It's so easy to get overwhelmed with all the advice coming your way about marketing.

I'm supposed to be an expert, but honestly, I hear so much conflicting information that sometimes I sometimes have to sit back and think “hang on, does this really make sense?”

Take an article I read today for example. It was about increasing engagement with your email marketing.

It had a couple of useful tips, but also included gems like:

“Make sure you include links to your social media profiles in all your emails”, and…

“Use a beautiful, professional-looking template”.

Ostensibly, sensible advice. Stuff you'll often hear repeated. Until you actually think it through using common sense.

So firstly, how does having links to your social media profiles increase engagement with your emails?

If anything it'll decrease engagement because people will click through instead of actually reading or replying.

And if someone is already a newsletter subscriber, do you really need them to follow you on social media too? Usually, the flow is from social media to email.

Perhaps a link every now and then with a specific call to action would work. But having links to your social media profiles in every email like a signature line will actually hurt your email deliverability. You should really aim to have only one or at most two links in each email otherwise the receiving email systems tend to flag it as spam or promotional.

Similarly with a fancy template, it's going to be more likely that your email ends up in the promotions tab or spam folder because it will look like commercial email.

And think about the emails you engage with the most…

Are they “professional” looking emails with banners, background colours and multiple columns?

Or are they the plain and simple emails your friends and colleagues send you?

Unless you're very weird it's the latter. So doesn't it make sense for the emails you send to subscribers to look like the sort of emails they normally read and reply to?

Of course, they'll know it's a newsletter type email. But if it looks and feels and is written like an email from a friend then subconsciously they'll tend to react to it in the same frame of mind as to an email from a friend.

So here's the point of all this…

…You didn't really need me to tell you that fancy emails with social media icons won't increase email engagement.

All you really needed was to think it through a bit and apply some common sense.

As I said at the start, sometimes when you're getting hit by a ton of “useful advice” you need to take a little bit of time to sit back and think.

Ask yourself whether the advice seems true from your own experience.

Apply a little logic, like thinking “why would a social media icon get me to read and reply to an email more?”. 

Common sense isn't always right. but 95% of the time it is and that helps you cut down on all the clutter and conflicting advice.

And it'll also give you a bit more confidence in your own marketing capabilities when you see how flimsy much of the advice from experts really is.