A recent study shows 77% of marketers saw an increase in engagement through email marketing between 2021 and 2022!
Brands and businesses all over the world are leaning toward email marketing to reach consumers more directly. But just because open rates are going up, that doesn’t mean the worst email marketing mistakes aren’t still happening.
22 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
1. Forgetting To Optimize for Mobile
With such a shift from desktop to mobile, this is one of the biggest email marketing mistakes to avoid.
One survey shows that almost 55% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices, including cell phones and tablets.
Forgetting to optimize your email for mobile devices can lead to a quick and passionate unsubscribe.
How to fix it: Condense image sizes so emails load quicker on mobile devices. Make sure every image is fitted with alt text, just in case they don’t load. Use a stack-responsive email template that’s mobile-friendly and always be sure to view your test emails in both desktop and mobile view.
2. Sending On a Whim, Not a Schedule
While you may be inclined to send emails all willy-nilly, a schedule is your best bet for engagement.
When you’re consistent, your readers begin to expect and welcome your content. This helps you foster relationships and develop trust as an expert.
According to Campaign Monitor, Monday is the best day to send emails, and the worst day to send them is Sunday. This makes sense if you think about it. On Sundays, most people are relaxing with their families and get ready for the week ahead. Whereas on Mondays, they’re trying to get back into the swing of things and cleaning out their email inbox is probably on their to-do list.
On the contrary, mixing up the days and times you send emails can frustrate your subscribers to the point where they trash their subscriptions. (Talk about one of the most underrated, worst email marketing mistakes there is.)
How to fix it: Select a day and time that works best for your target audience, and commit to scheduling emails then. You can perform mounds of industry research, only to find out that it doesn’t apply to your niche. This is a trial and error thing, but you can start here: Choose a day of the week, then choose your preferred time of day. Tweak as necessary.
3. Avoiding Automation
Automation can be a gamechanger for your email marketing performance. By doing things manually, you’re losing out on efficiency.
Humans are also naturally more prone to errors. If you want to take your list seriously, automation is it.
With the help of automation, you can:
- Create a welcome sequence to welcome new subscribers to your list and introduce them to your brand
- Create an abandoned cart sequence, encouraging visitors to come back to your site to finalize their purchases
- Schedule emails to be sent at optimal times
- And more!
How to fix it: Email distribution software is your friend. From Mailchimp to ConvertKit, there’s no shortage of options — you just have to find the right one for your business.
4. Ignoring How Your Campaigns Have Performed In the Past
Why perform marketing if you’re just going to do what you want anyway? Like any marketing, email marketing focuses on your audience’s needs, not yours.
To know which email marketing mistakes to avoid, you need to review your past performance and highlight areas for improvement.
How to fix it: Keep track of your metrics. KPIs you’ll want to focus on include clickthrough rate, conversation rate, bounce rate, list growth rate, email sharing/forwarding rate, open rate, unsubscribe rate and overall ROI.
Since cookies are going away, focus less on the open rate and more on the conversion rates to get accurate data. Don’t stress yourself out about gathering this data alone. Most, if not all, email platforms will keep track of it for you. You just need to make it a point to read it!
5. Acting Spammy
There’s nothing worse than a newsletter that looks, feels and smells like spam. And if that describes the emails you send out, don’t be surprised when you end up blacklisted.
Getting blacklisted isn’t out of the question. In fact, according to Email Tool Tester, 15.8% of all emails end up getting caught by popular spam filters. And once you get caught, it’s hard to get off of that list.
Spam-like emails include emails that are too frequent, come from an unreliable sender or don’t have a clear purpose.
How to fix it: If you’re sending emails too frequently, mitigate your rate. Then, move on to your subject line. Make sure it’s approachable yet legitimate. Ensure your unsubscribe links are visible and easy to find (someone who wants to unsubscribe but can’t find the button is likely to send an email to spam).
6. Failing To Personalize, from Both Ends
Do you treat your subscribers like a commodity? Do you, yourself, appear like a faceless brand or admin?
A lack of personalization — from both ends of the inbox — is one of the worst email marketing mistakes you can make.
Personalizing your emails is one of the best ways to increase your open and click-through rates. In fact, 74% of marketers say that targeted personalization tactics increase their engagement rates.
How to fix it: Start with using your subscriber’s first name. You can also segment your list based on demographics or psychographics; that way, you’re not sending one email to a massive bunch of unique individuals. Edit the ‘from’ field to appeal to your audience (consider using your name, your blog’s name or a fusion of the two). Fine-tune your customer personas while you’re at it!
7. Excluding a Sign-Up or Opt-In Offer
You want to attract new subscribers and customers, don’t you? Then don’t make one of these common email marketing mistakes.
People who forget to add a sign-up or opt-in offer, or people who place them where they aren’t obvious, are missing out.
How to fix it: Place your sign-up boxes somewhere obvious. Add an opt-in offer, but keep it simple (and make sure it addresses a problem your audience is actually facing). If your email service provider (ESP) allows it, add more than one opt-in for that extra touch of personalization.
8. Forgetting To Keep It Simple
This is an email, not a blog — nor a sales page, at that. Let your content lure in customers to read further or take action when they have the time.
With so many people opening emails on their smartphone, a drawn-out, complex email is likely to wind up in the trash.
This email from Loft is perfect. Quick and to the point! It tells the reader exactly what to do and how to do it.
How to fix it: Prioritize short sentences and paragraphs. Use a limited amount of images. Ask yourself, “Would I be overwhelmed if this email landed in my inbox right now?”
9. Forgetting About Email Confirmation (Bye, Bots)
A double opt-in, or email confirmation, is super important. It’s simple to implement but remains one of the most common email marketing mistakes to date.
Double opt-in protects you from spammers and keeps your email list clean as a whistle — full of real people who may actually want to buy your product or service.
According to MailChimp’s study on Double vs. Single Opt-in, they found that double opt-in users saw a 75.6% increase in opens. They also found that double opt-in users had a 114% increase in click rates.
How to fix it: Refer to your ESP to set up a double opt-in for all future subscribers.
10. Focusing On the Number of Subscribers Instead of the Quality
Your subscriber list could be full of thousands of emails, but what’s that mean if most of them never even open your mail?
This reduces your open and click rates, which can negatively affect your deliverability over time (AKA, you’ll end up in the spam folder of folks who actually want to read your email).
Fortunately, email marketing mistakes like this one are easy to fix. And when people unsubscribe from your list, consider it an act of good will — they’re saving you the hassle and telling you they’re not interested right off the bat.
How to fix it: Every few months, make a commitment to clean up your subscriber list.
Using double opt-ins will help keep your email list clean from the beginning. But, even if you go that route, you’ll need to comb through your list every few months to clean it. Start by removing anyone who’s emails have bounced or anyone who hasn’t opened or read your content in a while.
You should also remove general emails such as marketing@business.com or sales@business.com. Aim for email addresses that go directly to a specific person for a better chance of getting your audience to open your messages.
11. Missing the Welcome Email or Sequence
Sending a welcome email (or even a welcome sequence) is a great idea, but so many people don’t incorporate this into their agenda.
This gives readers time to totally forget who you are and what you do. As a result, they won’t know when or what to expect from you, and are more likely to unsubscribe.
How to fix it: Draft an email or sequence to automatically send out once someone subscribes or opts in to your offering. In the welcome email, share a bit about yourself as well as what the reader can expect from you and your content. Develop a relationship from the get-go. It’s that simple!
12. Aiming for a Large List Before Getting To Work
Like most types of marketing, people get too wrapped up in vanity metrics. They will wait until they have 10,000+ subscribers before they send a single email. But what is the point in that? Whether you have 2 or 20,000 subscribers, the size of your list doesn’t matter. If you have 2 quality subscribers who care about your content, you could see a higher ROI than a list of 20,000 random people who aren’t interested in your business.
One of the biggest email marketing mistakes people make is waiting until they’re “ready” instead of just getting started. From the moment you have a subscriber on your list, start sending out content. Besides, you never know who will forward your messages to their friends and potential new customers!
How to fix it: Just get started! There is no magic number of ideal subscribers. Your ideal subscriber is the consumer who will make a purchase and your total emails on your list has nothing to do with who will or will not complete your sales funnel.
13. Not Keeping Your Eyes Out for What Other Email Marketers Are Doing
They say reading makes a better writer, so it only makes sense that viewing other newsletters would help you improve your own. This can teach you what’s effective — or totally not effective — from your very own perspective.
How to fix it: Sign up for a handful of email subscriptions within the same niche as your brand. If you end up unsubscribing to any, consider what made you do so. If you stick around for others, ask yourself what makes them so great.
14. Skimping On Subject Lines
You could avoid the worst email marketing mistakes out there, but if you forget about crafting a kickass subject line, you’re done for.
According to HubSpot, the best email subject lines will spark curiosity, including promotions, and/or are personalized to the reader. The content of your email won’t matter if no one opens it so be sure to put some effort into crafting awesome subject lines.
How to fix it: Consider hiring an in-house or freelance copywriter who specializes in direct response and email marketing.
You can also create a list of subject lines that you receive from other companies that really inspired you to open their email. After all, if it worked for you, it’ll probably work for your readers, too!
15. Failing To Perform Split Testing
Split tests, or A/B tests, are a way for you to figure out which version of the same email performs better. Over time, this will help you maximize your email effectiveness and improve your metrics.
How to fix it: Choose an ESP with built-in split testing. Some may send email A to a small portion of your audience and email B to another small portion. Hours later, whichever one has performed best wins and gets sent out to the masses. You can also do this manually and choose the best option based on your preferred KPIs.
16. Forgetting To Subscribe To Yourself
Imagine: You send out an email, but it’s got a blunder. You don’t realize it until the next day when you return to work, and there are countless complaints.
Since you can’t un-send an email, avoid this email marketing mistake by sending test emails to yourself before sending your message out to the masses. This will help you catch mistakes, typos, and broken links. You can also see how your email will look when opened on a desktop compared to when it’s opened on a mobile device.
Address the issue before anyone else can. On a less serious note, self-subscription helps you see your email firsthand and determine if it goes to your primary, promotion or spam folder.
How to fix it: Always send test emails to yourself and other members of your team to review and proofread before sending it out into the world.
17. Focusing On Vanity, Not Value
Vanity metrics in email marketing can trick you into thinking you’ve got a solid campaign. In reality, you may just be focusing on numbers that don’t go below the surface, like your number of subscribers or even your open rates (if you’re going for opt-ins and purchases).
As Tim Ferris says, “Vanity metrics: good for feeling awesome, bad for action.”
Vanity metrics include number of subscribers, number of followers, or website views. These numbers are great – and if they’re high, it’ll make you feel good – but if these people aren’t purchasing or sharing your content with friends who will purchase, it doesn’t really matter to your bottom line.
How to fix it: Determine your goal. Then, figure out which KPIs actionably contribute to that goal. Don’t necessarily forget about the rest entirely, but don’t keep them at the forefront if they’re not serving you the most.
18. Skipping the CTA
You should always have some sort of call to action in your email marketing (or any kind of marketing).
Your CTA should be overt, clear and concise. These traits will make your subscribers more likely to follow suit.
Vanity metrics include number of subscribers, number of followers, or website views. These numbers are great – and if they’re high, it’ll make you feel good – but if these people aren’t purchasing or sharing your content with friends who will purchase, it doesn’t really matter to your bottom line.
How to fix it: Identity your CTA in every email on your schedule. Is it as clear as it can be? If not, boil it down even further.
19. Failing To Find the Right Image-to-Text Balance
Too many images and your email won’t load on desktop or mobile. Not enough images and your email appears text-heavy and hard to read.
Finding the right balance is key. Another troubling factor is that many people have images turned off when viewing emails, so if your email has too many images, there won’t be much context for them.
You’re also more likely to wind up in the dreaded spam folder if you fill your email with too many images.
How to fix it: Limit yourself to one or two high-quality, relevant and value-driven images per email. Definitely don’t go crazy with 10 or 20 pics.
20. Forgetting That Subscribers Should Be Able To Reply If They Want
There are so many ‘noreply’ emails that wind up in inboxes that many people forget this is even possible. But for many businesses, allowing responses is a smart move.
Why? Because when you get replies from subscribers, your subscribers’ email providers receive word that you deserve a spot in the primary inbox.
This will inherently increase your open, read and clickthrough rates. Moreover, the option to reply is a great way to foster relationships with your subscribers.
If they know that they are important to you, your brand will become more important to them.
How to fix it: Incorporate this clearly into your CTA. Ask your subscribers a nuanced question, then tell them to reply with a response. And don’t forget to allow replies in the first place!
21. Not Focusing on a Paid Media Driven Listening Strategy
You’ve probably seen it. “Get your hands on our new ebook by subscribing to our email list!
There’s a reason why so many people put their time, energy, and money into creating a great ebook, industry study, or other downloadable asset. Because it works!
It’s a great way to gain access to first-party data without costing too much. The cost per acquisition (CPA) for these downloadable assets is actually under $5 per email, which is a great deal when those emails end up spending a lot more on your products or services.
Once you have this first-party data, you can use it in your paid media targeting, email deployments, and so much more!
How to fix it: Get to work on your downloadable asset! Consider whether you want to write an ebook, do a study, or other really great asset that shows your authority in your industry but also sparks your audiences’ interest.
22. Invest in an Updated Landing Page
Another big email marketing mistake I see often is brands driving traffic to an out-of-date landing page. What is the point of drumming up all of this traffic if you’re just sending them to a page that isn’t converting?
How to fix it: Check out how your current landing page is performing on your Google Analytics dashboard. If it’s less than 1%, it’s time to revamp it. Improve the copy. Get new images. Change the color palette. Do whatever you need to do to improve your landing page, make it more attractive, and get more of your audience to actually follow through your sales funnel.
There’s No Shortage of Common Email Marketing Mistakes, But They’re Easy To Avoid & Fix
You can know about all the email marketing mistakes to avoid, but until you know how to fix them, you’ve only gone halfway. Determine which of these 20 common email marketing mistakes you’re guilty of, and resolve them ASAP. After all, no campaign strategy is set in stone — and marketing evolution is the best way to get through this changing world.
