9 Email marketing myths debunked

Email marketing can be challenging and feel complicated when you start researching it in more detail. That’s why we believe there are so many myths surrounding email marketing out there. All these myths just add complication and confusion when you’re trying to decide whether email marketing is for you. Today we’ll debunk 9 email marketing myths to help you understand why email marketing is an essential marketing channel to include in your marketing mix.

MYTH 1: Consumers spend less time on email

A lot of people believe that more and more consumers are spending less time on their emails. This belief stems from a belief that people prefer other marketing channels and want to keep their email address clutter-free. The truth is people are actually spending more time on checking their emails than ever before as they can access their emails easily via their mobile devices.

MYTH 2: A subject line’s only goal is to get people to open your email

While your subject line is your (so-called) first line of defence when you’re wanting to cut through the noise, the real goal of your subject line is to get people to open your email and complete an action. In other words - you want people to convert and you want these converters to open your emails. Whether that means you want your audience to buy your product, book a meeting or read your blog, your subject line can help you achieve this by clearly setting an expectation about what you are going to offer a customer within the email.

MYTH 3: Consumers don’t check their spam folder

Most email marketers believe that people do not check their spam folders, but *research shows that up to 67% of email users check their spam folders regularly and about 60% move emails out of spam. Although we are not proposing that you should use this as a benchmark to spam your subscribers, this information shows that there is light at the end of the tunnel if your email happens to land in someone’s spam folder.

MYTH 4: Sending too many emails annoys your audience

Another email marketing myth is that subscribers are receiving too many emails already and that you should not send emails to your subscribers often. According to OptIn Monster consumers receive about 6 emails a day from brands they trust. If you’re concerned about sending too many emails to your contact list make sure that you have something to say when reaching out and keep adding value to your subscribers’ experience.

MYTH 5: Unsubscribes are hurtful to your email marketing efforts

We’re always sad to see someone go and unsubscribe from our email marketing list, but unsubscribes aren’t always a bad thing. Having engaged subscribers is much more valuable than a subscriber list filled with uninterested contacts. Unsubscribes, therefore, are an important part of keeping your email list clean and healthy.

MYTH 6: Adding videos to your emails automatically boost your engagement rates

Video content has been known to boost engagement rates across various marketing channels, but adding them to your email campaigns are not necessarily going to boost your engagement rates. The reason why videos in your campaign might not boost your engagement is due to the large files that come with video content. Large files in your email can lead to bad deliverability which means your emails might not be seen by the intended audience. A great workaround to adding video content is to add an image with a play button over the image that links to the video.

MYTH 7: Spam emails are purely badly designed emails

It’s just not true that badly designed emails are the only thing that triggers spam complaints. Subscribers can mark email campaigns as spam when it’s irrelevant to them too.

Other factors that can lead to high spam complaints include:

• Not having a custom domain set up
• Using a bad/unrelated From name
• Using non-opted in lists or bought lists
• Not sending relevant content
• Not sending out regular emails (which leads to subscribers not remembering they signed up)
• And yes, badly designed emails don’t help either

MYTH 8: Designing emails in HTML is super easy

Nope. HTML doesn’t follow a basic rule set, which means you may import your code into your email providers system which might not understand what you are inserting. At Mail Blaze, we like to make things easy for you by not making you spend hours using complicated code to design your campaigns, while still giving you the freedom to use HTML code if you choose.

MYTH 9: Email marketing is dying

If you Google: “is email marketing dead” you’ll get a lot of varied opinions on the subject. Overall though most marketers believe that email marketing is still one of the most effective, efficient, cost-effective ways to engage with their audience.

Let’s look at some email marketing stats to illustrate why we think email marketing isn’t dead:

• 99% of people read their emails at least once a day
• 92% of internet users have an email account vs only 79% who have a social media account
• The average order value generated from email marketing is 3x higher than that generated from social media

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about common email marketing myths. Are you ready to take the next step and start sending out beautiful curated mails? Contact us today to help you get started or head over to our pricing page and pick one of our cost-effective packages to suit your needs.

*according to research by Litmus