Causing More Harm than Good in Email Marketing

Email marketing is a very important lifeblood for a startup. We are fortunate in Atlanta to have some of the best email marketing companies in the world in our backyard.

However, there are a few ways you can really damage your company through email marketing mistakes. Here are a few thoughts on nasty email marketing bloopers:

Making It Totally Obvious That You’re Spamming

I received the following email earlier this week

I didn’t get past the “<<FIRST_NAME>>” before I had already clicked “Spam” in the Gmail interface. It’s funny to me now as I post this that his first paragraph actually contained specific information about me. But I never saw it. I took a snapshot and clicked the spam button.

Emailing a Big List without BCC’ing Everyone

Once I accidentally emailed over 50 of our partners at once with all the email addresses on the “To” line, rather than the “Bcc” line. Many of those partners were competitors with each other, and it really turned them off to see that I was emailing all these partners with the same message. I still feel embarrassed by that blooper.

Emailing Too Many Gmail Addresses

Gmail addresses are dangerous to send emails too. If too many recipients in Gmail mark your emails as spam, it can cause damage to your domain’s reputation. While we have an opt-in list, we rarely send email and when we do many on the list forget they opted-in. We worry so much about this that we refuse to let people register on our website with a Gmail address.

—

What are your thoughts on ways you can cause more harm than good with email marketing?

Related articles