What is the first thing you do when you sit at your desk in the morning?  If you’re like me, the answer is check email. And everyday I say to myself the same thing. Where did all these messages come from? To be honest, sometimes I feel overwhelmed. I am eager to start my work every morning but I have all these unread messages hanging over my head.

The statistics are even more frightening. Recent studies show that the average employee now checks email 36 times an hour, spending a full 13 hours a week reading, deleting, sending, and sorting emails. Unfortunately, it gets even more alarming. It takes an average of 16 minutes to refocus on the task at hand after spending all that time going through your inbox. 

The cold hard facts are in and email overload is flirting with productivity. This raises a point worth noting. With so much email in their inbox, people are only going to open and read if it is worth opening and reading. People don’t have time to read email that does not provide them with any value.

So what does this mean for marketers? With so much mail flooding inboxes, it can be hard to get in front of people. Don’t get me wrong; email marketing is an incredible inbound marketing tool that can be used to nurture existing leads if done correctly. Abusing email can get you thrown into the delete file faster then you think. Are you abusing email marketing? Here is our checklist for marketers to see if you are abusing email marketing.

You Believe More is Better

A lot of people have the mindset that more is better when it comes to an email marketing campaign. In other words, the more frequently you send emails to your subscribers, the more likely they will click and interact with your content. False. And here’s why.

Think about the principle of content marketing. People love content marketing because it is marketing that gives them value and is created just for them. Providing valuable and remarkable content tailored to your buyer persona takes time to plan and execute. Sending out too many emails might water down the value of your content. You are so focused sending as many emails as possible that you are forgetting the most important part about email marketing: giving the end user the value that they so desperately want. The moment your subscribers see that your email nurturing campaign isn’t what they expect it to be, they will not hesitate to unsubscribe to your emails. CANSPAM makes that possible.

You See No Need to Test

Marketing analytics is a marketer’s best friend. It tells you what works and what doesn’t so you can tweak your inbound marketing efforts accordingly. Measuring email marketing success is no different. It can measure crucial metrics for you such as bounce rate, click through rate, conversion rates, and so much more.

Analyzing campaigns and fine-tuning them accordingly is the key to achieving maximum digital ROI. The neglect of measuring your emails is like blindly throwing an object at a target with the hopes of it hitting the bull’s eye.

Generic, Generic, Generic

No one likes to feel like a name or number in a database. Unfortunately, so many email-marketing campaigns treat individuals this way. This is a sure fire way to get a high level of unsubscribes from your email marketing efforts. And here is the best part! It isn’t that complicated! This post from Hubspot is great because it touches on excellent examples of email personalization.

Bottom Line

Here is what we know: People are extremely busy and they have a big email inbox.  They don’t have time to read every message that finds its way into their inbox. Marketers with the mindset of sending email after email with generic content will find themselves seeing very little return on investment with their campaigns. They are abusing the wonderful tool of email marketing. Be sure to nurture your existing leads, provide them with quality content, conversational and engaging copy, and click worthy subject lines. After that, analyze your results and fine tune emails and watch your ROI move up and to the right.