How to avoid making an email campaign that is annoying

If you own a small business, you know how important it is to maintain a positive image in the eyes of your customers. Sending annoying marketing emails to potential customers is a quick way to ruin your reputation. If you want to get the word out about your business, but don’t want to risk annoying potential customers, stick to these email marketing guidelines.

• Clearly label your call to action and make it stand out
• Be sure your email marketing strategy is appealing before launching it
• You shouldn’t spam your clients’ inboxes
• Avoid oversaturating your post with graphics, especially stock photos
• Stay away from boring subject lines

Clearly label your call to action and make it stand out

Keeping with the theme of brevity, make sure your call to action (CTA) stands out clearly. The average consumer has a short attention span and wants to know an email’s point the moment they open it. If getting readers to click through to your CTA is your top priority, then having it buried in the body of your email will likely do more harm than good.

Be sure your email marketing strategy is appealing before launching it

Your emails should catch the attention of your subscribers in one of three ways: through targeted prose that gets your point across economically; through flashy graphics that draw the eye to the information you’re trying to share; or through a combination of these and other techniques. A failure to do so may result in your email content being relegated from digital marketing to the spam folder.

Find out who you’re selling to so you can better cater to their needs. For instance, a marketing strategy that is “appealing” to a group of teenagers may look very different from one that is “appealing” to a group of businesspeople.

You shouldn’t spam your clients’ inboxes

One of the most obvious ways your email marketing campaign can turn annoying is if you send too many messages to a single subscriber at once. We send billions of emails every day, and many of them are never read. If you bombard your audience with too many messages or send too many emails that don’t provide any real value, you risk boring and eventually losing them.

Avoid oversaturating your post with graphics, especially stock photos

To get your point across, keep the body of your email message brief and easy to read. As soon as your intended recipient opens your email, you need to do everything in your power to keep them there. While it’s tempting to use a slick email template complete with eye-catching graphics, stock photos, and a bold CTA button, a more straightforward approach may yield better results.

Sending a plain-text email is acceptable if you lack the graphical skills necessary to make your message stand out without being obnoxious. In fact, you should primarily rely on sending text-only emails.

Stay away from boring subject lines

Creating engaging email subject lines is a great way to attract the attention of your intended audience. Given its prominence, the subject line of your email marketing campaign should make sense and avoid coming off as clickbait. According to Polly Kay, a marketing consultant with Polly Kay Marketing, failing to craft a good email subject line is like falling flat on your face just before the starting gun.

When it comes to encouraging email opens with teasers, “there’s a fine line,” as Kay put it, “between getting your email and any subsequent offerings channelled immediately to the junk folder as it comes across as clickbait.” “A misleading, vague, or weak subject line will not encourage opening, and any subject that doesn’t make it clear what’s inside and why your prospect should care is pointless – and annoying.”