Email marketing is arguably the most abused marketing channel.

A lot of marketers do everything they can to collect email addresses from prospects, only to batch and blast emails to their databases, resulting in poor email performance and a tarnished sender reputation (and potentially a lot of angry recipients!)

And then they wonder why they’re getting so many unsubscribes.

My colleague Alison said something that changed the way I look at email marketing:

“Every time you email someone it’s an opportunity for them to unsubscribe.”

Well, dang. When you put it that way, it makes me think we should hold our precious prospect email addresses a little tighter to the chest.

So I put together this decision tree that we can go through every time someone wants to send a mass email.

Before pressing that “send” button to thousands of people, make sure you have your bases covered:

• Only send to people who have engaged with your brand (website visits, email engagement, event attendance) - these are your people!
• Create emails tailored for your audience (try using dynamic content or creating separate emails for different personas)
• Remove anyone who has recently bounced or whose email address has become invalid (an email validation tool like Neverbounce can tell you which email addresses are invalid before sending)
• Think through whether or not email is the best marketing channel for the message, or if it would be better through individual outreach by sales, or in a Drift bot.

Be sure to download the decision tree and post it by your desk to make sure you never intentionally send another unsolicited email again!

Want more content on email marketing? Check these out:

• The Email’s Journey to the Inbox
• My Favorite Marketo Workarounds Pt 1: Email Throttling
• How To Do Opt-In Right
• An Email Strategy That Gets Results And Doesn't Piss People Off