In the past day alone, I have received four marketing/communications emails that are indicative of a huge amount of carelessness or ignorance or both. In each case, spending a bit more time checking the following would result in a more effective email.

<strong>Check you spelling without depending on spell check</strong>

"Your invited to join us" was in the subject line of one email and in the the body of another.  Depending on spell check without actually reading your email will let this type of ignorant email go through.  In case you're wondering what is wrong with that line, please read this sentence.

<strong>Check dates carefully</strong>

I got an invitation for an event taking place on Monday, September 20th. Except that September 20th is a Friday. And it turns out the event is actually on Monday, September 16th.

<strong>Be careful with automated replies</strong>

As you<a title="You may not see this post" href="http://deborahbrody.com/2013/09/you-may-not-see-this-post/"> read yesterday</a>, this blog's feed was not appearing in Feedly. I wrote Feedly and I got an automated response (I didn't realize it was automated at the time) telling me that it was due to a capacity issue. Feedly's Twitter person told me this:
<blockquote>it is not a capacity issue. That is an old automated email. I have asked our dev lead to look into this. Expect and answer today. -Ed</blockquote>
I realize that sometimes it's necessary for customer service to send an automated response due to volume or because of the need to acknowledge communication. But, email communications should not be misleading or just plain wrong.

<strong>The bottom line is check and then check again!</strong>

Email marketing may be very effective, but if you send out the wrong information, with incorrect spelling or grammar, you will not only not achieve your communications goals, you will appear ignorant and/or careless.

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