Over the years, I slowly stopped playing mobile app games. Most of them never really got me to play them for a long period of time except for a select few.

Today I'm down to one game, which means less time spent on my phone.

Awesome.

But if you've played any mobile games before, you'll notice a lot of them have one thing in common.

Advertisements.

Advertisements that promote other mobile games, but it's not just that. Most ads you see are pretty misleading.

They'll usually show you a video showcasing the game, and you can tell on certain ads that whoever made them really tried to make the games as exciting and dramatic as possible.

But when you download the game and actually play it, it's nothing like you saw in the video ad. It's a plague that's been around the mobile world for many years.

Does that happen with emails too?

Of course!

There are always some email marketers out there that'll mislead their readers to them to open their emails even though it's against the CAN-SPAM Act.

Here are some examples I found online since I couldn't find any in my own inbox.

I found an email sent from someone who put their sender name as "me, Jason (2)" to trick the reader into thinking this is an ongoing conversation between them and a man named Jason. I won't lie, this is actually a pretty clever trick. I never would've thought of it (not that I would use it).

And then there's this one.

This furniture retailer decided to pull an April Fool's joke campaign. So they sent an email with a subject line that says,

"Thanks for your order!"

Shakes my head

Apparently when some people read the subject line, they thought their credit cards were stolen. But when they opened it, they saw it was just a regular promotional email. They were not amused and upset for the email causing false stress.

I mean, if you want to increase your open rates and risk getting fined up to $43,280, do this. It'll definitely work, but what's the point if you lose your reader's trust and they opt out of your email list? It completely defeats the purpose of email marketing.

The whole point is to build a relationship with your readers, not sabotage it. You want to write emails that'll add value to your readers' lives and that they'll enjoy reading.