3 Tips for Launching a Disastrous Email Campaign

For every successful email campaign, just as many (or more) bomb based on certain “best practices” that are supposed to work but fail to make a blip. Despite this, many marketers continue to deploy best practices, which begs the question:

Are some direct marketers actually trying to launch disastrous email campaigns?

If this is true and you’re one such marketer, here are three simple tips to create emails that people enjoy whipping into the trash:

Keep Telling People “This Is Your Last Chance”—Then Ditch Them

This easy, time-honored technique is an exceptional way to annoy the hell out of people and create tons of bad word-of-mouth advertising. Case in point:

Some while ago, a friend received a “last chance” email from a company selling a CD set that promised unparalleled “benefits to your career, finances, health and relationships” by learning how to be grateful, all for $17, which (according to the marketer) was a “delightfully generous” 85% discount from the normal selling price of $115.

The thing was, my friend had come to a simple conclusion. She was already thankful in life, and had always been grateful. So she essentially already had the training to create more personal and professional benefits in her life, and didn’t need to spend $17 for a how-to CD set. Moreover, she was irritated that the marketer would give her a “last chance” to cash in on the discount when the marketer had made the same “last chance” offer just days earlier. So my friend wrote to the marketer to ask an obvious question:

“I thought the last email was my last chance. How many times are you going to harang me about something I clearly don't want?”

Rather than answering my friend’s question, the marketer just politely ditched her by writing:

“Thank you for reaching out. We are so sad to see you go. You will be missed! We have successfully unsubscribed you from our list. Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.”

After being unceremoniously chucked into trash, my friend naturally let others know about how she’d been “helped.”

In other words, if the marketer’s goal had been to piss off a prospect, create a negative brand image and lose future prospects, they pretty much hit the mark, and one can only assume they were grateful for that.

Blindly Copy Research Without Checking the Facts (and the Whole Story)

Few things obliterate brand trust and believability like parroting “factual” findings by others without verifying those facts or even making sure you have the whole story. Here’s a simple example:

In a recent email from a healthcare company, the writer quoted the following research:

“In a recent study by German researchers, nearly 25,000 chemicals were found lurking in a single bottle of water… and many of these chemicals mimic the effects of pharmaceuticals.”

In actuality, German researchers didn’t find all those chemicals in a single bottle of water. Researchers tested 18 different water bottles and found 25,000 chemicals in total across the board.

Now not all prospects/customers may want to spend three minutes on Google to discover whether you’re just parroting research. So this technique is not a surefire bet for email disaster. However, once one of these trust-obliterating grenades goes off, you get the double bonus of a completely mistrustful prospect/client AND further undermining the trust in marketing as a whole.

Use Incorrect Words to Create Baffling Content

Like traditional emails selling products or services, job emails are also marketing emails designed to attract the best candidates to an opening by selling prospects on an enticing opportunity. To turn those candidates away, incorrect word choice and overall bad writing have the added benefit of creating baffled readers. A quick example:

In a recent email alert for an English teacher’s position with a leading university, applicants were instructed to “send to the Department Chair by email a letter of application, a current curriculum vitae” and “the names and contact information for two referees.”

To say it another way: By using “referees” instead of the word “references,” the email created three baffling possibilities:

• Applicants required experience playing hockey.

• The company needed to find some referees (perhaps for its company team), and the job posting was really a surreptitious ploy to easily gain such information.

• Any future job interview with the company would be so fraught with physical confrontation that applicants had to be prepared to bring their own referees.