How to Send a Terrible Marketing Email

bybrandonacox

2.9K followers

7 years ago

I messed up.

Normally, when I send a marketing email, I follow some basic rules:

• Plain text only, no images, unless it involves a physical product.
• Very personal, like I'm emailing one person, not many.
• One, two, maybe three links but the fewer the better.

NOT to spam, but so you can see one that had a 33% open rate and a 3.6% click-through rate, here's a link: http://bcox.me/egood

But today, I received an email from one of the most respected marketers in the field. His email was HTML, not plain-text. It included 10 stories, which seemed to convey high value.

So today, I experimented and created a nicely designed HTML email with ten blurbs, each with a link. I tried to model his approach as closely as I could.

It bombed!

NOT to spam, but so you can see how terrible, awful, no good, very bad today's email was, here's a link: http://bcox.me/ebad

So far, the open rate is just 13% (probably will approach 18%) but my normal open rate is up around 30%. And the click-through rate on links... 0.5%!!! Normally, I'm between 3.5% and 4.0%.

I've also noticed a higher than usual number of unsubscribes and even spam complaints.

The moral of the story?

Keep doing what Pat Flynn does.

• As plain as possible.
• One link (maybe that one link repeated a second time).
• Very personal.

Live and learn!