It’s safe to say that for every great example of email marketing we see, we also see at least a handful of examples that are completely wrong. While there’s no doubt that email marketing can be an extremely powerful channel, that doesn’t mean it’s something that’s always intuitive. Since there’s a lot of mistakes that can be made with this form of marketing, we want to highlight five of the most common:

1. Only Sending Promos

When businesses get started with email marketing, it’s common for them to kick things off by sending out a promotion. This often leads to a bump in revenue. Because businesses want to continue bumping revenue, they quickly get stuck in a cycle of only sending promos. Unfortunately, taking this approach almost always degrades its effectiveness. It can also lower the brand’s perceived value. So while promos and other pitches have their place, it’s important to send other types of emails as well that help to build a relationship with your list.

2. Sending Too Little (Or Too Much)

Plenty of businesses put effort into building an email list and then fail to ever communicate with the people on it. This is because they’re worried about annoying those subscribers. However, as long as those subscribers were obtained in a legitimate way, it means they want to hear from the business. On the other end of the spectrum, some businesses do bombard their list with too frequent of emails. Finding the optimal frequency for communicating with the specific people who care about your business is why it’s so important to test and then use your analytics data to decide.

3. Not Testing Plain Text vs. Rich Emails

Like sending frequency, plenty of businesses default to sending either plain text or rich emails. Both forms have pros and cons, which is why the only way to know what’s going to work best for the people you’re emailing is to test both types.

4. Failing to Create a Strategy

Another very common issue we see is businesses diving into email marketing without any type of cohesive strategy. It’s true that you’re likely to get better results from sending some type of email instead of none at all. However, those results will be far from optimal. Reaping the full benefits that email marketing can provide is why it’s very important to create a strategy that covers everything from how you’re building your list to the different campaigns you want to send throughout the year.

5. Using An Unreliable Provider

Even a perfectly crafted email marketing sequence isn’t going to succeed if it’s sent through a provider that can’t guarantee optimal delivery. So if you are currently looking for a provider or have any doubts about your current provider’s reliability, take a look at our email marketing page to learn why we’ve remained a leader in this space for the last 14 years.

1. Marketing
2. Strategy
3. Success