4 Signs Your Email Marketer is Lying to You

Your business probably uses email marketing. Over 80% do. If someone else does your email marketing, an agency/freelancer, or an employee, here’s four ways they could be lying to you. 

Meet Todd, the BAD email marketer. If you need help visualizing Todd, imagine that annoying classmate that always snickers and talks behind your back. Likes to cause drama. He probably doesn’t even like sunshine or rainbows. 

1) Focus on Open Rates

You might be wondering why open rates are on this list. It’s a top-of-funnel metric that should be a good indicator of performance, right?

Wrong.

In 2021, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). This feature automatically "opens" emails. Artificially inflating open rates. When every email is marked opened, no email is marked opened.

Todd will want to use open rates as the primary success metric because they’re higher than actual. It makes him look good. 

Instead, focus on lower funnel metrics. The best metric is purchase conversion rate. But that number is lower and harder to compare between campaigns. 

Click-through-rates are another option, however recently there’s been clickbots that have also been inflating metrics. Nobody should be receiving 99% CTR in a 1,000+ email campaign.

2) Prioritize List Size

Todd is a person that repeats “the bigger, the better” to himself in the mirror. It’s why he drives a Jeep 4x4 Pickup truck. Makes you wonder if he’s overcompensating for something.

The problem is he brings this mentality to email marketing too. Todd’s fixated on growing the email list size at all costs.

Having a lot of subscribers is important. But even more important is list quality. Put it another way, if your business sells gloves then what good is having 1 million subscribers without arms? Sorry, that’s a gruesome example. 

If the subscribers are not your target customers, then it can damage your sender reputation. Unengaged subscribers can mark your emails as spam. More tangibly, it leads to higher costs. Most email service providers’ fees are based on the number of subscribers.

Focus on the engagement of your subscribers. Tell Todd to suppress subscribers that don’t engage.

3) Ignore Technical Setup

Want to know what the most important part of an email is? Hint: It’s not the subject line. 

It’s whether your subscriber receives your email, or deliverability. There’s no point in crafting the perfect subject line if it ends up in spam.

Improving email deliverability falls partially under “technical setup.” If the words SPF, DKIM, or DMARC cause your eyes to glaze over, you’re not the only ones. It’s boring and tedious. There’s tons of Fiverr services dedicated to technical setup. There’s also tons of great content online dedicated to this subject.

Problem is, Todd’s eyes also glaze over when he hears those letters. He does the simple thing. He ignores it. Most people won’t know technical setup is necessary. They didn’t need this for their personal email accounts.

If you don’t have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up, do it now. It’s painful but a one-time thing. Otherwise you’re sending emails into the void.

4) Extend Attribution Windows

Probably the laziest and most harmful tactic Todd the tool uses. Whoops meant to say the laziest and most harmful tool Todd uses. 

Let’s first oversimplify how purchase attribution works. If an email is sent and a purchase occurs afterwards then that purchase is attributed to the email. But it must happen within a certain time frame, or window. Otherwise every purchase you make after seeing the email is attributed even years later.

The more purchases attributed, the more revenue and value Todd is bringing in. He is very motivated to get that number up. 

What he does is he goes into settings and increases the number of days. Maybe to something ridiculous like 60 days. Who remembers an email from 60 days ago?

Boom now his attributed revenue goes up. No extra work needed.

This is considered the most harmful tactic because there is no actual value being added. Check to see if your attribution window is reasonable.

Todd the Email Marketer

You don’t want Todd as your email marketer. But now you know what Todd does. Modern email marketing is complex and nuanced. There’s unreliable metrics and opaque spam filters.

But when done correctly, email marketing can be a powerful driver of business growth. 1send offers the same benefits on Facebook Messenger. 

Build the same marketing campaigns without the issues. Accurate open rates and click-through-rates. No technical setup required since deliverability is guaranteed.