Don’t you just hate it when you accidentally send an email to the wrong person or reply all and didn’t mean to? The recent Carat email debacle has nearly blackened their reputation and provided a feeding frenzy for past employees to attack the company, not to mention creating a sounding alarm with existing clients. Yet, these email blunders still continue.

Email Marketing cannot be commoditized.  Most people know just enough to be dangerous and don’t know when to draw the line or where the line begins.  Hitting the send button does not qualify as email marketing. If email was as easy as people think, why are their companies out there that solely provide email marketing services?  Attention must be paid to 1) best practices, 2) attention to detail, 3) deliverability and 4) list management and maintenance.

In the past two days, I have become a victim of receiving bad emails from professional service providers in which I am a client. In this post I’ll be providing two examples of how email (both personal and marketing) can go very very wrong and have an impact on your company’s brand and customers perception.

Example #1: Be Professional and Respect the Privacy of Others

I received an email today from a sales rep. The email was the 3rd email I had received about their free trial.  I had purchased their product months ago and even upgraded to a higher level but yet because their email lists of new prospects and current clients are not cross-referenced they were still marketing to me.

Email Marketing Tip #1: Have a well managed and well maintained list, cross reference, tag, flag, etc to make sure you have the most current information on your prospects and customers.  Email addresses are assets, these are folks who have already engaged with your service or company. Respect them, know who they are and address them personally. Don’t abuse email addresses or take new or existing customers for granted. Having maintained lists will also improve efficiency, effectiveness, and your bottom line.

Additionally, this email was sent out to a whole gamut of people and all of our email addresses were their for public consumption.

Email Marketing Tip #2: For internal/private messaging
Use the BCC field when sending to multiple addresses.  No one wants their email address shown to every stranger on your list. Be courteous and respect others privacy by regarding email addresses as assets. Email addresses are to be handled with care.

The email didn’t even utilize basic macro inserts for personalization (e.g. Dear Liberty…) it was simply just a bulk send of all the “L” email addresses. Making me believe that this guy was just going down the list.

Email Marketing Tip #3: Personalize your emails. Don’t be lazy, know who you are sending to, where they are in the sales process, learn why they haven’t purchased yet, or if they have take the appropriate actions to welcome them. Use a professional ESP (Email Service Provider) to send emails so you can track success and deliverability.

I replied politely to the email:

And instead of a personal response apologizing or saying they would remove move from the list and take my suggestion into consideration -  I became a victim of another fatal email mistake. THE ACCIDENTAL REPLY TO: email.

Company accidental reply (translation: I don’t really care about you or that you are an existing customer, and I don’t care to respond to you and actually let you know what we are doing to take care of it) I also like that he calls me a guy:

So naturally I respond to once again notify them of their mistake:

The result? As expected. No response.

Which leads me to Email Marketing Tip #4: Be professional.  Train your staff on how to handle customer communications and how to respond and represent your brand and your company. Especially with a troubled economy, where in recent years it seemed customer service had disappeared, it again becomes the deciphering factor between you and your competition.

I said two examples of email blunders. But I will save the next one for a different post.