Email Marketing Mistakes & Solutions 27 Experts Share Their Insights

Andy Crestodina - Orbit Media Studios

Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer

Diana Conner - BMG

Director of Email Marketing

The most important thing is to catch the mistake as soon as possible. Even with a proper QA setup, accidents happen. Once you realize that a campaign was sent incorrectly, collaborate with your team on the best course of action.

If it's the subject line or the content, perhaps it was sent to the wrong group. Customers are ok with receiving an apology or oops! emails to clarify the issue. That extra level of personalization to say “hey we flubbed” goes a long way with transparency to your audience.

I was once targeting a segment for Mother's Day and accidentally sent it to the entire list rather than the smaller segment. Luckily, it was a general enough promotion that others were interested, and we didn't have to "fix it". Internally there was a bump, but to the customers, they just heard about another great deal we were offering. Sometimes it can be a "happy accident", just go with it. The most important thing is to stay focused on solutions and move forward with the experience you gained during that blunder.

Michal Leszczynski - Getresponse

Content Marketing Manager

One of the newsletters I signed up for assumed I'm a woman and in one of their messages they asked me whether I'd like to become an "#Instagirl" and help promote their brand. Another, similar one I had, sent me best wishes for the International Women's Day. I don't mind either of these, but this is a silly mistake that could have been avoided by:

1) Asking your audience about their gender upon signup.
2) Asking them the same question later through a survey.
3) Creating a fallback message for those who they're not sure about.

I've never bought anything from those sites so their message wasn't based on my activity or preferences. It was just an assumption they made, which turned out pretty funny.

Jeannette Castaneda - Inbox P.I.

CEO/Founder

There are many things one can do wrong with email marketing - not render testing for mobile, not taking advantage of preview text, sending out emails with broken personalization tokens, and more.

But the biggest mistake people make is forgetting that when someone gives you their email address, they're inviting you to their online home, which means you are their guest.

I've seen companies of all sizes abuse their guest privileges by providing irrelevant info, being too pushy, refusing to leave, and trying to trick their inbox hosts with "clever" subject lines. Sending an email with subject lines like "re: your most recent order" (when there was no order) puts your company in the "spammer" and "illegal" camps in the U.S. and Europe, among other places. Yes, getting people's attention in the subject line is crucial. But, lying or being overly clever will backfire - fast.

A San Diego chiropractic clinic found this out late last year when they sent out a "clever" email with the subject line of "YOU'VE BEEN SENT TO COLLECTIONS!!!" (yes, with all caps and triple exclamation points). The inside of the email had an awkward line about "collecting a healthy spine." As you can very well imagine, this email's open rate was through the roof. At first, the unopened email alarmed subscribers. Once they realized they'd been duped, angry patients lit up the phones at the chriropractor's clinic and sent back angry emails. It took more than a few apologies to get patients to calm down. Email is the most trusted communication method companies have to reach customers and prospects. I always remember that before hitting "send."

Janis Rose -Mailigen

CEO/Founder

I am surprised by how often individuals and companies ask us to sell them our client email databases. It is not happening every day, but frequently enough to notice it. Of course, it is not something that Mailigen does. I guess educational content in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. is something that could decrease that demand.

Sam Hurley - OPTIM-EYEZ

Founder

The worst (and it's happened to me several times!) is when companies fail to either:

1) Allow you to opt out, and/or
2) Carry on emailing you from different people in their organization once you've done so!

This is EXTREMELY annoying and leaves such a sour taste — even a few swear words towards said brands! Make it easy for people to opt out and honor their requests at any moment. If you make mistakes — admit them and make up for them in a way which will be not only appreciated but remembered.

Crystal Ledesma - crystalledesma.com

Senior Visual Designer & Developer

The biggest blunder I see happening in the B2B space are walls of text. When people are making business decisions, details are important of course, but the information should be clear, concise and easy to understand. Think 'skimmable'! We are all busy at work all the time and skim emails, so do your subscribers! The email is the hook that should get subscribers interested to read more detail on a landing page or to respond/pick up to phone to talk your sales reps.

As a consumer receiving B2C retail emails, the big blunder I always see is the lack of direct links. Emails showcasing a variety of products but only providing a single link for the entire email is a let-down. If a subscriber saw a specific product they were interested in and click on it but are then led to a page where they have to go searching for it, you've made it too hard for them and you're likely to lose them. Provide direct links whenever possible.

Veronica Williams - Simpleviewinc

Senior Email Marketing Specialist

I love working with my clients! It always brings me such joy to receive their emails in my inbox. Each one displaying the distinct personality of the Destination. You see, I work with DMOs (Destination Marketing Organizations) who are responsible for marketing their destination to tourists, meeting/event planners, or sports enthusiasts. When I think about one of the biggest email marketing blunders I have encountered, I think about links. Most specifically, broken links.

As the users in the ESP curate the email, they pull information from many different sources, including newsletters they have received. Therefore, they will right-click on a link in that newsletter, copy it, and paste the link in their email. Their email will get sent out, most likely without having all the links tested.

As a result, when I receive it and click on one of those links from a previous newsletter, the link might not work. Links to important information such as listings (restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc.), events, rsvps, mailtos (email addresses), etc. This is because the link taken from the other newsletter has tracking code in it from the other ESP - which they just placed in their email - and then they sent it - and their ESP placed tracking code on top of it (maybe even UTM code too). I have also tested emails containing a majority of links like these and they often get caught in spam filters like G Suite or Office 365.

To avoid this, open the newsletter you found and click on the link, so it opens in a browser. Then, copy the link from the browser and make sure not to copy any of the tracking code or UTM codes. Finally, paste the clean link into the email you are creating in your ESP. So, when you send your next email, it will be sent with clean, old tracking code-free links that work with every click! (And don’t get caught in the spam filter!)

Phillip Davis - Towerdata

Chief Business Officer

The most common email blunder that is easily avoided results from the failure to remove a prospect from a drip campaign after a conversion. This can easily be avoided by building out post conversion automation rules.

Tammi J.Miller - Zumba

Senior Email Marketing Manager

There are so many to choose from, both from ones my team & I have been guilty of, as well as other brands. I think the worst I've seen recently was a personalization fail (my first name was showing as a broken variable & my company name was completely incorrect).

A common mistake made so much worse by the fact that it was a sales email from a PERSONALIZATION software company (one that clearly, I will not be considering).

The way it can be avoided? TEST, TEST, & TEST again. And make sure you're testing with actual recipient data & not just your fallbacks.

Neville Medhora - Kopywriting Kourse

Copywriter

Not starting to build an audience via email or social earlier on. I stupidly blogged for 8+ years without trying to collect email or social followers because I thought I was "too cool for that." WOW....what a dumb mistake! I didn't realize that collecting followers HELPED my readers get my material, and it was beneficial to them.

Jonathan Pay - Holistic Email Marketing

Consultant

A serious mistake by email marketers (in 2018) was the over-zealous, and deeply misunderstood, 11th-hour re-permissioning of lists in the lead up to 25th May for GDPR.

With all the miscommunication around the subject at the time, there was a sort of panic towards the deadline and it seems like many brands lost permission to contact a lot of valuable, and previously valid contacts. If a brand was already following best practices, then they would have been fine.

Will Devlin - Message Gears

Vice President

One time, I was on a team that was rushing so quickly to get an email blast (first mistake - this was a while back) out the door. The fact that we were racing against the clock led us to rush QA, and we didn't catch that our own company name had been miskeyed in the copy of the email.

So, we sent an email to our list with our own name misspelled. It wasn't a great day! Process, planning, and generous lead times are all ways these types of blunders can be avoided. Rushing to beat a deadline at the last minute is almost always going to lead to errors.

Matthew Vernhout - 250ok

Director

Sending to the wrong email list is a huge mistake that an email marketer makes. This could be as simple as sending the wrong language preference, sending with the wrong from brand/domain, or sending to your suppression files. All of these situations are bad experience for the end users, but also vastly different scenarios with different impacts from a delivery perspective.

How to best avoid this:
Name your lists in an intuitive way - EN_Subscribers, FR_Subscribers, ES_Subscribers, etc...

Even use terms like "NEVERMAIL_SUPPRESSION" or simply remove suppressions all together to avoid an accidental send. Finally build a checklist with targeting identified and doublecheck everything prior to hitting the ‘Send’ button to ensure that your setup matches your pre-send configuration in your email platform.

Paul Airy - Beyond the Envelope

HTML Email Design & Development Consultant

I had subscribed to The Guardian Today email, which I really like the design of, and have very little to critic. Recently, however, I received this edition – https://litmus.com/scope/bdxsd8c9g8t1 – and as you can see, there’s a “Missing Headline” – a rare blunder.

I share this, not to point a finger at The Guardian Today, but as a warning to you, and to myself, of how dynamic personalisation can go wrong if not monitored closely enough. How do you avoid such a blunder? Well, that has to come down to a robust quality assurance process.

Larry Kim - Mobile Monkey

CEO

It'd be a mistake not to pay attention to your unicorn email campaigns and not promote them with a resend to non-openers.

If it was a high performing campaign for open and click rate, you'll usually see another half-life potential in a resend to non-openers. So, if it got 30% open rate in the initial campaign, you might see another 10% open rate in the re-send to non-openers. Give it a try by creating an audience of people who were sent the campaign but didn't open it.

Crystal Vargas - Boats Group

Email Marketing Strategist

The biggest blunder is not baking in time for testing against live data. Often times I've seen a test list built that works perfectly with the email but when data is changed, even slightly, the email can go out with significant errors.

Always add a day of testing to your turnaround time expectations, even if you can do it in less time. If you get it done quicker, great! But if something goes wrong, you have some added time to fix it and retest it. And ALWAYS test with live data and with every variation of your dynamic content.

Dennis Dayman - Return Path

Chief Privacy and Security Officer

Using email appending databases is the biggest mistake made by email marketers. Email appending, e-pending, or "enriching" is the supplementation of existing email databases by cross-referencing them with information from other databases. The presumed goal is to add email addresses for customers or prospects for whom the sender has other information but not email.

E-pending is not an opt-in process. My legal first name is Dennis and my father’s nickname is "Dennis" as well, but not his legal name. For a while I began to get both email and postal mail advertisements for the American Heart Association thanking me for my donation(s) and to donate more, but for a long time I thought I my identity had been stolen or it was a guilty ploy to get me to donate to their cause. I was even getting his tax dedication paperwork!

After some time, I decided to call them and see what was going on and found out that a donation was made, but it was made by my father in an offline manner. The American Heart Association wanted to go digital with their communications to my father and by e-appending, they found my name, my email, and my postal address thinking it was my father and updated their database with my information vs. his digital information. A major mistake on their part.

Because of the prevalence of multi-channel marketing, email append has become a widely used method for companies to build their in-house email database with non-permission-based addresses. M3AAWG has published a very clear statement about e-pending: The practice of email appending is in direct violation of core M3AAWG values.

Mike Welthy - E-Alignment

Email Marketing Consultant

The biggest email marketing blunder I come across is companies relying too heavily on automation for transactional communication instead of identifying ways to create a conversation with customers.

Many companies and retailers focus primarily on generating emails based on a type of triggered response - abandoned cart, “we saw you looking...”, “in case you missed it…” - rather than understanding behavior patterns and targeting messages to the person, not the action. This often results in potential customers receiving multiple emails, sometimes daily, all with the same Subject Line, template, and message, just a different product. All too often the priority is to generate as many automated and triggered emails as possible rather than understanding what the person is really interested in and engaging with them.

The majority of automated email campaigns I audit for clients are either time-based or tier-based, using a predefined interval or a single data point to trigger the email campaign. This provides email marketers with a number of very specific ways they can target their communications and interact with their current or potential customers. The downside is that usually once these email campaigns are created and implemented, they are not routinely updated and can fall out of sync with other marketing efforts that are continually updated.

How can it be avoided? Look at automation as a way to enhance your email marketing efforts and interact with customers, not as a way to send them emails. I look to identify at least 3 different data points or measures as the criteria for any automated email program. This will allow you to decrease the number of automated and triggered emails you have to manage while creating a more tailored customer engagement experience.

Kath Pay - Holistic Email Marketing

CEO

Out of so many different blunders to choose from, I guess sending the wrong offer to the wrong segment is up there as being one of the biggest ones as it can cost you dearly – not only in delivering a bad (and sometimes confusing) customer experience, but also financially.

The other day I received a message from a brand who sends me theatre offers. They said in order for me to continue receiving these emails, I had to upgrade. There was no mention of how much the upgrade was nor why I was suddenly having to do this as it had always been a free service. Turns out it wasn’t meant for me, as it was only meant for people on the list who hadn’t booked a show in the last year.

They sent me an apology email and gave me a free upgrade which was all well and good. However, it was obvious they had changed their terms and conditions and instead of being transparent about it, they went about gaining the upgrades the wrong way in the first place. What they did right though, was the apology email. These apology emails are fantastic opportunities to leverage the Pratfall Effect which, simply put, means that when you make a mistake, you appear more human, and so more relatable and likeable. This, of course, will only work if you own the mistake!

Radu Neag - Travian Games

Senior CRM Manager

A flash sale email promo has been sent to 500k users showing two different percentages off (40% off in the header, but 35% off in the body). We received some complaints and probably increased a bit of curiosity among the users, making them check the website for the official %.

How to avoid: Pay more attention to details in the future and simplify the template, showing the % only once (and not on an image, but in the body where a text field can be easily modified).

Kait Creamer - Wandering Kait

Email Marketing Manager

"Biggest" is relative, but the one that I think has the potential for the biggest negative impact is email automation or segmentation that goes to the wrong audience. This can happen for a variety of reasons (for example, when someone uses “contains” instead or “equals” in a filtering clause or doesn’t account for a tricky nuance in their database when building a list), but it always results in a decrease in relevancy.

That’s a really dangerous mistake in email marketing: sending a good message to the wrong person at the wrong time. With bad timing or list parameters, you become irrelevant in the inbox, and that’s a tough thing to recover from.

To avoid that sort of irrelevancy, you have to do a few things: monitor your regular automations (never set and forget), ensure multiple people are involved in segmentation and automation QA, and when setting up new segmentation, check your filtering criteria and records against your database.

Irina Akelyeva - Akelyeva.info

Email Marekting Consultant

Not testing your campaign before sending it is the blunder that can hurt your results badly. To avoid it follow these three steps.

1. Test your template for all client services and devices. You can do it by setting up a group of emails across all service providers, or you can use the tools like Litmus. This testing step will help you to avoid the problems with rendering.

2. Create a list of contacts (your colleagues and/or team members) and send them your test campaigns. The more diverse the group you have, the more valuable feedback you will get. I recommend sending your test campaign to people from sales, marketing, someone with a graphic design background and someone who has no connection to the company. This way you will receive a comprehensive overview of your campaign.

3. Do A/B testing. If you have big enough list, split it for A/B testing and test subject lines, design and content. It will help you to learn what your clients really want to see in your campaigns.

Andy Shore - Benchmark Email

Content and Social Networking Manager

I don't know if it's the biggest, per se, but it's one that has been bugging me lately. Birchbox Man sends out an email every month before my subscription box comes allowing me to preview what's in my box. However, the past few months, I've received the automated email on schedule, but the box preview isn't available on the website when I click-through.

In the grand scheme of things, it's really not a big deal. I can wait a few days until my box arrives. However, it does leave a bad taste in my mouth. It's not the user experience you'd want to create for your customers. Making sure you create a comprehensive brand story from email, to website and every other marketing channel in between will help you to avoid it. Consider the full picture, and not just each step of the way.

Karen Talavera - Synchronicity Marketing

President

Purchased email lists - don’t do it! The #1 blunder I see is when companies outright “buy” an email list of people in their target market with whom they have no prior business relationship nor consent to email.

Not only is it against most ESP terms to mail non-opt-in names (meaning marketers often can’t even get email sent to a purchased list), it also damages sender reputation and deliverability, jeopardizing the ability to send to even opt-in subscribers. Don’t believe the fantasy that “if you blast, they will buy”. Customer relationships aren’t built overnight.

Daniel Burstein - MarketingSherpa

Senior Director, Content and Marketing

Assuming that every email you send needs to be image rich is the greatest email marketing blunder. Sometimes, the best performing emails are well-written, customer-focused letters without any images.

After all, think of the emails your customers are sending to each other. They're not sending each other HTML email newsletters. Those newsletters have their place of course, and visual promo emails MIGHT work best for your audience. But challenge the status quo. Test a plain text letter and see what you learn.

Skip Fidura - DMA UK

Digital Marketing Expert

The biggest email marketing blunder I have ever witnessed resulted in sending just under one million messages to the wrong email addresses. A client had requested a file and the database team delivered it in the same format that they always used - fixed width. Rather than using a character (like a comma) to separate the columns, in fixed width files each column is set to a specified number of characters. When my client put in the dividers, they accidentally shifted over one character so stripped off the first character of the email address.

Because it was the first character some of the email addresses were valid and the emails went through to the wrong recipients. In fact, one million emails were sent to the wrong addresses and of those 400 thousand were delivered.

To prevent these types of errors you need a good QA process. First, eyeball all of the data after you have processed it for upload into your email platform. Had the client done something simple like comparing first names with the email address, this issue should would have become apparent quite quickly.

The general first step is to compare sample records that you are about to upload with those at the source to ensure they match. Secondly, automate the process to upload the data where you can. Lastly, always have a second set of eyes look over everything. Blunders happen but pay attention to yours and others, learn from them and make sure you have steps in place to prevent them going forward.