Every successful email marketer knows that customers these days are a bunch of whining ninnies who want to be spoonfed “relevant and engaging information.” Ignore these wimpy subscribers! If your customers are really serious they will buy your products once you’ve hit them with a good ol’ fashioned hard sell. So by all means go ahead and use all seven of the top ways small businesses can alienate their email subscribers!

“They can darn well read it on a real computer!”

Configuring your email to be properly displayed only on a resolution of at least 1024 x 768 ensures that only serious customers will be able to read it. After all, everyone knows that all those mobile freaks out there with those tiny screens are just puerile tweens keeping up with Justin Bieber tweets or lonely hearts trying to score on Facebook, and they don’t ever really buy anything.

“I’m not a communicator, I’m a seller!”

Providing relevant and entertaining information in your email marketing campaign is the surest way to waste your time and not move any product off the shelf. Show them the product, tell them they have to own it or be known forever as lily-livered wusses, and then plunk a Buy Now button that takes up half the screen. If they want to be informed, let them go to cnn.com. The only effective purpose of emails is to sell sell sell!

“I love my Flash logo and Applemaniacs can take a hike!”

You’ve put serious money into having your logo morph into a 3D eagle soaring over an American flag then turning into the Statue Of Liberty holding your SKU 4905W3A instead of her torch so goldurn it, you’re going to have it in your emails! You don’t know what HTML5 is and you don’t care. If Adobe was smart enough to create PostScript and Photoshop, their Flash is good enough to run on all the devices that really matter.

“If weekly emails sell, then daily emails will sell 7 times as much!”

The only people who get tired of having their inboxes swamped with retailer emails are the ones that aren’t interested in your products anyway. Being your customer is not just a consumer choice, it’s a lifestyle! So why not hit them up every day with new offers designed to separate them from their money? For that matter, why not send one in the morning and another one in the afternoon? People today have short memories so it’s best to keep hitting them up.

“Who cares about proofreading? Just make sure the Buy links work!”

Most of your customers are illiterates who spent English class daydreaming about cute cheerleaders or brawny quarterbacks so the finer points of the language are lost on them. What the heck is the difference between whose and who’s, and who really cares? Nobody yet has turned back on a deal because some ivory tower professor determines the sales copy used too many participial relative clauses.

“Preheaders are for the birds!”

What is the point of tipping off your subscribers to what’s inside the email? They can open it for themselves and read it. You should be sick and tired by now of babysitting your lazy customers, so if they can’t be bothered to hit Open without being teased into it, they can all take a long walk off a short pier.

“The busier the better!”

Don’t let anyone tell you that flashing, running marquees, dancing clowns, hopping bunnies, fireworks and swirling type doesn’t sell product. Any good email template has to have at least four different strongly patterned backgrounds and at least two animated gifs per square inch. If your marketing message was supposed to be static you would have sent it by snail mail!

Email, schmemail, selling has been the same since time immemorial. Dazzle them with B.S., strongarm them, then separate them from their money. Apply these seven ways religiously and you will be sure that your subscriber alienation metric will reach an awesome and exciting 100%!