The last posts that I’ve written are about how to get the best out of your email marketing program (for Restaurants or Hotels and Resorts), reasons to add a newsletter to your web or blog and how to build a successful newsletter. This time I’m turning up side down and I’m going to talk about what do you have to avoid in email marketing. My experience with Pixelnews allows me to identify the most common mistakes in email marketing campaigns:
Too complex design
You have to realize that designing an email campaign is not the same as designing a website. Don’t try to use fancy flash or java scripts or try to embed a You Tube video, it just doesn’t work, and you will get crazy trying to make it look ok in the different email clients. Try to design a layout as clean and simple as possible with the correct links that will get your subscribers to the website or landing page you want.
Adding the wrong reply email address
It is pretty common to find mistakes in the reply email address or marketers that prefer to introduce a false address to avoid to get their inboxes full. Receiving feedback from your subscribers is one of the best ways to improve your campaigns and your product/service, so you cannot afford to miss that replies.
All Image, No text
I’m tired of seeing email campaigns that only have an image or a few images and no text at all. This campaigns hace two main problems:
• Are very likely to be considered as Spam by the main ISP (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail)
• Most of the email clients don’t download the images automatically so your subscribers will receive a blank email. Then they will delete it or worse, mark you as spam.
Spammy Subjects
More marketers than I thought still hasn’t understood that using subject lines with all caps, using words like WIN, PRIZE, FREE or using multiple exclamations!!! will make their emails look like Spam.
Wrong Links
The last of the most common mistakes that I’m used to see is when I click on a link in an email and it get me to a blank page with big letters that say: 404 error: Not Found. Before you send out your campaigns make sure that you have introduced the links correctly.
The economic situation that we are living today makes you analyze even more the ROI (Return on Investment) of every of your marketing actions. Don’t let these avoidable mistakes make you lose sales or decrease your reputation.
I am a big 
We want to make getting their already built contacts lists into Pixelnews really easy to our users. Most of the small companies manage their lists with excel files, so we will be keeping the basic functionality to import excel, .csv and text files. However, the number of small companies managing their contacts with CRM applications grows fast every day. In order to make it as easy as possible for them, Pixelnews will be prepared to import and synchronize contacts from the most important CRM applications in the market. This way, the users wont have to manage two different lists in two different applications.
We think it is very useful for the user a feature that makes easy to create a subscription form and embed it into a web, blog or social network profiles. This way every new sign up will be directly added to the user´s Pixelnews lists.
Finally, we are adding a feature that also exports the contacts to excel, .csv and text files.
One of the best ways to get better results with your email marketing campaigns is the segmentation of the lists. Because each user follows different criteria to create the segments, Pixelnews makes easy to customize the fields for each list.
We want the user to know how the lists perform over time. Pixelnews will provide reports where the user will see the evolution of sign ups, unsubscribed and bounces.
