10 Ways to Get Your Business in Trouble with Email

How could something so easy, so cost-effective, and so powerful get you in trouble? It usually happens the moment you think that easy, cost-effective, and powerful tools can’t possibly be abused.

1. Get spam complaints. Spam is in the eye of the receiver. If your audience thinks your email is spam, all they have to do in most cases is click one button in their email program, and your email address is flagged as possible spam forever. Spam complaints destroy your delivery rate and reputation. To avoid spam complaints, you have to avoid looking like spam.

2. Use deceptive ways to collect contact information. You can find email addresses everywhere you look, but not everything shiny is gold. Collecting email addresses from web sites, directories, and web-crawling computer programs will give your email list more spam complaints than sales.

3. Violate the CAN-SPAMAct. Consumers hate spam, so Congress decided to take action on spammers by creating the CAN-SPAM Act. You can be fined if you violate the CAN-SPAM Act, but the laws also shed light on the email marketing practices that consumers dislike the most.

4. Send too much email. Your business has to survive, and regular communications are the key to staying top of mind with customers. Sending the right amount of content at the proper frequency is a balance that will reward you if you practice keeping your finger off the “send” button when your customers aren’t ready to hear from you.

5. Buy an email list. Email list purchases or rentals fail not because of the quality of the list, but rather because consumers dislike receiving unfamiliar emails.

6. Share your email list unintentionally. Sharing your email doesn’t necessarily have to involve handing a disk to a friend or colleague. When you send an email with hundreds of email addresses copied into the cc field, you are sharing your entire list with everyone you’re sending to.

7. Share your business with a spammer. If you send email from an email server that also hosts other businesses, that server is only as good as the reputation of the other people who send email from that server. If your shared hosting partners are spamming people, your emails can be flagged as spam by email programs. Using an email service with a good reputation is critical to your delivery.

8. Go it alone. Effective email marketing is nearly impossible without partners to help you with formatting, delivery, and strategy. Just like a good CEO surrounds herself with key people to grow a business, a good email marketer is surrounded by partners who are invested in the success of the business.

9. Hide your identity. Even if your audience knows you, they still have to recognize you. Your email’s “from” line has to be familiar, your brand has to be prominent, and your email address has to look friendly to the companies that decide which emails to deliver and which to send to the junk folder. You can read more about creating familiar emails in Chapter 9.

10. Fail to plan. If you’re going to invest time, energy, effort, and money in an email marketing program, take the time to plan the steps necessary to be successful.