Bad Email Techniques, 101
An email marketing example of what not to do.
A few days ago, I opened my email to find five emails from Meta, one right after the other. This wasn’t one of those strange technological email glitches that occasionally happen. This was Meta deciding to send five separate emails with five distinct subject lines to the same email address.
This morning, they sent three more, only minutes after they sent my advertising invoice. It makes me want to not advertise with them. (Haha. Like we have a choice.)
If one of my customers asked me to create an email campaign, there is no way I would recommend sending emails at this pace. It’s just bad business sense to clutter up a client’s email inbox. It breaks the rules, and not in a good way. Unless you’re begging your email subscribers to unsubscribe, which I just did.
My guess is that they were attempting to personalize or segment their emails according to audience, and I must have fit multiple audiences. (I am a good customer!) It was still a huge fail. Somehow, they messed up with the programming logic. The result is not what they wanted, I’m sure.
Doing Email Better
How many emails should a company send out?
Deciding how many emails a company should send depends on a few factors. While there are no hard and fast rules, ask:
- How large is your email list?
- For an email list of around 2,000 or fewer, it might be wise to send out anywhere from 4 to 8 emails per month.
- For an e-commerce company that has a larger list, sending out an email daily could work nicely.
- What type of emails are you sending? Are you sending informational emails to hobbyists? They may like daily emails. Are you sending out promotional emails? Then, less frequent emails would be better.
The Email 80/20 Rule
Another key factor in sending out emails is remembering the 80/20 rule. 80% of your emails should be informational and add value for your reader, while 20% should be transactional/promotional.
In closing, it’s beyond me to fully understand how and why Meta is so blatantly breaking email rules. Maybe they’ll reach out to me and explain. If they do, I’ll be here, and I’ll let you all know what they have to say.