unsubscribing. Worse, they will certainly be talking about your email marketing practices in a bad light. Discounts are ok, but when they’re being given away like candy on a regular basis, their value and appeal drop.
5. Don’t bother checking ‘Do Not Reply’ email accounts
It is common practice to send emails from ‘Do Not Reply’ email accounts, but sometimes, some recipients do send replies there. An email marketer worth his salt will check that email account periodically, but if you’re determined to be an email marketing jerk, just leave those accounts be. That will guarantee your recipients will think they’re being ignored, and they are going to move on.
6. Be colourful
It’s alright to highlight an element or two in your email using a certain colour, but when the entire email practically looks like a rainbow with red text, blue links, yellow borders all with a background that is blindingly bright, you are bound to irritate your recipients and give them a headache.
Then again, if you want to be an effective email marketer, never do any of the above, and you’ll be just fine.