Why you should listen, even if your uncle's 100

There's a huge disconnect between what marketers do and what experts say they should do.

[There's also a huge disconnect between what experts do and what experts say you should do, but that's another story.]

Now there are understandable reasons for ignoring best practices, the most common being a lack of knowledge or a lack of executive/financial support for improvements.

But the cynic in me suspects there are two other reasons which are less understandable. If they apply to you, consider a rethink. Because you're just holding your program back.

The 100-year old uncle excuse

"My uncle smoked 40-a-day and lived to be a hundred. Clearly smoking isn't bad for you."

You're not following best practices, yet your email marketing program is successful. So why change?

This attitude often accompanies a belief that experts are pursuing their own agenda (vendors) or living in a fantasy world (academics) or stirring the pot for their own promotional purposes (bloggers).

While healthy skepticism is good and proper, the "I'm doing fine as I am" approach is flawed...

1. The benefits you are measuring may be hiding costs you're not measuring: image and brand problems that only show up further down the road, suppressing future sales and slowing list growth. These are the hidden costs of lazy email marketing practices.

2. You may just be lucky or be doing something particularly well that is -- for the moment -- compensating for the odd bad practice or three. But your luck could run out soon.

There are, for example, those who refuse to believe that continuing to email inactive subscribers can have any negative impact. A sent email is another brand impression, right? Which is a good thing, no?

Unlike publicity, however, any impression is not a good impression...thanks to the report spam button.

For those who need hard evidence, Michelle Eichner describes here how mailing to old, inactive subscribers did do clear, serious damage to an email program.

3. All the trends, especially in the deliverability world, point to receivers of email (ISPs) and recipients of email (your subscribers) getting choosier and choosier in terms of what they will accept in inboxes.

4. Best practices aren't just about protecting you from disaster, they're also about improving results. Get the basics right and move on from there to start getting more from your email investment.

It's too difficult, expensive or time consuming

Yes, some of the more advanced techniques and tactics rely on access to tools or expertise that, frankly, the majority of us don't have or can't find the required investment for.

But there are so many ignored best practices that involve minor tweaks requiring a few minutes of your time. No exaggeration...just a few minutes to make small changes that can make big improvements to your success.

Examples:

• Adding alt-tags to your images
• Adding a pre-header to your template
• Replacing the ESP's template welcome message with one of your own.
• Putting your email through a design and spam testing tool (at a cost as low as $5 per email)
• Ensuring your from and/or subject line includes a brand, business or personal name your recipients will recognize
• Reviewing and tweaking the chain of communication a subscriber sees when they sign-up for your list, like these guys did.

Any other quick fixes you can recommend?

[Hat tip to Loren McDonald for sparking this riff with his article on email industry disagreements.]

Tags: email marketing best practice, email deliverability

 feed | email | Follow me on Twitter

The main website for everything email marketing | Introduction
Email advertising basics | Service listings | Sources of statistics
Advice on email design, delivery issues and list building

22 sources of inspiration
Outlook 2007 and HTML design
42 HTML email design resources

follow me on Twitter