The 6 Biggest Email

Marketing Myths, Debunked

Markidan Strategies

lenmarkidan.com
I heard that if you send an email without
consent and you turn into a bronze statue.
Last year, the number of emails
sent and received totaled over
205 billion.
The world is, without a doubt,
addicted to our inboxes. And
because of that, despite what the
clickbait-generating marketing “
gurus” want you to believe, no,
email marketing is not dead.
Nor will it be dead in the
foreseeable future.
In fact, one McKinsey study
suggests that email marketing
is 40 times more effective at
acquiring new customers than
Twitter and Facebook combined.
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So, if email is here to stay, then it makes
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sense for marketers to understand it as
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well as possible. And a big part of that is
clearing up the many dangerous myths
that have been repeated so often that
they’ve somehow become “facts.”
In this guide, we’ll look at the six worst
offenders.
1. Tuesday is the best day
to send marketing emails
You’ve almost certainly heard this
one.
The 6 Biggest Email Marketing Myths, Debunked 1
And if you haven’t, just play the In HubSpot’s Science of Email report,
scene out in your head: imagine that they took a look at the impact that
someone asks you to guess the very the day of the week had on email
best day to send a marketing email? open rates, and here’s what they found:

“Ok,” you think. “Well, let’s see…

It wouldn’t be Monday, because

people are getting in and catching up.
It wouldn’t be Friday, because people
are getting ready for the weekend.
Wednesday and Thursday, people
are already in full swing and probably Copyblogger Certified
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focused on work.

So, it must be Tuesday.”

And just like that, you’ll have reached

the same conclusion as thousands of
other email marketers, who accept as
fact that Tuesday is, without question,
the most effective day to do email
marketing.
Except that, well…it’s not. Not for
everyone, at least.
For all but the largest lists, Tuesday
was actually the worst day to send
marketing emails!
My hunch is that those Tuesday emails
get lost in the noise of those other
email marketers diligently obeying the
“best practices.”

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In fact, Thursdays, Fridays and even
weekends outperformed the rest of
the week.
Ultimately, every list is different and
you’ll need to test for yourself.
But don’t get caught in the Tuesday trap.
2. You can only send a
particular email once
You spend hours writing a marketing
email that you hope will help your
business. It’s clear, punchy and will
bring a ton of value to your readers.
You need to get this email in front
of them.
And so you send the email, and get
an open rate of around 30%.
While it’s great that 30% of your list
saw the email you toiled over, that
means that 70% of your list never got
to read it.
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Missed opportunity, right?
Not necessarily.
I absolutely love this tactic shared by
SumoMe founder Noah Kagan (and
taught to him by Neal Taparia from
EasyBib), for getting more mileage
from every email that you send:
Step 1. Take the SAME
email you sent and
CHANGE the subject
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Content
line to Marketers
something new.
Step 2. Email it out a
week later JUST TO
YOUR NON-OPENS.
Simple, but incredibly useful.
Here’s how Noah’s email results
looked from his initial email:
The 6 Biggest Email Marketing Myths, Debunked 3
And here’s how they looked for the re-titled and re-sent email:

That’s 30%+ more opens than if he hadn’t repackaged the original email!

We’ve tested the same strategy at Groove and gotten results ranging from 5% to
40% more opens per email.

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3. Keep your marketing emails short
Have you heard people wax poetic about how “Email is a short-form medium!”

I know I have.

But it’s not that simple. The truth is that it all depends.

When I read Joanna Wiebe’s excellent advice on landing page copy, I punched
the air in agreement (yes, it looked ridiculous, and yes, it made me happy to
work from home with nobody around):

Like everything, the length of your page depends on your

visitors and prospects. It’s not about picking one length or

Markidan Strategies The 6 Biggest Email Marketing Myths, Debunked 4

 style of page out of a hat and simply shoving your messages
into that. And it’s not about copying Crazy Egg, Flow, Groove,
Dropbox, Uber or any other sites out there!

You can apply this same framework to email marketing.

What do your visitors and prospects care about? And how much are they
willing to read about it?

Close.io tested emails of varying lengths in a drip marketing campaign, and

one of them brought in more free trial signups than any other. Look at how
long it is:

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Markidan Strategies The 6 Biggest Email Marketing Myths, Debunked 5

 Copyblogger Certified
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 Copyblogger Certified
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 Copyblogger Certified
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 Copyblogger Certified
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Don’t worry about cutting your message short just because you want to stuff
your email into an arbitrary word count. Yes, you should write economically,
but don’t be scared of testing long-form emails!

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4. Keep your subject While most marketers stuck to 21-50
characters, actual read rates didn’t really
lines short.
drop off significantly for longer subject
As soon as smartphones began to lines until they started to get really long.
take off, article after article popped
up about testing your subject lines to
5. Unsubscribes are bad!
make sure that they fit on Blackberry
screens. Some email marketers love to brag
about their low unsubscribe rates.
“Keep it to 25-30 characters,” they said.
But really, that’s not any different than
Chalk that up as another one of those bragging about Facebook likes. It’s a
assumptions that might sound valid, nice metric, but it means absolutely
but isn’t necessarily that important. nothing for your business’ bottom line.
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Return Path looked at more than 9 Content Marketers
million marketing emails sent in
February 2015 to see how subject line
length affected the average read rate,
and here’s what they found:

Harvard Business Review

But bragging about not having

many unsubscribes is even worse,
because unsubscribes are actually

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they remove people from your list who are unlikely to buy from you, which in
turn saves you money with your email software provider (almost all of them
charge based on the size of your list).

In fact, savvy email marketers strategically try to get unqualified leads to unsubscribe
from their list on purpose to maximize the ROI of their email marketing efforts.

6. Marketing emails should be branded and polished

Do marketing emails need to look nice?

Not always. In my testing with Groove, for some of our email drips —
especially in customer onboarding — plain text emails with no logos or colors
at all convert the best. In fact, this is the highest-converting email in our
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entire onboarding drip, performing about 35% better Certified
than the same copy
in a branded template: Content Marketers

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For comparison, here’s the “branded” version of the same exact email:

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We’re not the only ones to have had plain text emails win.

HubSpot tested the claim that HTML emails performed better than plain text
ones, and here are just a couple of the results they found:

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Again, it all depends on your audience, who might prefer the conversational,
personal feel of a “regular” looking email over a well-designed one.

When it doubt, test.

Don’t buy the email marketing myths

Email marketing is incredibly valuable. It’s powerful, cheap and easy to

implement. But there’s a lot of bad advice out there out there.

I hope that this guide convinced you to not take any of these common myths at
face value. As with any kind of marketing, test to see what works best for your
unique audience: what works on them is all that matters.

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