1) Irrelevant content and offers

If you don’t give your recipients the content they require then they will not open your email or they will unsubscribe. Segment your list and send targeted emails rather than a single email to your entire list. Also ask for feedback from your readers to find out what content they would like to see.

2) Broken links and images not displaying

This is usually down to a lack of testing. Create internal sign-off procedures that make at least two people sign-off the email before delivering it to your list.

3) Your email is designed as a web page

Although HTML email messages use the same scripting language as a web page there are some differences. For example images must be given an absolute reference, and certain technologies such as CSS require specific placement in the HTML to work correctly. These are just two of the many differences between designing an email and a web page that designers need to be aware of to avoid your email not being displayed correctly.

4) Bad placement of call-to-actions

It is important to have your call-to-actions at the top of the message and to repeat them several times. Email recipients will scan your message so the call-to-actions must be prominent to achieve a high click-thru rate.

5) Resending to unsubscribes

This is the ultimate sin for email marketers and is usually a result of not having a solution for managing and excluding your unsubscribes from future campaigns.

6) Invalid email addresses

This is a result of bad data collection procedures and a lack of data cleansing. Although not an exciting task if marketers ignore these issues bounce rates will rise and ROI on your email marketing will fall.

7) No landing pages

You can put enormous amounts of effort into the email message but without sufficient support of landing pages or a microsite your campaign will not be as successful as possible. Don’t be lazy and stop at designing an email message only.

8) Sending emails at the wrong time

Particularly in B2B email marketing timing is crucial. There are still marketers who send emails overnight because of the limitations of the system they are using. However when people open their email first thing in the morning they are generally less receptive to your message as they would be 2 hours later.

9) Emails not tracked

Without tracking your emails you can only get limited ideas on how successful your email campaigns are. In addition tracking results enable you to identify what offers or topics are popular in your newsletter and this can be used for either segmenting your campaigns or deciding on appropriate content for your next issue.

10) No personalisation

One excuse for not using personalisation is that certain fields such as the name are blank against some of your list. This is not an excuse for not adding personalisation as you can easily put a default field against these so it would read ‘Dear Customer’ where the first name field is blank.