Don't be that email marketer

We’re back and ready to start fresh in 2024! After the holiday season, we’re left with an overcrowded promotions tab and sales email hangover, so this issue is our first anti-email email marketing email. Yep, this issue is all about when not to send.

Wishing you an emptier inbox and a Happy New Year!

—The Inbox team

Delete these 4 types of emails from your send schedule

When we (fellow email marketers) sit down to improve our email strategy, we tend to think most about increasing our sending. Rarely do we stop and take a look at where we should be cutting back.?

The easiest (and fastest) way to improve the quality of your email strategy is to cut the content that doesn’t serve your audience. So, if any of these 4 types of emails appear in your send strategy, you know where to start.

#1 - (Meaningless) welcome emails: It’s great to set expectations and greet new subscribers. But you should be doing that while providing value. Don’t waste an email—much less your first email to a new subscriber) simply saying “get ready for XYZ or “welcome to my email list.”??

Do this instead: Provide value from the get-go. Acknowledge a problem they might be facing and demonstrate how you can solve it or offer rewards points for signing up.

#2 - Image-only emails: Email image blocking means some recipients won’t see anything when they click open and those who use screen readers won’t be able to hear your message. Not to mention you can’t use preheader text, loading problems, scaling to mobile…the list of issues goes on. It’s not worth risking your customer experience.??

Do this instead: Create modular emails. With pre-built snippets, your emails can be just as visual and time-efficient as an image-only email.? Are you a big believer in image-only emails? If you’re going to do it, here’s how to do it right.

#3 - Sales offers no one wants: No matter how much you may think they want a sale (or how much you want them to want it), you’ll find the real truth in their subscriber data.?? Someone who just signed up for your email list or hasn’t engaged with previous sales offers isn’t ready to spend thousands on your product. If you’re mass-sending sales emails, you’ve skipped the nurture cycle and gone straight to alienating your audience.??

Do this instead: Build automated workflows that will funnel your contacts through a targeted lead nurture cycle.?

#4 - Emails no one signed up for: Never send your email marketing to someone who hasn’t subscribed to your email list. That’s one way to run into anti-spam laws—and terrible deliverability rates thanks to recent policy changes. ?? In the less extreme sense: different subscribers want different kinds of content. A good strategy will have multiple pillars: education, entertainment, and promotions—and give subscribers the choice of what pillars they engage with. ??

Do this instead: Provide a link to a preference center at the bottom of every email. From there, your subscribers can choose what kind of content they want to continue receiving.?

(BONUS) Unsubscribe confirmation emails: Are people still sending these?? When someone unsubscribes from your email list, you should not follow up with a confirmation email to let them know they’ve successfully unsubscribed. ??

Do this instead: Your email footer should include a link to unsubscribe. This opens a new tab to a preference center or a message that confirms they have unsubscribed.?

If you passed this test with flying colors and didn’t have any emails to delete, check out this article from Webbiquity to see which email marketing tactics you should ditch in the next phase of your strategy clean-up.

Avoid these email habits that your subscribers hate

Before you hit “send,” take a look through this checklist to make sure you’re not stacking the odds against yourself. Converting customers can be hard enough and even small pain points in the journey will take a toll on your engagement.

• Rambling emails: This is an attention economy! We’d be surprised if you even read past “rambling emails.”
• Click-bait subject lines: It was trendy two years ago, but now subscribers are tired of fear-bait subject lines like “Here’s what you’re doing wrong.”
• Broken links: We can’t think of a more frustrating customer experience than finally being persuaded to click a link—only for it to lead to a 404 error.
• Bad timing: Don’t send late-night or early-morning messages (this one’s more applicable to SMS), but no one wants to be bothered on their downtime.
• Not feeling safe: Your messages shouldn’t look like a threat to anyone’s cybersecurity. Make sure your subject line is clear and your email content is polished.

Want to know more?

If you’re particularly interested in email habits, you’ll want to check out this article from Forbes. It does a deep dive into common email marketing pet peeves.

How to mass delete emails on Gmail

You read that right—there’s a quick and easy shortcut to reach “inbox zero” but it isn’t for the faint of heart. Here’s how to do it, oh, and you’re welcome.

• Log in to your Gmail account
• Find the checkbox that’s at the top left of your inbox—click it! This will select all the emails displayed on the first page.
• Click the blue text that reads, Select all X conversations in Primary.
• Click the trash can icon to delete all your emails.

Pro tip: you can delete by date range, by sender, and even “read” vs. “unread.” Find the details on how to master the mass delete in this blog post from Zapier.

What to do when you can’t unsend

So, you’ve sent an email you wished you could unsend? Maybe it was an automation gone-wrong, or a faulty test email, or sometimes it’s just a good ol’ fashioned oops. The best way to come back from those mistakes is humor.

Kudos to Shipt, this email is a perfect example of how to bounce back from a bad send. They acknowledge the mistake while keeping things light—no need for a long-winded explanation in this case.

If we could change one thing about this email, it’d be the call-to-action text. It’s fun and matches the tone but it doesn’t tell you anything about what will happen if you click that link.

Want to see when your competitor is (and isn’t) sending?

Use InboxFlows to search and (anonymously) sleuth the email strategy of any brand. View a calendar of your competitors' email schedule to see when and what they’re sending all in one place. The best part? It’s completely free.

Create an inbox and use the generated address to subscribe to your chosen newsletter—Inboxflows will immediately start gathering the emails (and the strategy) you need to see.

Take a look at the send strategy from The Ordinary that we found on InboxFlows ??

Was one of your recent campaigns a hit? Forward it to [email protected] – we’d love to feature it.