The Wrong Way To Do Email Marketing

I’m a big fan of email marketing, both permission based and unsolicited, cold email. When done right, it can make a huge impact on your business. The problem is, there are so many areas you can go wrong.

Most people struggle with the technical stuff, like dealing with a high bounce rate, cleaning bounces, burning your domain names.

But what I’ve noticed… is a lot of people struggle with the stuff that they can easily control.

The email itself.

How to NOT Do Email Marketing

The reason I’m even writing about this is because I’ve seen a live example for the past week, how you should never do email marketing.

The first time I saw the email, it was definitely trying to hard sell me on some stupid info product.

My first thought was, “did I even subscribe to this crap”? My second thought was, who the hell was emailing me…

I didn’t give it much thought after those initial 2 seconds before going on to the next in the inbox. I didn’t read it past the headline because it was obviously of commercial nature and the headline wasn’t really something that appealed to me.

I didn’t hit unsubscribe, I just figured I’d let it go for now and see what else they send.

3 hours later, I received another email, slightly different subject line, but same exact content.

The next day and for 4 consecutive days, I received the SAME EXACT email.

I then unsubscribed.

We Can Learn From His Mistakes

The good thing about my experience with this guy, is that we can learn from the mistakes he made.

1.) If I did subscribe… they sure didn’t remind me.

I assume that the email was cold, I really don’t know for sure but it certainly seemed that way. If you have an opt in list, remind people every now and then who you are, why they subscribed, or at least stay consistent with the types of content you put out.

2.)  If the email was cold, they didn’t even try to reel me in.

With cold email marketing, your goal is usually to establish trust, credibility, get people thinking, then later on reel them in, try to convert them into an actual lead. Sending helpful information is always a necessity and including a soft call to action would work much better than trying to take me from 0 to 100% sold right from the beginning.

3.) Don’t send duplicate emails!

If you send the same email blast twice or three times in a row, it shows that you’re lazy. You don’t care about the people receiving the email, you don’t care about the results, your reputation, or even your product or service.

Whoever sent those emails to me, could have easily spent an additional 20 minutes making the email copy unique and new.

4.) Discounts Don’t Matter!

The headline was about an 84% discount and some awesome bonus.

That’s fine… but what’s the discount for? Why should I care? A bonus? A bonus for what, what’s the bonus?

This stuff doesn’t matter to people. When you craft your emails, make them something that people can benefit from reading. If you’re trying to sell something in a cold email, then make sure to build up to it, don’t be all “in your face” trying to sell.

It looks desperate.

Bottom Line

It’s easy to ignore the simple stuff and look at the more complex issues when sending emails. However, the basics are usually what separates winners from losers.

Don’t be stupid, don’t try and take the easy way out when it comes to your email content. Spend some time on it.

There’s no point in getting your email delivered to the inbox if you’re unable to write an email worth reading.

Do you already understand the power that email marketing can have when it comes to generating leads for your business? I wrote the book on it.. Ice Cold Email Gold is your key to cold email mastery.