It's easy to be a sloppy marketer

Sometimes marketers are just sloppy.
Take, for example, an email I received today from a company.
I wasn’t expecting it (sloppy #1).
I never consciously signed up for it (sloppy #2). Apparently I’d bought a package they sold through Appsumo and they claim I asked for future offers. If I did, I didn’t mean to.
The email itself used a template from the sender’s ESP, but whomever wrote the copy didn’t actually proof read it (sloppy #3).

Use this area to offer a short teaser of your email's content. Text here will show in the preview area of some email clients.
Clearly, no one actually took the time to proof the email or even send it to themselves. Otherwise, they would have noticed the teaser text wasn’t changed.
Sloppy email marketing is a major cause of delivery problems. In this case, the error was more user visible than machine visible. But if they failed to check the machine visible information as well, that can trigger bulk foldering.
For some mailers the bulk filtering isn’t that huge a problem. The major consumer ISPs track when users go into their bulk folder and pull email out. If that happens, that improves the reputation of the sender. In this case, though, the mail is unexpected, so the recipient isn’t going to look into the bulk folder to pull it to the inbox. And even if the recipient did look in the bulk folder, it’s unlikely they would recognize it and remove it to the inbox. The sender is new, the preview text is unedited and it doesn’t look like “real” mail.
None of what the sender did here is unrecoverable. It’s not a good introduction to recipients, but it’s mostly fixable. That’s assuming the majority of recipients didn’t unsubscribe or complain. If they did, the sender probably squandered a prime marketing opportunity simply by not taking enough time to proofread their copy.
 

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Some of my clients can’t answer these question. They just tell me they want to use email and they don’t know what they’re doing and that’s why they hired me. Well, I can help them successfully send email, but I can’t help them decide what role email plays in their business. Those are the decisions my client needs to make. I can’t set their business goals for them.
When was the last time you actually sat down and just thought about your business goals? I know that sometimes it’s hard to find the time to look at your business and where it’s going. “Think about it? I’m too busy doing it!” But every business person needs to look at their business goals.
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If you’ve reached your current business goals, what are your next ones? And how does email fit into those goals?
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