After all these years, why I am still ranting about email.

I am quite fed up every time when I receive an email which makes lazy mistake. If you use email to communicate in your business, please at least test it before you send it out. I am sure everyone of us in marketing have read about email marketing or the do-and-don’t of email marketing, etc. But how come the marketers still make the mistake like this,

The email has nothing except many stripes overlapping with each other. You can barely see some text characters in the content but they are all unreadable.

This one looks better at least with a clear message for some of the non-displayed images.

Today almost all the email apps are pre-configured not to display the images by default particularly on mobile. It is our job to provide clarity in the communications. If you are composing your email with rich content, your email will be sent out in HTML format. Then all the embedded images will not be displayed by default. You need to include the text message using the alt tag. The alt tag is the HTML attribute used in HTML document to specify alternative text that is to be rendered when the image element to which it is applied cannot be rendered (from wiki). I do not need to write the entire HTML formatting guide here. You can Google “Alt Tag” and read as much as you want for how to use alt tag and why we need it.

But learning and knowing one thing is different from practicing it. We don’t practice a lot of common knowledge because we choose to stay lazy and be indifferent. Why? In my experience, and it is also the theme of this blog, 50% of the marketing failures are not caused by the insufficient of knowledge. It is the result of our ignorance and the unwillingness to improve. Technology come into handy for us to use it as an excuse for our laziness. I am wondering why I keep saying the marketers are lazy…? My bad if I am being bias. But as a matter of fact, the lazy mistakes do happen all the time and show no sign to stop.

If you use email marketing solution such as Mailchimp, Mailjet, or SendGrid, then you should read their best practice guides. They share tons of good information which can improve your email marketing practice. Someone even proposes a markup language called HEML to simplify responsive email marketing. Email marketing has been around for at least 30 years and the marketing community continues to enhance the standard and practice. It is our job as a good marketer to practice the fundamental correctly while adopting and improving with the technology.

Just don’t be lazy when you do marketing.