10 Ways to Suck at Email Deliverability

I don’t know about you, but this post gave me a good laugh to end a very long and busy week. Our friend Kristin Connell, Senior Manager, Marketing Operations, at Deltek posted this great deliverability post to the Eloqua Topliners Community.

Please take some time this Friday and laugh with me.

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Why write about ways to suck? Because everyone always writes about how to not suck – and, I’ll admit it, I jacked the twist from a SlideShare presentation recently posted by one of my product marketing directors about how to fail at project management. Anyway, back to sucking at email deliverability. Why email deliverability? Let’s just say it’s a timely topic for me – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

So, 10 ways to suck at email deliverability (in no particular order):

1. Buy lists – buy lots and lots of lists – upload them ad hoc and blast, blast, blast!
2. If people don’t open your emails, just put’em in a program and keeping sending to them and never give up – why else would they call it automation?
3. Sender score? What do you mean sender score? You’re saying someone is scoring my sending?
4. Don’t bother people wanting to submit a form on your site with fine print about what you’re going to do with their email address – no one reads that stuff anyway.
5. Welcome, shmelcome! Who has time to figure out what people are interested in? Just send everything to everyone and they’ll figure it out.
6. Testing your email is a waste of time – seriously. Just write it up, slap some footer mumbo-jumbo on that bad boy and send it out, no big.
7. Speaking of footers, if you’re asked to kill or hide the footer mumbo-jumbo, be like Nike (and just do it).
8. It’s what you say that matters – don’t be boring about background images, blah, blah, blah – who cares what it looks like!
9. It doesn’t matter what you say, it just has to look hot and BOOM! Everyone will open it.
10. Business cards are like little permission slips – grab’em up at your event, slam that data into your system and blast away. Duh.  It says you can do that on the Internet and you can never put anything that isn’t true on the Internet.

What other ways have you found to suck at email deliverability? I specifically made this a question so I could recognize “helpful” comments – points, anyone?