I get a lot of emails. To be fair, I also send a lot of them. Like, a LOT. Several million a month. Even though I’ve been doing this for a while, it will always be a little scary clicking send. Email marketing is a very public job. If there’s a mistake, millions of people can see it – instantly. Sure, depending on the mistake, most people probably won’t see it. Most brands should be so lucky to have people open and completely read their emails, let alone notice a mistake. (Unless it’s in the subject line, pre-header, or from name. Poor Google Wage.)

But I notice them. I scrutinize the emails I receive, and then I put a label on them – Good email marketing or Bad email marketing. The “Good email marketing” emails get forwarded to co-workers with a “Hey, we should be doing this.” The bad ones? Well, they get tweeted about with the hashtag “#emailsnarketing.”

Tweeting about them isn’t really all that helpful. While it’s fun to be snarky and cringe at typos in subject lines, it’s not really helping anyone. I want to help everyone make their email better.

So I’m going to write about them here. I just subscribed to a LOT of emails from all kinds of brands. Many of them are popular brands that I normally don’t even shop at or subscribe to, but now I do. I’m going to call out bad email practices and make suggestions for improving them. I’m also going to have “Thumbs up Thursday” for brands that are doing it right. Maybe someday, that will be every email.