Some obviously fall through the cracks…

Why? Not enough Love.

Allow me to do a tad bit of email consultation for all of you. I do this for a living but because I’m in a generous mood, I’m gonna offer some advice – pro bono. Thank me by EXCLUDING me from ANY form of event notification. Please.

Here’s a great example from Love International that never made it to my eyes, until by accident, noticed it peeking out from under some Viagra spam. Behold:

So for budding email writers who are looking to maximize their list capabilities for events, here are some guiding tips on what NOT TO DO:

1. Chill out on the CAPSLOCK KEY

SCREAMING AT PEOPLE LIKE THIS IF YOU ARE TRYING TO CREATE ATTENTION really serves very little purpose. UNLESS YOU ARE F**KING SICK OF GETTING SPAMMED. Thankfully filters are capable of keeping these nasties out of your inbox. You’d think that people would get that by now.

2. HTML Grossness

Uh. Why risk it? Most HTML and image heavy emails are gonna slam straight into most junk filters. Don’t bother. Plain text just works and if you can’t communicate in writing, then there’s really no point using email.

3.Too too too many links links links

The more links, the more junk mail assassins are going to redirect your carefully crafted communication straight into the poo-poo pile. Your email is to communicate an event, it’s not the yellow pages.

4. Trigger words

… like ‘SECRET’ and ‘Buy’ and ‘Free’ are not good for your emails. Just look at the trashy penis enlargement emails that end up in your spam filter and pick out trigger words that are going to compromise your communication.

5. Unsubscriptions

(Doesn’t really anything to do with spam filters — but it’s still annoying.)

Make your unsubscribe links are clearly visible and MAKE SURE THEY WORK. I’ve tried unsubscribing from this list for close to the 5th time now and still nothing. In fact, I might report this as unsolicited email to their ISP… just because I still get these newsletters.

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So keep these tips in mind next time you’re crafting your next brilliant event invite and with some know-how you would find yourself with many more interested readers.

And always keep the primary objective in mind: larger open rates = larger response rates. But we’ll get down to that another day.

PS: If you are REALLY interested in trying out some proper software that can fix all these issues FOR you – then I would really suggest e-filtrate. I’ve been using this for almost a year now and my arrival rates have always been awesome.

Check it out here.