5 Ways to Piss of Your List When Email Marketing

Even though people seem to spend more time than ever on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, email marketing remains 40% more effective for acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined (Mckinsey.com). Here’s the secret to getting some new customers from your IT marketing emails: avoid doing the stuff that lead your subscribers directly to the unsubscribe button. Sounds simple, right? It is – but you’d be surprised how many companies are making all five of these mistakes. Here are 5 ways to lose email subscribers fast (and you should avoid them if you hope to use email marketing to grow your business!)

Forget Mobile Users

Almost 45% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. If you fail to make your emails mobile responsive, you’re just asking for your mobile users to unsubscribe from your email list. Don’t expect your subscribers to zoom and pinch and scroll all over their tiny smartphones or tablet screens in order to read your email – they won’t. Are you prepared to lose almost half of your email list? No? Better make sure your email marketing campaigns are mobile responsive.

Create Deceptive Subject Lines

We know it’s difficult to get people to open your emails, but using deceptive subject lines to encourage email opens will only lead to angry unsubscribes once the person realizes your subject line has nothing to do with the actual content of your email. Not only is it deceptive and in poor taste – but it’s actually a CAN-SPAM violation. Go ahead and get creative with your email subject lines but make sure you focus on getting someone to open the email with a subject line that actually relates to the content in your email.

Constant Advertising or Talking About Yourself Too Much

Would you watch a television station if it only had commercials? Of course not! Your subscribers will stop opening your emails or will unsubscribe if they find your email content is nothing but advertising or talking about yourself or your company nonstop. Your email campaigns can, and should, include offers or descriptions of your services or products – but you have to provide information and value to your readers if you expect them to remain on your email list and keep opening your emails. The goal is to find a good balance between conversational, informative, and promotional.

Create Generic Newsletters

The worst thing you can do with email marketing is to attempt to create a newsletter generic enough to work for anyone and everyone. What ends up happening is your super-generic email doesn’t appeal to anyone, and people will start unsubscribing. Figure out who your target customer is and learn as much about them as you can. How old are they? Is your target market made up of mostly male or mostly female customers? What are their interests or passions? The more you know about the people you are targeting, the better you can tailor your email messages to that group of people.

Send Too Many Emails

I get it – you want to keep your company name, brand, services, and product offering on the minds of your potential customers at all times. But I promise if you send too many emails you’re only going to annoy your subscribers and send them searching for the unsubscribe button. There is no exact science for figuring out how many emails are “too many” as it differs from one industry to the next; but keep track of the number of unsubscribes you get if you increase your email marketing frequency; and when people are unsubscribing, ask them their reason. If you start to see an increase in the number of people unsubscribing because they get too many emails, you’ll know you came across too eager, and you need to cut back the frequency of your email marketing.

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