There are a lot of things that can go wrong with email marketing — broken links, typos, unoptimized images — the list goes on. If we step away from this detail-oriented mindset, however, we can understand and fix some of the bigger issues that are likely holding our email marketing campaigns back.

That’s why David Meerman Scott has identified five deadly sins of email marketing. Read carefully, and make sure you avoid these awful email marketing mistakes!

1. Database Fails

There is nothing more painful than seeing “Dear <First Name>” as the greeting in your email instead of your real name. Oftentimes, this is a result of bad marketing automation and puts an emphasis on the lack of authenticity on the sender’s side. Make sure you are correctly mapping labels (First Name, Last Name, Company Name) to their values. Otherwise, you risk disappointing your community and losing email recipients.

2. Being Boring

“There is no rule that says that when you do email marketing, you have to be deathly boring,” says David. Instead, use exciting language and try to pique people’s curiosity with humor, controversy, or data. “Be somebody who tells a story,” adds David. Grab the reader’s attention with the very first sentence by referring to data or something funny, controversial, or newsworthy.

Most bloggers and webmasters know that an email list is one of the most profitable online assets they can have, yet few actually build one. I wonder why that happens, as getting an email list going is not that hard. In this post I’ll give you 4 steps to kick-start your own email list.

1. Get an email marketing provider

While there are solutions and software around you can use to power your own email marketing server I wouldn’t recommend it. A key aspect of having an email list is making sure people will receive your emails, and specialized companies are much better equipped to do that.

Sure, you’ll need to spend some money, but what is $30 or so monthly compared to the money you could make by selling your products, services or affiliate products to your list?

If you don’t have an email marketing provider check out GetResponse.com. It is one of the leading email marketing providers, and they are now offering a 30-day free trial. The cool thing is that you don’t need to put a credit card, so there are no strings attached whatsoever.

GetResponse also integrates with over 20 CRM and email management systems, so you can import and existing contacts and get your list populated right away.

2. Create a freebie to encourage people to subscribe

People care about their privacy and about their time, and they sure won’t give your their email addresses just for the sake of it. In other words, you need to offer something in return if you want people to give you the opportunity to communicate with them via email, which is one of the most personal channels online.

That something can be many different things. For instance, it could be an ebook, audio interviews, software, a template, a tutorial, so on and so forth.

Read the whole story:  http://www.dailyblogtips.com

Next time you write an email subject line, think twice about the words you’re using.

Loading your message with words such as “confirm,” “join,” “press,” or “invite” is not a good idea if you want a response, says data from Baydin, the makers of email plugin Boomerang.

Baydin recently extracted data from five million emails its users handled — either using the company’s “email game” or scheduled for later via Boomerang. It found that some subject-line words, such as “apply” and “opportunity,” got more responses than words from the aforementioned list.

Its data also suggests the best time to send emails is before work. Users who scheduled messages to read later, using Boomerang, most often wanted to deal with them around 6 a.m.

Already sending emails packed with “opportunity” at 6 a.m. and not getting a response? You’re in good company.

Baydin’s average email game player deleted about half of the 147 messages he or she received each day. Ninety minutes of the two hours he or she spent on email each day went to just 12 messages.

Read the whole story:  Mashable.com