Email marketing campaigns can be a great way to contact potential customers as well as reach out to leads already in your sales cycle. They can help you keep current clients interested, increase traffic to your site and ultimately, create new revenue. That being said, you can make a mess of an email marketing program due to basic formatting issues and/or reports of spamming. The good news is that these issues can easily be avoided; you just need to be aware of what the common mistakes are!

3 Formatting Problems that Can Sink your Email Marketing Program

• Not Including an Opt-Out Link – Whether or not this is intentional, it is probably one of the most serious mistakes you can make due to the fact that it is illegal. Ever since the implementation of the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003, email recipients must be able to ask to be taken off your recipient list. Period. Usually, people will look for this link in the footer of your email, so be sure to include it.
• Complex Designs – The template for an email is different than that of a website. Many of the awesome tricks of web design simply won’t work when put into an email and can seriously mess up the layout of your email. The same goes for certain frameworks and languages, like ActiveX and JavaScript, which simply do not cooperate well with email’s HTML format.
• Graphics as Emails – If your email is simply one large image, it will be seen as spam by spam filters. Even if an image is the focal point of the message, you still need to incorporate text in order to have your email pass the filters.

3 of The Wrong Reasons to Add Someone as a Recipient

• Very Old Interest – If someone bought from you once and you send them an email years later, you are asking to be reported as spam. After years of no contact, you no longer have a legitimate reason to send them information. Find a different way to re-engage that person’s interest and then ask them to opt-in to your email list. That way, you’ll avoid getting reported.
• Mutual Membership to an Organization – If you get the email addresses of the members of a group through the organization’s contact list and send them your email campaign without their direct permission, then you are spamming those people. You need their direct opt-in; otherwise, your email will be flagged as spam.
• Indirect Permission – Getting an email address directly is not the same thing as being given permission directly. For example, let’s say you run a promotional contest that requires an email address to participate. Even though the participants have willfully handed over their contact info to you, they have still not given you permission to send them your email campaign. Get direct permission!

A properly set up email marketing program can bring in many new customers for your business, but it can also smear your name if you’re not careful. Being reported as spam or simply sending a malfunctioning email that looks extremely unprofessional are good ways to do damage to your brand. Keep your corporate identity intact and make the most of your email marketing efforts by avoiding these mistakes listed above.