“Walking under an open ladder will bring you bad luck!”

A classic example of an old myth and, if you’re superstitious, you may well avoid walking under them for fear of the unknown!

The email marketing industry also has some myths which could seriously hinder your performance as a marketer, if you stick to them. We’ve broken down a few of the popular ones and given you sound, logical reasons why not to believe them:

Myth #1 – Tuesday Is the Best Day to Send Marketing Emails

You may be thinking, why Tuesday?

To put it simply, some email marketers presume Mondays are hectic as people begin to settle into the week. They may also think that on Thursdays/Fridays people are leaving work earlier in preparation for the weekend.  And Wednesdays mean middle of the week, which is when most people are knee deep in work. Therefore, it must be Tuesday! True? No!

Sending emails on a Tuesday is not necessarily the best day and especially not for all companies. Research conducted by Smart Insights found that for both B2B and B2C emails, opens and clicks are pretty much even throughout the week, even peaking slightly during the weekend for retailers.

Myth #2 – Your Subject Lines Should Be Short

If you read email marketing best practise guidelines, we are told that subject lines should be between 21-50 characters in length.

Return Path analysed over nine million emails from over 3000 retail senders to examine how subject line length affected average read rates:

Although most marketers stuck to the 21-50 character limit, there was no significant drop in read rates for longer subject lines. In fact, there was only a significant drop once subject lines had a character length of great than 100. Furthermore, the highest read rate was for subject lines with a character length of 61-70.

From this we can conclude that short subject lines do not necessarily mean more reads, just ensure your subject lines stand out with the right wording and you’re ready to go. Click here to read more about using emojis to make your subject lines stand out.

Myth #3 – Unsubscribes Are a Bad Thing

It’s inevitable. Unsubscribes are going to happen – but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

A recipient unsubscribing simply means they do not want to receive your emails. This could be down to the content, frequency or just de-cluttering an inbox. Therefore, no matter what you sent to them, no amount of email magic would have changed their view.

Essentially, unsubscribes remove any individuals who are not engaged with your offering. It’s better for delivery rates that these people opt-out rather than remain on your marketing database and doing nothing, or worse, still marking your email as junk.

Unsubscribes leave you with a more targeted marketing list; boosting your engagement and those all-important open rates.

Furthermore, with GDPR looming on the horizon, your data is getting cleaner with organic opt-out’s.

Myth #4 – You Shouldn’t Send the Same Email Twice

We feel it’s perfectly fine to resend the same email to subscribers, BUT only to those people who didn’t open it the first time around. With busy inboxes, your recipient may have genuinely missed your emails and with CMAdvantage you can even change the subject line when resending automatically to non-engagers. This way you are acknowledging that you are sending the same content and just want to ensure your recipient is not missing out.

Myth #5 – You Have to Use Double Opt-In – It’s the Law

Only in Germany 😊

But it is a great feature if you want to ensure you have authentic opt-in susbcribers. Click here to learn more about double opt-in.

Myth #6 – Email Marketing Is Dying Out

A study conducted by Radicati Group predicted by the end of 2020 the number of email users will be over 3 billion; this is almost half of the world’s total population, showing no indication of email marketing slowing down any time soon.

You need an email address to register, set up an account, purchase something etc. so we don’t see it dying out anytime soon!

We hope we’ve helped bust some popular email marketing myths for you – if you need any more advice or tips to boost your marketing emails, get in touch with us at info@campaignmaster.co.uk. You can also sign up to our fantastic e-newsletter at campaignmaster.co.uk/receive-hintstips-updates