There’s plenty that can go wrong with an email marketing campaign. Email’s been around for a long time, but people still make plenty of mistakes.

 

When your emails are full of errors, you’re undermining your own authority and professional impression.

 

Here are some of the most common or important email marketing mistakes to avoid.

 

7 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

 

1        Broken or Missing Links

Imagine putting together an awesome email campaign, only to realize – after you’ve hit send – that you forgot to attach your landing page link to your call-to-action.

 

Or maybe you did link it, but forgot to publish the landing page, meaning everyone who clicked it just got a 404 error.

 

That’s one of the worst cases. Doubly so if it was a lead generation email.

 

Before you send an email campaign out, send yourself a test proof, and click every single link and make sure it goes where you want it to.

 

2        Spelling and Grammar Errors

Spelling and grammar aren’t just niceties in the marketing world. Your message is everything, including how it’s written. Spelling mistakes actively cost you money.

 

Run your entire message through a spell-checker before you send. Ideally, get others to proofread it as well. A fresh set of eyes will absolutely catch mistakes you didn’t notice yourself, especially if that pair of eyes belongs to another writer.

 

3        Terrible Subject Line and Sender Name

A lot of people make the mistake of tacking their subject line on as an afterthought. When you think about it, that’s silly.

 

Your subject line is what will decide whether someone opens your email or not. It shouldn’t just be good, it should be awesome. Try to keep it under 50 characters if you can. You want the whole thing to be visible no matter how it’s being viewed, even on mobile.

 

You should also put a bit of consideration into your sender name. If your email is just coming from Company Inc, it immediately comes across as faceless and robotic. Use a real name instead, or even both – John from Company Inc sounds a lot more human.

 

Which means it’s far more likely to get opened.

 

 

4        Incorrect Personalization Tags

This one can be extra embarrassing when it goes wrong. If you’re using personalization tags (and you should be!), make sure of a few things before you send.

 

Check that they’re configured correctly – you don’t want your <First Name> tag to pull the wrong information.

 

Ensure you have all the data you need. If you’re trying to pull someone’s company name or Twitter handle, and you don’t have it, that’ll take the wind right out of your sails.

 

Make sure you have good default content set up for when you don’t have the right information for a contact. For example, setting up the first-name tag to default to “there” would result in “Hey there” instead of “Hey <First Name>”, which can save you plenty of embarrassment.

 

5        Missing Device Optimization

Most people tend to check their email on mobile at least as often as on desktop, if not more. If you’re not optimizing your emails for mobile, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

 

So many people check their email on their mobile devices now that if your email is hard to read or looks bad on mobile, you’ll lose out on potential leads.

 

When you send your test proofs, open them up on your mobile, and try to get a look at it on various devices and browsers.

 

6        Formatting Issues

Much like mobile device optimization, making sure your emails look good is critical. If your images are stretched, pixelated, too small or too large, your message will get diluted as the reader focuses more on what’s wrong.

 

Sometimes, images don’t render due to all kinds of reasons, including the email provider the recipient is using. In that case, generally, the alt text will appear where the image would go.

 

That means you need to remember to put alt text in your images in the first place, of course.

 

Check and double-check that your email looks exactly as you intended, across multiple platforms and displays.

 

7        Possible Color Problems

Here’s an issue that I encountered with an email I received recently from my gym. It was an “important notice” about something, so I opened it up.

 

I was using my phone, and I have my display set to “dark mode” to conserve battery life. This means that the UI is dark, and it displays black text as white, for example.

 

My gym had, for some reason, used a solid white block as the background for their email. Because I was using dark mode, the actual text also got flipped to white – which resulted in a completely invisible message.

 

The only way I was able to read it was by highlighting all the text.

 

Another common issue is that some email clients don’t render background colors (or might not pick up on the one you’re using). If you put in a nice dark grey background with white text, but the client doesn’t render that background, you’ve got the same situation – invisible text.

 

You never know what context your message will be opened in. If you’re using color blocks for backgrounds, there are plenty of ways this can go wrong, so be sure to test using all kinds of display modes, devices, and clients.