How to completely screw up your email marketing (and how not to)

Email is like a boomerang, it constantly sends traffic back to you.

If anyone tells you it’s “dead“, Immediately run the other direction. 20% of the traffic to this site comes from email. 2% comes from Twitter.

visuals_key

That doesn’t mean you should dump Twitter, just keep it in perspective. If you only have 5 hours to work today. Don’t spend 4.5 on Twitter.

Here’s the deal though, as great as email is you have to use it correctly.

MyCrowd.com is a new service that just launched. They are like Elance or Odesk only slightly more integrated with existing applications.

As soon as I saw they were opened for business I posted a task to check them out.

https___mycrowd_com_app__email_bryan_manfisher_com_token_fvpqB79KCst2iJFUqKCG

30 minutes later I got this email

Alert_from_MyCrowd_-_bryan_manfisher_com_-_Mail

Can you spot the problem?

..

.

They didn’t give me a way to ACT on the email.

There is no button, no link…no way to do anything.

The point of the email was to alert me that someone had placed a bid but the email gave me no way to do anything about it.

I had to:

  1. Open a tab
  2. Type in their address
  3. Log-in
  4. Remember my login credentials
  5. Reset my login credentials
  6. Figure out how to get back to the task
  7. …ugh

Don’t make this same mistake.

If you are trying to sell something, make it easy for people to give you money.

Groupon does a good job of that:

Sky_Blue_Cafe_-_bryan_manfisher_com_-_Mail

If you are trying to get people to reply to an email and give you feedback. Ask them.

Don’t forget the obvious.

Need a cheesy analogy to help you remember? Gotcha’ covered 🙂