A recent Litmus article highlighted some of the some usual suspects in manipulative email marketing: passive aggressive opt in or opt out language, clickbait subject lines, etc. When read from the perspective of the subscriber, most of these are obviously annoying.
But if you flip the perspective to that of the business sending them, a lot of these start to look pretty attractive– some may even say “best practice”. When’s the last time you went to a blog that did not have a focus-stealing pop up with passive aggressive text imploring you to subscribe? And I imagine most email marketers have tried to juice open rates by getting overly clever? Some of the stuff in this list is relatively innocuous, but it’s interesting the see the significant gap between expectations of the business and those of their subscribers.
My solution to navigating these waters is to always bring my experience as a subscriber into consideration. I joke marketers are one of the worst audiences to market to – because we know how the process works – and some of us are a little jaded about it. So use this as a compass in your own marketing decisions as ask: “If I was a subscriber, would this frustrate or delight me?”