10 Email Mistakes That Cause Campaigns to Underperform (and How to Fix Them)

I've been in the email marketing industry a long time—more than 10 years—which means I've pretty much seen it all. But what surprises me the most are the mistakes that keep happening over and over again. Many of these should have been eradicated long ago. We talk a lot about best practices, but here is a list of the 10 worst practices that are killing email campaign ROI.

1. Batching and Blasting: That phrase wasstricken from my vocabulary several years ago. I even hate writing it down. The practice is old and outdated and simply doesn't work anymore. Even if you're just sending out a monthly newsletter, you should look at your engagement metrics (opens, clicks, etc.) and communicate with each segment differently. Doing so will help you turn a non-opener into an opener, an opener into a clicker and a clicker into long-term and valuable customer.

2. Buying Lists: This is another cringeworthy practice that some email marketers continue to do. Getting permission to email someone is the absolute, bare minimum an email marketer needs to have any chance of success. So instead of buying a list, fine tune your acquisition strategy. For example, sweepstakes are a great way to organically grow your list and your customer base.

3. Maintaining Separate Lists: Yet another old-school tactic that needs to be put to rest. Keeping subscribers in different lists pigeonholes recipients into specific categories. Instead, a marketer needs to use profiling attributes to target email campaigns based on various profile fields and turn his list into a series of interesting segments.

4. Uninspired Welcome Messages: Welcome messages typically have the highest open and click rates—sometimes even the highest conversion rates. Welcome messages should engage recipients and set the tone for your email marketing campaigns. Better yet, create a welcome series. More on that in the next tip!