I’ve spent over 20 years in marketing, and thousands of hours helping customers solve complicated (and sometimes simple) business problems and after all of this time, here are the top 7 confidence destroyers I see in marketing programs.
Table of Contents
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Unsubscribes are permanent. Suppress your old list every time you switch platforms.
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Transactional email isn't a loophole around subscription limits.
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GDPR applies if you email into Europe or the UK, no matter where your company sits.
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Open rates don't tie to revenue. Stop reporting them to leadership.
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Write your own alt text. AI can't read nuance yet.
Your mileage may vary.
1. When someone unsubscribes, they unsubscribe forever. Not until you get a new platform.
For the love of Pete (apologies to all Petes and Peters), please upload and suppress your previous unsubscribe list. I am exhausted from having to unsubscribe from the Nordictrack list (again) because they have a new ESP. Listen, I sold the bike because I didn’t use it. Now you’re just making me feel bad. Plus, it’s bad practice. Do better.
2. No, transactional email isn’t a clever way to get around subscription limitations.
I don’t care what your salesperson said. The fact that your salesperson said it should be your first clue. Subscriptions exist for a reason. It gives people an opportunity to pick and choose what they want to engage with your brand and why. If you start using transactional email to get around the high unsubscribe rate it tells me that:
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You haven’t been emailing people anything valuable.
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You are WAY behind fixing a credibility problem.
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c) You’re headed straight into ESP purgatory.
I hope you have another one lined up.
3. GDPR isn’t something you should just worry about if you’re in the UK.
No, I don’t care what your consultant said. Privacy laws aren’t something that only matter when it's your data at risk. If you email into Europe or the UK you need to apply it no matter where your company is based. Not to mention, some of the GDPR rules are just good business practices. Ignoring them could set you and your organization up for difficulty.
4. AI tools are like fine tipped eyeliner.
They should be used sparingly and with intention. Otherwise you have one eye that looks bigger than the other and everyone thinks you’re crazy. That could just be something only a certain percent of the population understands, but if you remember hairbands of the 80s, I feel like you probably get it, too. The point is: you don’t need to use it for everything. And when you use it, a little is better than a lot. You still need to come through the application.
5. Use the tools that you have well before you add new ones.
I don’t care what your Account Manager said. Everyone is always looking to add things to the techstack that will make them do more, do better, close more business. But big companies have crashed and burned with a huge tech stack and no cohesive data governance plan. Sears is a great example of this. They had divisions that were competing, 30 different business units, each with its own management and its own P&L, its own board of directors – imagine the tech stack! Getting help from IT required a formal agreement write up or outside contractor. It was fragmented by design, not by accident. This is the textbook example of why you want to streamline business units, communications, and ensure that the tools you have are well utilized before you add new ones.
6. Whether you like it or not, open rates are not going to save your job.
Stop reporting them to leadership. Much like GPS is a tool that helps you on your way to work, you’re still not going to use that to report to leadership at a quarterly meeting either, are you? They have almost nothing to do with the bottom line (revenue) and there are so many contributing and competing factors now that they’re almost meaningless. It’s a tool that helps you drive the metrics that matter (clicks and conversions). Start pivoting the reporting away from that metric now so that when eventually that metric is completely unreliable (it’s pretty much there now) you have something that tells the story you want to tell about your performance.
7. Put meaningful alt-text behind your images, or else.
The robots are reading everything, including the alt text. So yes, use it for its intended purpose of helping disabled readers and e-readers understand what is in that empty square. But it’s also the very first opportunity for robots to discern if you are something that is valuable to the person you’re sending to or not. Important to note: do not default to using AI for this task. It’s a garbage tool for understanding context and nuance (see #4), so this tool requires a human.
You’re probably guilty of at least two of these.
I get it. So am I. But when you know better, you do better. If you’re not sure which one is costing you the most, that’s what an audit is for.
