Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:15 pm

This blog article is about email marketing and how to get it very badly wrong, in fact so wrong that it can harm your business.

In the week between Christmas and the New Year I got three emails from a supplier that I used once towards the end of last year.  While I expect now-days to get emails from businesses that I have used once – even though it is annoying that there is no way to choose not to receive these emails when you buy from many online sites this supplier failed in so many ways.

Within the space of 2 days I got three emails, all giving me details of special offers on their on-line shop.  I’ve listed below the  problems with these emails :-

•  They were  all related to offers that expired before Christmas !  You can probably appreciate how annoying this can be to a prospective customer.
• When I tried to email the supplier back I realised that it had been sent from a “no-reply” email address, meaning that there was no way to contact them directly.
• The unsubscribe link on the email ended up with an error on their website – meaning there was no way to unsubscribe from future emails.
• They linked to their Twitter account on all of the emails – guess what – the link to the Twitter account also ended up with an error on their website where they were trying to count the number of people clicking the link.

As I found each of these problems the likely-hood of me using the supplier again diminished more and more.  I eventually looked at their website, found an email address and contacted them asking them to remove me from all future mailings and pointing out the errors and suggesting that this would not have increased confidence in their customers.

Oh, and what I didn’t point out is that the emails were illegal here in the UK as they were a limited company that hadn’t included their company registration details (something that has been law here in the UK for about 3 years now – see our email marketing law blog post for more details).

This supplier has lost at least one future customer by not carrying out some very basic checks – if you are sending emails out to customers or prospects as part of a mailshot make sure that you send a copy to yourself first, click on every link in the email and make sure that they all work, and as a final thought – you may have a lovely design on your emails (lots of product shots etc) but did you know that the default for many email clients is not to download images?