Recently, one of our team members made a simple mistake of CCing numerous contacts in a general email rather then BCCing them – the aftermath was a backlash of emails back to the affect of ‘It’s incredibly bad form to mass mail like this – Have you ever heard of BCC? ‘! Needless to say my colleague was going quick, and this was a genuine human error of which a follow-up email was sent immediately to apologise. … Normally we would stick to our email marketing service, but this was actually a genuine email from the desk of our project manager, extending an invite to some contacts she had delt with recently.

If you’re not sure of the difference between CC (Carbon Copy) and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy), CC means that all the recipients (and their email addresses) are seen, BCC means they remain anonymous to the main recipient/s of the email.

Today, to my surprise, Adobe made the same mistake. And not only did I receive their email confirming my attendance to their ‘Amplify Your Creativity’… event on Thursday in Sydney, but I also received 200 of them, all with the recipients email addresses available in the CC field of the email. Mistake? Yep, a biggen! Is Adobe immune to human error? I think not!… I have to wonder … Does a human error warrant a disgruntled email? How would you handle this?

It’s easy to do as we ourselves (embarrassingly) did recently, and is a good reminder that you should stick to email marketing systems for automations and bulk emails.

So whilst we’re too not immune to making rookie email blunders, we do know the best practises and how to use email marketing systems to their best potential. Here are some of our top tips:

Don’t bombard your database with self promotion. Give them value and share information/tools they are interested in

Don’t harass them. Get your frequency at a good balance… you want to contact them enough that they don’t go ‘who the hell is ‘XXX’ but you also want to have enough touch points that you’re at front of mind.

Make it relevant. A lot can be said for segmenting your database and tailoring content that is specific to their needs/location etc.

Discover… Automations. Automations, or Autoresponder series as they are also known, are powerful email marketing series where by you can tailor, and fully automate a series of emails to trigger based on an action, list etc.

Integrate and then integrate some more. Choose an email marketing system which will seamlessly integrate with your website. Integrations at a top level can even be worked in with social media advertising so that if a customer takes a particular action, they are unsubscribed from list Y and added to list X.

The Creative Collective can assist you with setting up your email marketing system – from importing your database and creating a custom email marketing template, to masterminding complex automation series and integrations. Talk to us today to find out more.…