11 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

We often click on emails saying, “Hurry Up, Offer Ends Soon!” – only to be greeted with a generic message, broken links, and no clear call to action. Some emails even give us the vibe of the 2000s due to their awkward formatting and so many pictures that load information slowly.

These major email marketing mistakes could negatively affect your brand’s reputation. Globally, 376.5 emails are sent and received daily, while only 21% are opened, with a 3% conversion rate. So, to stay ahead of the competition, your emails must stand out for many good reasons.

Knowing the common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them can significantly boost your efficiency and build a solid foundation. So, in this article, we’ll discuss the common email marketing mistakes to avoid with a helpful guide. Let’s dive into it.

How Email Marketing Mistakes Drain Your Efforts

Mistakes in email marketing can have serious consequences. Ineffective marketing strategies can cost businesses a lot of money. They make potential clients distrustful. An email full of mistakes could be reported as spam. It can also decrease deliverability and harm your reputation.
Also, mistakes like sending emails with too many photos or irrelevant material make people unsubscribe. Thus, it will eventually reduce the quality of your email list. So, if you don’t personalize your content or optimize for mobile, you risk consumer interactions.

So, the cost of email marketing extends beyond the immediate losses. It can an impact on the ROI and long-term trust of your company.

11 Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid and How to Fix Them

You obviously need an email marketing tool to manage subscribers, create segmentation, and run targetted campaigns. It’s impossible to do everything manually. weMail is such a feature-rich WordPress email marketing plugin by which you can design emails from scratch and run targetted campaigns.

You can get the plugin by clicking the buttons attached below.

In this section, we’ll list the common email marketing mistakes and explain how to avoid them with weMail. Keep reading!

1. Emailing Inactive or Unverified Contacts

High bounce rates, poor deliverability, and possible spam blacklisting are the results of an oversized email list that contains invalid or inactive contacts. Your future reach may suffer if your email service provider (ESP) flags your campaigns as low-quality due to frequent bounces or opened emails.

You can improve email deliverability and engagement rates by sending emails to a clean and active email list rather than sending out emails blindly.

How to Fix:

• Enable weMail’s double opt-in to ensure that only real and interested people sign up for your emails.
• Use weMail’s segmentation feature to find inactive subscribers, then send them tailored re-engagement emails.

2. Not Customizing Emails

Generic emails that lack personalization result in low open rates, high unsubscribe rates, and disengaged audiences. They come out as robotic and impersonal. Today’s consumers expect brands to understand their interests, preferences, and habits.

Customized emails can boost engagement and trust while increasing conversion rates by making the audience feel valued. Explore the best email customization tips.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail smart tags like {first_name}, {last_name}, and {custom fields} to customize emails for each recipient.
• To construct customized campaigns, organize your contacts according to their geography, past purchases, or degree of involvement.
• Use weMail’s newsletter templates to design your email newsletter.
• Send emails on special days and occasions to engage more people.

3. Ignoring Formatting and Designs

Cluttered, hard-to-read emails with broken layouts don’t just frustrate readers. They often end up in the trash. Since more than half of consumers check emails on their phones, a non-responsive design can cost you their attention.

That’s why following best email design practices is crucial. A clean, well-structured email is easier to read and drives more clicks and conversions.

How to Fix:

• Your email needs mobile-friendly templates for a better output. Each template created by weMail is mobile-friendly. So, choose the one you like.
• Use the drag-and-drop email builder of the plugin if you want to reorganize the content.
• Before sending, watch the live preview and make sure your email looks the same on all devices.

4. Overlooking Email Performance Indicators

You’re operating in the dark if you don’t monitor your open, click, and bounce rates. You cannot optimize your campaigns without performance information, and you may continue to make the same mistakes that are costing you conversions.

Monitoring email performance enables you to make strategic adjustments, boost engagement, and optimize return on investment.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail’s Analytics & Reporting to fix it.
• View open rates, click rates, bounces, and unsubscribes all in one dashboard with Real-Time Campaign Insights.
• Examine performance over several periods to see patterns.
• Determine which subject lines, content variations, or CTA placements your audience responds to the most.

5. Sending Emails at the Wrong Time

Even the best emails might go bad if sent at the wrong moment. This leads to lower open rate and less engagement. Timing is crucial; choosing the best days to send emails can greatly increase their visibility.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail’s smart scheduling to fix it
• Use audience behavior to automate campaign schedules.
• For maximum visibility, make sure subscribers receive emails at the best local times.
• Increase user engagement by automatically sending unopened emails to those who missed them.

6. Sending Too Many Emails

Sending too many emails to your audience might cause spam complaints, high unsubscribe rates, and subscriber weariness. An excessive number of emails might cause people to get disengaged, even if your content is excellent.

Maintaining audience engagement without overwhelming them is possible with a well-balanced email schedule.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail’s frequency control to fix it.
• Automate drip marketing instead of sending out a lot of emails at once.
• Set up a well-paced email sequence.
• Send less frequent emails to users who are not as active and more to those who are.
• Give people the option to change their email choices rather than completely unsubscribe.

Check this guide on how to do email blast in the right way.

7. Failing to Authenticate Your Emails

Unauthenticated emails might never make it to the recipient’s mailbox. ESPs may flag your emails as spam if SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are not set up, which would decrease deliverability. Emails that are properly authenticated are trusted and go to the recipient’s mailbox.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail’s secure email sending to fix it.
• To increase deliverability, enable SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. WeMail offers a smooth authentication setup process.
• Connect with Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, Amazon SES, and other reputable services.
• To preserve your sender reputation, automatically delete emails that have been hard-bounced.

8. Not Optimizing for Mobile Devices

If your emails don’t display properly on mobile devices, it can dissatisfy your customers and increase the bounce rate.  Given that over 50% of emails are seen on mobile devices, avoiding this crucial error is essential.

How to Fix:

• Use the mobile-responsive templates in weMail to fix it
• Select from pre-made templates that are designed for mobile devices.
• Preview and modify email layouts for mobile devices with ease by using weMail’s editor.
• To guarantee flawless rendering, see how your emails appear on various screen sizes before sending.

Explore this analysis on why email marketing doesn’t work.

9. Using a Weak Subject Line

When a customer receives weak, ambiguous, or deceptive subject lines of an email, chances are there for low open rates and reputational harm to your business. Subscribers won’t open an email if the subject line isn’t attention-grabbing or offers something of value.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail’s A/B testing and subject line insights to fix it.
• Try a variety of topic lines using A/B testing to determine which works best for your audience.
• Create subject lines that grow interest or provide value upfront (e.g., new product announcements, discounts).
• Examine the open rates of various topic lines to adjust your approach for optimal effect.

10. Lack of Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

Lower conversion rates can result from emails without a clear, compelling call to action. Your subscribers can choose to disregard your email if they are unsure of what to do next.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail’s Simple-to-use Make use of CTA buttons
• Create noticeable, clickable buttons for desired actions (such as “Shop Now” or “Learn More”) with weMail’s CTA button templates.
• CTAs should be positioned above the fold so that readers can see them without having to scroll and act on them right away.
• To get the best conversion rate, try out various designs and positions.

11. Neglecting List Segmentation

Irrelevant material and high unsubscribe rates might result from sending the same email to every member of your list, regardless of their interests or activity.

How to Fix:

• Use weMail’s advanced segmentation to fix it
• Make extremely customized lists according to past purchases, activity, or geography.
• To increase engagement, provide communications that are specially made for each segment.
• To improve your list segmentation approach, keep an eye on engagement metrics.

Here’s a guide on how to segment email lists.

Compliance and Legal Mistakes

Violating email marketing rules can cause serious havoc to your email sender’s reputation. The most common compliance issues that marketers overlook when sending out emails include legal requirements. Take a look at them below.

Typical Legal Mistakes in Email Promotion

• Send Emails to Unsubscribers: It is against the law to send emails to users who haven’t given their permission or subscribed as per the GDPR, CAN-SPAM, or CASL.

• Using Misleading Subject Lines: Using false or deceptive email subject lines to get recipients to open the emails may lead to legal consequences as well as undermine the subscribers’ trust.

• Failure to Provide Business Information: Some laws ensure that business include their physical address and contact details in emails, and failure to do so is called lack of disclosure.

• Weak Data Security Practices: The consequences of data breaches may include legal penalties, which can result from storing subscriber information in a way that is not encrypted or secured.

How to Maintain Compliance 

• Employ Double Opt-in: With weMail, you can activate double opt-in, which guarantees that you only add individuals to your list who actually want to receive your emails.

• Automate Unsubscribe Management: The plugin complies with regulations such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR by automatically including an unsubscribe link in each email.

• Stick to Anti-Spam Best Practices: You can customize suppression lists using weMail to stop emails from reaching subscribers who have opted out.

• Maintain Correct Business Details: To comply with legal obligations, just provide your company’s physical address and contact details in every outgoing email.

• Safeguard Subscriber Data: WeMail provides safe data processing and guarantees that your email lists are shielded from abuse or illegal access.

Closing Up!

Congratulations! If you have read this far, you are already on your way to enhancing your email marketing plan. By avoiding typical email marketing mistakes and utilizing the right techniques, you can increase interaction, have a solid sender reputation, and optimize your marketing outcomes.

Do you have any queries or observations to share? Please leave a comment below; we would be delighted to hear from you!