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Guest post by: Alex Newell Become an Author

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We all start our email marketing career making some mistakes and here are seven major mistakes I see in my inbox every day.

Spam - spam email is unsolicited commercial email. This is illegal and should not need discussion. A few tips for beginners include - only use emails of people who have "double opted in" to your webpage and only use a professional autoresponder company such as GetResponse or Aweber.

Sloppiness - starting an email with "Hi firstname" is unforgiveable. Many years ago mail merge was able to send personalised letters to clients and autoresponders can do this too. Getting it wrong and sending your clients or prospects emails starting with "firstname" rather than their actual name is embarrassingly common.

False Urgency - Having a subject line that shouts at your subscriber such as OPEN THIS NOW is unprofessional. You may be keen that they open your email and you may feel anxious to get your affiliate commission but your urgency is not your subscriber's urgency and if you do this you will lose respect first and subscribers second

Copy and Paste: working in affiliate marketing you feel lucky to learn of an upcoming promotion. You feel even luckier that the merchant has provided pre written promotional emails and you copy them and paste them and send them. Your customer though is busy deleting all the copy cat emails they receive and just deletes yours too. Don't take it personally; after all you didn't write it personally did you?

Overusing the trigger - reading in copywriting manuals that you have to trigger human emotions you decide to use the infamous "Bad News" subject line. The bad news you refer to is just yet another sale coming to an end or yet another bonus running out but the subscriber who feels anxiety or fear in seeing your bad news subject line will be bad news for you; they may well feel tricked and unsubscribe. They may in fact feel so sore about your little trick that they lodge a "spam" complaint even though they are double optins. That is "Bad News"!


Funny formatting - I get some emails formatted so that the text is all of 2 inches wide. I generally unsubscribe pretty quickly because such emails are too difficult to read. They are not as bad as those I get with no formatting at all but I don't read those either. For the beginner - format your emails 60 characters wide. It is so easy to get this right it's just not funny.

Links not working - having worked hard at getting people to sign up to your professional double opt-in mailing list you then send them a link that does not work.

All you have to do is send a "test" email to yourself. This is an absolute must. You will spot broken personalisation, funny formatting and links that stink. Testing carefully will pretty much teach you what you need to know to give your subscriber the impression that you are a professional who cares about them and respects them and that's true isn't it?

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