11 Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Email marketing mistakes to avoid

You can vastly improve the quality and performance of your email marketing campaigns if you avoid these common pitfalls.

1. Selling too hard

It’s important to understand why you’re emailing your customers. You want to get something out of the relationship, whether it’s increased sales or website traffic, but you still need to foster a relationship with your customers. If every email tries to sell your products, your customers are going to become disengaged. Try to find a balance between helpful content and product offers.

“For example, if you run a hardware shop, perhaps you could send out a weekly newsletter with tips on better completing projects around the house or worksite,” said Nicolas Straut, senior SEO associate at Fundera. “Interspersed with this regular content, you could showcase relevant new items or sales.”

Sharing tips and ideas allows you to engage customers through content marketing. By doing this, you can bolster your position as an industry expert while building a relationship with customers and building their trust. This will lead to higher open rates and improved conversion rates.

2. Failing to optimize for mobile

As consumers continue to use smartphones to view email, it’s vital to optimize your emails for mobile devices.

“You can usually see in reports if most people are reading your email on a desktop or mobile device, but it’s always good to send yourself a test copy of your email and check across devices to see if the font is big enough, the graphics or video looks good, the flow of the email translates well, and if the email is too long to scroll through if reading from a phone,” said Shannon Howard, content editor and producer at The Predictive Index. 

The best emails give customers a great experience both on mobile and desktop. It might take a few extra minutes to perfect your email’s format, but it’s worth the effort to ensure your emails are optimized for mobile. Data from Adestra suggests that if your email doesn’t display properly on a mobile device, nearly 3 out of 4 people will delete the email in seconds. 

3. Neglecting your sender reputation

One of the most common email marketing mistakes is to not look at your sender reputation, and this oversight can affect your spam rates. This score, which internet service providers set, weighs your daily email volume alongside your bounce and unsubscribe rates. The more frequently your emails bounce or result in recipients unsubscribing, the lower your sender reputation. Fewer emails sent may correlate with a higher sender reputation.

To improve your sender reputation, you must track it. The easiest way to do so is with a website or tool that uses your URL to pull up your score. A great example is Sender Score: Just add your URL, your monthly email send volume and some other key information to see your score. You’ll also gain access to sender reputation reports and tips on how to improve your score. Following the tips should lead to fewer emails going to spam. 

4. Ignoring customer segmentation

“Marketing is much more effective when the message is targeted,” said Michael Cohen, a marketer with over 20 years of experience, including more than 10 as a vice president of marketing for three companies. “And the deeper you go, the better. Demographic information such as gender and age is a good start, but deeper behavioral segmentation based on data like purchasing habits delivers even more value to customers and greater marketing effectiveness.” [Related: How to Find Your Target Audience]

It’s important to cater to the needs of each customer. You can do so through a technique called customer segmentation, which involves sorting your customers into smaller groups with similar buying habits. When you send marketing emails targeted directly to these groups, customers are more likely to engage with your content. Avoiding this more direct approach is a common email marketing mistake.

Think of the process almost as individual email marketing. Customers want to feel like they matter and aren’t just another subscriber on your list. Including personalized greetings in each email is a good starting point.

5. Failing to include clear calls to action

Your emails should serve a purpose. Whether you want your customers to buy a product or follow you on Instagram, there should be a call to action (CTA) for it. It’s important to be clear about what you’re looking for from customers; otherwise, you’re just crowding their inbox.

“Decide what you want the recipient to do, draw their attention to it — in the form of a big, bold button or [something] similar — and enable the action to be taken in as few clicks as possible,” said Sean Luechtefeld, communications director at ANCOR.

He warned against overdoing it with CTAs, however. You don’t want to overwhelm or confuse email recipients.

“If you’re asking your subscribers to buy multiple products, sign up for another email list, post a photo on Instagram, support a cause and seven other things, you are likely to fracture your audience into different conversion funnels,” Luechtefeld said. “The result? You have 100 people taking 10 different actions, rather than having 100 people taking one action.”

6. Ignoring GDPR considerations

When the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May 2018, the world of email marketing changed. To comply with the GDPR, businesses must show proof that customers have opted to receive emails from them. These regulations don’t directly apply to emails sent to those in the U.S., but adding an opt-in feature to your email list is a good idea regardless of where your recipients reside.

“Perhaps more to the point, even where not illegal under actual law in the U.S., such email is seen as spam by most people and all email inbox providers, meaning that you will be subject to the ‘law of the spam filter,’ which will penalize all email that you send, not just marketing email,” said Anne P. Mitchell, an internet law and policy attorney and CEO of the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy.

7. Neglecting analytics

To generate consistently engaging email marketing campaigns, you need to use analytics. Check the click-through and open rates of your campaigns, and see how many new subscribers you’re gaining and how many people unsubscribe. Determine what the emails with the highest open and click-through rates have in common to inform future campaigns. Learn about the most important email marketing metrics you should track.

If you don’t monitor analytics, it will be exceedingly difficult to develop and improve your email marketing strategy. Some email marketing services integrate with Google Analytics, which helps you monitor the readers who go from your email campaigns to your website.

When evaluating an email marketing tool, you may emphasize finding a platform with a wide array of analytics tools. If your marketing campaigns rely heavily on email marketing, it helps to use a detailed email marketing tool.

8. Writing poor subject lines

Getting an email recipient to open your email is the first step in a successful email campaign. According to Mailchimp, the average open rate for emails across all of the industries analyzed was 21.33%. 

Try to follow subject-line best practices. These vary a bit by company, but it’s a good idea to keep your subject lines short. AWeber found that email subject lines tend to be under 60 characters and that the average subject line is just over 40 characters. 

For optimal engagement, write short subject lines that are clear and engaging. Better yet, write catchy email subject lines. This is easier said than done, but following the general rule of keeping subject lines under 60 characters can help you stand out in someone’s inbox.

Depending on the audience, some businesses may find that using emoji or colorful language in the subject line increases open rates. Other businesses may have better success with stoic and professional wording. The tone of your subject line depends largely on your email recipients. 

9. Including too many images

Yes, images can make a marketing email look crisper and cleaner. However, some recipients  might block email images. As such, when you use too many photos, you’re pretty much sending a blank email. Sure, you can add alt text to appear where images are absent, but it won’t quite do the trick like paragraphs and sentences. To avoid this email marketing mistake, use at most a few images in your emails, and space them out evenly. 

10. Sending emails at the wrong time

Data from HubSpot suggests that emails sent at 11 a.m. have the highest open rates. This doesn’t necessarily mean that 11 a.m. is the best time to send an email for your business and audience, however. It’s worth experimenting with different send times to see which is best for your audience. Data from Campaign Monitor suggests that Wednesdays and Fridays are the best days to send emails.

It’s a good practice to send emails during a time frame that makes sense for your core audience. For example, Morning Brew sends a daily email at approximately 5 or 6 a.m. detailing the latest happenings in the business world. This newsletter arrives early in the morning because its audience normally reads the newsletter before work. Sending early also ensures that the newsletter won’t be behind breaking news each day. If the newsletter is sent at noon and a major business story breaks at 11:30 a.m., it wouldn’t give the team much time to put together an intelligent and well-researched product.

Even if your business doesn’t send time-sensitive information via email, it’s a good idea to ascertain when your audience likes to see your emails. Avoid sending emails at odd hours, as they may get lost in a crowded inbox.

11. Forgetting to personalize email campaigns

The best emails engage their audience. To do this, it’s important to create personalized messages, such as by launching segmented email campaigns or including a recipient’s name in the subject line.

If you’re a small business with a tiny email list, you can take personalization to a deeper level than larger businesses can. With people receiving dozens of promotional emails every day, tailoring your message more specifically to the individual groups or people who subscribe to your campaigns may yield great results. [Read related article: How to Build an Email Marketing Contact List]

By sending segmented messages with personalized written content, you have a better chance of getting someone to engage with your email. This gives you a better chance of converting them into a paying customer. 

Best email marketing software

It’s easier to avoid costly email marketing mistakes when you choose one of the best email marketing software platforms. Some include tips for improving your email marketing campaigns even further, enabling you to get the most out of your content. 

Here are some of our top picks for email marketing software:

• Constant Contact: With a user-friendly interface and a broad range of features for an affordable price, Constant Contact is a great choice. Our Constant Contact review outlines all of the features included in this service.
• Freshworks Freshmarketer: This platform integrates seamlessly with various solutions to support sales teams, making it excellent for lead capture and nurturing. Our full Freshworks Freshmarketer review explains why this platform works well with the Freshworks CRM.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: This powerful email marketing solution offers AI-driven insights and 24/7 customer support. Our Salesforce Marketing Cloud review provides an in-depth look at the software’s features and benefits.
• Mailchimp: Mailchimp is one of the easiest email marketing platforms to use. If you’re just getting started and want a tool that’s straightforward and helpful, we recommend starting with Mailchimp. The software gives you everything you need to create attractive email marketing content to test if your audience responds well to this marketing channel.

Reduce email marketing mistakes for better results

By avoiding the common email marketing mistakes above, you can expect higher open rates, more user engagement and better conversion rates. You can also rest assured that your email marketing practices are compliant with data privacy regulations and that you don’t risk incurring fines and penalties. When it’s used properly, email is an excellent marketing channel. Now that you know the missteps to avoid, you can set up an email marketing plan to grow your business successfully. 

Max Freedman and Tejas Vemparala contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.