Email marketing remains one of the most popular and efficient ways to advertise products and services to customers, subscribers and followers. Considering that it costs next to nothing to maintain and develop, many brands see email marketing as “the great equalizer”; even smaller businesses can put themselves on an equal playing field through hard work building their lists. Despite all the benefits email marketing can bring, there are plenty of pitfalls and negatives if you go about it the wrong way. Today, we’ll review the biggest no-nos in email marketing so that you can avoid making these awful mistakes.

Buying Email Lists

You’ll undoubtedly come across countless email marketing services promising results with their pre-sorted email lists. Some simply sell gigantic lists of random email addresses, while others claim to have more “refined” results for specific niches. In almost all cases, these lists are not going to provide you with the value promised and for one simple reason: these individual email users never volunteered to subscribe to your brand. Even if it takes more time and effort, building an email list via your own brand is immensely more valuable because people are proactively demonstrating interest in your brand as you obtain their email addresses. Pinging links and content to large numbers of people who never subscribed just isn’t worth the effort these days.

Sending Uniform Campaigns

As you begin to build a marketing list, you may not have a lot of information to sort. Over time, however, you should begin to collect information, purchase histories, subscription variations and other tidbits of info that can help you customize emails for each particular person. If you make the mistake so many do – and send out one email pitch to everybody on your list – then you will inevitably fall short of your campaign’s potential. Each subscriber should receive a pitch that is relevant to their past behaviors and interests. The more customization you pump into your campaigns, the more value you’ll extract from it.

Failing to Send Multiple Formats

Different people access their email in different ways. Some use their desktops, while many use mobile devices. Along with this, people have various preferences for how they’d like to receive their messages. Not only can subscription forms that prompt how frequently someone would like to receive emails be helpful, but providing both HTML and text-based formats is essential to ensuring everybody can read your messages. It’s important to remember that not everybody is on the same page technologically-speaking; you don’t want to lose a sale or conversion because someone was incapable of viewing your image-laden email. By providing the option in every campaign, you’ll ensure readers can always see what you’re offering.

Avoiding major no-nos in email marketing can make the difference between a failure of a campaign and a success. By pinging links relevant to the users’ interests, sending formats accessible by everybody and cultivating your own lists from those who have demonstrated interest, you’ll be able to build phenomenal campaigns. Share with us below a time when you made a major email marketing mistake and what you learned from the experience!