Stop with emails that sound like they were written by a robot
Whether we like it or not, AI is going to make a huge impact on pretty much every aspect of our lives. But that doesn’t mean that your marketing automation sequences should sound like they were written by a robot, argues Daniel Smith.
With the average email open rate at around 23%, there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to marketing automation for small and large businesses alike.
In 2012, if your business had the following automations in place, you were ahead of the game:
- Welcome series
- Win-back series
- Cart/sign up abandon series
- Cross-sell series
The quality of these series didn’t really matter so much as very few businesses were using marketing automation to nurture leads or drive sales, and consumers weren’t receiving many emails.
I *HATE* (with a vengeance) HTML emails. Because of security reasons, I use a Unix based text only email client. I have NEVER had a security incident because of this: you *cannot* exploit a dumb text only email client. Email was originally text only. Then some idiot decided to corrupt the simple standard and add HTML to (the exploitable) Outlook client. Now I am greeted with pages of gobbledygook for just a few sentences! Reading HTML emails from unknown (or even known) sources is just begging to be pwned! So I totally agree that companies need to get back to emails that are just a few lines of plain text. And stop getting some clueless intern to do *anything* which is direct client facing (like the robo-mails) unless you want to lose that client. Of course, they like to add their tracking stuff (single pixel images etc) using HTML so they know *exactly* when you opened it. It is amusing when I seem to get dropped off certain lists (even though I read the emails) as they think I haven’t received them because my dumb text only client doesn’t ever betray me 🙂