21 email marketing mistakes you’re probably making

Before you skip over this list and never think about it again, hear us out. 

Email marketers love to talk about the “common mistakes” made in and out of the inbox. 

Don’t believe us? Just google “common email marketing mistakes” and you’ll find a long list of fluffy articles that tell you everything you already knew. 

They’ll give you pointers like: 

• Don’t forget to segment 

• Include a clear call to action 

• Make sure your emails create value 

Not to be too frank, but yeah… we’re well aware.

Instead, we’re here to do what no email marketer has ever done before (not really… but maybe?). And that’s to give you a complete list of email marketing mistakes you probably, most definitely are making. 

1. You view open rates as the golden KPI (and make decisions based on them)

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but back in late 2021, when you saw a spike in your open rates, it wasn’t because you stepped up your subject line game. 

Artificially inflated open rates quickly became the norm when Apple rolled out its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature. 

To put it simply, your open rates are inaccurate, and you shouldn’t give them much weight when analyzing your email performance. 

You also should not use them to make strategic decisions — Like setting up campaign segments based solely on subscriber open criteria. Just don’t do it. 

2. You have a serious leak

We’re talking about the WELCOME10s and SAVE15s of the world. 

Sure, static coupon codes are easy to set up. But they could be causing some serious damage. 

Ever heard of RetailMeNot? Or Capital One Shopping? These coupon sites will sweep up your static codes, and before you know it… they’re in the hands of thousands of aimless shoppers.

If your goal is to maintain brand integrity and establish unique value for your prospects and customers via email, it’s about time you implement dynamic codes. 

Pro Tip: If you absolutely need to use a static discount code, make it appear unique. Instead of “WELCOME10”, set up a string of random characters like “TYH3PM6”. This will strike like a unique discount code and may help reduce risk of distribution. 

3. Your email links are causing chaos for your customers

We’re all consumers here. Which means you’re familiar with this whole process: 

1. You receive an email saying something like “Use code XHJ89KW3 to claim your offer”.

2. You head over to the website, add your product to cart, but…

3. You have to head back to the email to get your code.

4. You try the old fashioned way — repeating the eight random characters over and over again in your head. Hoping you make it back to your cart before your memory trips. 

5. It tripped. 

6. You’re back to the email. Taking a modern approach this time around — Command + C.

7. Now you’re back to your cart to finish what you started. Command + V. And only the most resilient make it this far. 

Now, we can all agree — that whole thing. Not ideal. 

Stop putting your valued customers through a game of cat and mouse and update your email links so that coupon codes auto-apply.  

4. You neglect the Outlook user

Let’s face it, Outlook can be a nightmare for email marketers. 

But that doesn’t mean you just give up on the subscribers with this email provider. 

By following these best practices, you can make engaging with Outlook users a heck of a lot easier.  

• Litmus test — Don’t you want to know what your email is going to look like before you press send?

• Stop sending out image-based emails — While this is a no-no for a number of reasons, it’s a massive barrier for Outlook users. Images oftentimes do not display automatically, so if you want your email to be comprehensive in the inbox, use as much live text as you can.

• When you do include images, add alt text — Unless you want the file name to display, plug in alt text for every image in your emails. That way, if an image does not populate for an Outlook user, they can at least refer to a brief description.   

5. You send campaigns to segments without flow exclusions

When email marketers talk about “smart segmentation”, they are typically referring to segments that include advanced behavioral and interest-based criteria. 

And that’s great. We love a good segment.

But the difference between a “good” campaign segment and an “excellent” campaign segment is something we like to call “flow exclusions”.

Whenever a subscriber is in a flow, they are there for a specific reason. They engaged with a pop-up. They abandoned checkout. They made a purchase. And you put time and effort into cultivating tailored sequences based on these very actions. 

Why choose to interrupt that experience with a general campaign?  Or even worse, overload their inbox and ultimately prompt them to unsubscribe before your flows even have a chance?

No, subscribers actively in your abandonment checkout flow should not get that whimsical “tips and tricks” campaign. Nor should subscribers in your welcome flow receive a “here’s your Monday motivation” campaign. And no, folks who just placed an order should not immediately receive all your campaigns. You risk diverting their attention from writing a review, learning how to use their new product, or buying that other item that would look great with what they just purchased. 

To put it simply, if you choose to deliver a campaign to subscribers actively enrolled in any flow, the benefits of sending the campaign must outweigh the risks of disrupting the flow experience.

6. You think “abandoned checkout” and “added to cart” are the same thing

Many email marketers look at this and think “tomayto, tomahto”. 

More often than not, abandoned checkout flows are up and running. All the while, added to cart flows aren’t even a thought. 

And wait… did you hear that?? Sounds like a steady stream of missed revenue opportunities.

The abandoned checkout trigger occurs when a user adds to their cart and proceeds to the checkout page. From this action, they can receive the first abandoned checkout email via one of two instances — 1) their email was already in your list, or 2) they went as far as to submit their email at checkout before dipping out.  

On the other hand, the added to cart trigger occurs when a user adds to and abandons their cart before they make it to the checkout page. In this case, emails only send to those who are already cookied.  

If you still think those two flows are the same thing, just know that from an email marketing standpoint, they are not. They each require a unique setup. Plus, the flow content should vary between the two, accounting for discrepancies in purchase intent. 

7. You go full Oprah when it comes to flow discounts

“You get 10% off. You get 10% off. And you get 10% off.”

Don’t rush into discounts too early. Especially in your abandoned checkout flow.

Remember, these people took every possible action leading up to purchase. This means they are very interested in your product. So why hit them with an immediate offer before giving them the chance to convert without one? 

Unless you’re a fan of handing out vouchers, we always recommend holding off on discounts in abandoned checkout flows until email #3, and sometimes until email #4. And if you don’t have a third or fourth email in your abandoned checkout series, we recommend you start there.

8. You have one welcome flow for everyone and their mother

Before we jump into the welcome flow matter, ponder this: 

If you’re running ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, and Amazon, are you distributing the same content across each channel? Or are you tailoring your content based on what you know and hypothesize about each audience? 

You tailor your content — or at least you should be.

The same logic applies to email capture. 

Users subscribing via a promotional pop-up are characteristically different from those who subscribe via a footer form. And both of those user types are characteristically different from those who subscribe at checkout, or those who subscribe via a landing page you’re driving traffic to. 

As an email marketer, it’s critical to understand and identify trends between capture sources and personas. And it’s even more critical that you do something with this information — like create unique welcome flows for each audience. 

Plus, when you set up your flows this way, you can easily isolate and analyze performance across each audience. This gives you more insight and enables you to make well-informed, strategic decisions.  

9. You don’t have nearly enough flow filters turned on (wanna bet?)

This mistake may warrant a dedicated article. Seriously, it’s that big of a deal.

And quite honestly, even the gravest flow filter mistakes come down to a ton of baby blunders stacked one on top of another. 

Here’s a good example:

You have a solid post-purchase flow. There are eight touchpoints and they go something like this:

1. Order confirmation (transactional)

2. Personal thank you 

3. Additional product education 

4. Update your preferences

5. Product use cases / inspiration  

6. Encourage repeat purchase / cross-sell 

7. Another cross-sell push 

8. Limited time offer 

Now, most email marketers would look at this and think the only filter needed is the trigger filter “have not placed an order since starting this flow”. 

And we wish that were true… setup would be a lot simpler. 

But no. You have to consider all of the possible customer journeys, and determine how each of those fits into, or doesn’t fit into, this universal sequence. To name a few additional filters that should be considered for this flow: 

• Flow filter — If someone canceled an order since starting this flow, boot them.

• Flow filter — If someone initiated a return since starting this flow, you guessed it… boot them too. 

• Personal thank you email filter — Whether you have one personal thank you email or a few (based on how many times a customer has placed an order), you have to ask yourself, “how many times do I want a customer receiving this same email?” When you have your answer, set up the filter that aligns with your determined limit.  

• Another personal thank you email filter — If you have a secondary thank you email going out specifically to repeat purchasers (showering them with gratitude for coming back a second time), you should consider adding a returns filter. Someone who purchased, returned, and re-ordered shouldn’t receive this email. 

• Preferences email filter — If someone has already updated their preferences, they shouldn’t receive this email. There’s a filter for that. 

• Limited time offer email filter — You may not want customers to receive an offer after every purchase they make. In that case, set up a filter to control the recipient pool.    

10. You don’t care that your preview text is out of control

You know the feeling when you get that teaser text just right… But then you send yourself a preview and notice all of the extra text funneling in at the end.

Yeah, that extra bit is actually the first string of text in your email body. So, unless your preview line miraculously reaches the exact character limit for every rendering engine and device, you’re bound to deal with those unwanted add-ons. 

Not sure what we mean? Here’s the difference: 

We figured out a way to avoid this issue completely. Unfortunately, this is a solution we reserve for our clients (because it requires a bit of coding). 

Fortunately, it takes little to no time to drop us a line.

11. You set up five versions of one email when you could just use dynamic content

If you’re creating multiple variations of the same email in order to share the most relevant content with your different audiences, we can draw two conclusions: 

1. You understand the significance of segmentation and you made it happen. That’s great. 

2. You may not understand that dynamic content can accomplish this goal, more efficiently and more effectively.  

To use a past project as an example, we set up a dynamically powered post-purchase flow for a pet supplement brand. 

They have 10+ SKUs, each of which has its own set of instructions.  

Now, many email marketers would look at this and immediately think the best and only way to distribute this product information is through completely separate emails — where the structure of the emails are relatively the same, but the subject line, email content, and links are unique to the product being featured. 

With much thanks to HTML, we can say those tedious, repetitious efforts are not required.

For this pet supplement brand, we were able to create one email that dynamically adjusted its subject line, body content, and links based on the product(s) they most recently purchased.

So, if someone purchased product A, they received the dynamic variation that shared product A instructions. And if someone purchased products B and C, they received the dynamic variation that shared product B and product C instructions.

12. You design with no consideration for dark mode

Five years ago, this wasn’t so much a mistake. 

However, in more recent years, dark mode users went from 0 to 100. Dark mode usage is now the default on many devices.  

It may seem superfluous (especially for email marketers who don’t use dark themselves). But it’s quite the opposite. 

In fact, an email not designed and optimized for dark mode can result in an illegible, inaccessible, unnavigable, and utterly pointless attempt at reaching your audience. Many ESPs like Klaviyo are starting to offer dark mode previews, so check it before you send it. 

To help you visualize, consider this logo on a white background. It looks great:

But when viewed in dark mode, the logo nearly disappears:

13. You settle for poor mobile optimization and mobile responsiveness

Email marketers are quick to respond to statistics in ways that ultimately boost performance — which is why we do things like run A/B tests.

We see that for many, if not most ecommerce businesses, mobile users make up more than half of total users.  

These days, mobile optimization is an absolute must. And for whatever reason, emails are still hitting inboxes with a shrunk-down hero image intended for desktop. Or columns that should be stacked on mobile. Or font sizes that prompt users with 20/20 vision to squint. 

While our preferred mobile optimization solution may not be the easiest to adopt, it surely is tried and true — and that’s coding emails in HTML. You can read more on the benefits of HTML-coded emails in mistake #20.  

14. You don’t update the default list setting in Klaviyo (and maybe are just now learning what the default actually is)

If you manage a Klaviyo account and have no idea what we mean when we say “default list setting”, this may be your most valuable takeaway yet. 

Klaviyo lists are programmed to default to “double opt-in”. This means that when anyone subscribes to any list, they immediately receive a “confirm your subscription” email. 

Why is this a problem? Well, if a user fails to click the button in that email, they simply won't get your emails… ever. 

Not to mention, the “confirm your subscription” email is not a good look. Not only is it unbranded, but it includes the name of the Klaviyo list that’s connected to the sign-up source (which, in most cases, is not intended to be customer-facing). 

And since subscribers are explicitly consenting to receive marketing emails at checkout, in pop-ups, and through other forms, we just don’t see the need. In fact, we see double opt-in as a barrier to list growth, engagement, and revenue. 

If you’re looking to adjust your list opt-in criteria, you must do so in each individual list (there is no global setting). Click into a list, select “Settings” in the navigation bar, and locate the “Consent” section, then “Opt-in process.” 

15. You operate as if email and SMS marketing are separate channels

Email marketing decisions made without consideration to SMS (and vice versa) are not smart marketing decisions.

And that’s because your SMS list is not unique. The majority of your SMS consented profiles are also consented to receive email.  

So, if you’re delivering emails and SMS around similar times and with similar calls to action (via flows or campaigns), you may be doing more harm than good. To name a few common consequences: 

• You unknowingly create an intrusive experience for subscribers that are consented to both email and SMS. 

• You limit the potential of your SMS channel — because when email and texts deliver the same value to a subscriber, what’s the need to stick around for both? This often manifests in high SMS unsubscribe rates.  

• You are throwing money down the drain. Duplicate email and SMS efforts typically translate to duplicate marketing spend. And if you’re using separate email and SMS providers (i.e., Klaviyo and Postscript or Klaviyo and Attentive), “duplicate” doesn’t even begin to cover it. We’ve seen businesses spend 3x, 4x, even 5x on SMS than what they would be spending had they been on a consolidated platform.     

• You are clouding your analytics and jeopardizing your ability to make informed marketing decisions (rendering attribution worthless). 

16. You have never touched your back in stock notification settings

If any flow deserves an underdog title, it's back in stock. This is a missed opportunity for so many ecommerce businesses. 

But even those who have this sequence running often miss this critical step — reviewing the back in stock setting. 

The default configuration is not one size fits all. Luckily, you have the ability to customize the following criteria:

• You can define when you want back in stock subscribers to be notified of a restock, based on new inventory volume.

• You can specify how many back in stock subscribers you want to be notified when the product they subscribed to is restocked.

• You can customize the time delays between grouped restock notifications. 

The criteria you set should be tailored to your business’s most typical restock volume and should also consider the size of your back in stock subscriber lists.  

To review the back in stock setting in Klaviyo, go to your account settings, select “Other” in the header navigation, then click “Back in stock settings.” It should look something like this: 

17. You think all pop-ups are created equal

Pop-ups should be created with necessary customization.

When it comes to pop-up triggers, we see two common scenarios:

1. You play it too safe — While conservative triggers do shield visitors from invasive experiences on your website, they are likely contributing to stunted list growth. 

2. You created a monster — We’re talking pure pop-up chaos. Every user, every session, every page… it never ends. This tactic may bring about notable list growth, but it’s doing so at the cost of your customers’ experience and satisfaction.

Use a tool with pop-up logic that enables you to customize unique experiences for website visitors based on even the most granular criteria. Then, you can be confident your list is growing optimally, all the while preserving a frictionless experience for prospects and customers alike. 

18. You don’t capture subscriber preferences (and if you do, you don’t put them to use)

Klaviyo’s default preference page is nothing more than an unsubscribe page. And nine times out of 10, no one bothers to change it. 

This means a couple of things. 

• You are missing out on zero-party data (aka a true email marketer’s best friend). This seemingly trivial mistake actually carries a lot of weight. Without zero-party data, your segmentation strategy can run a bit dry. 

• Not updating your preference page only contributes to your unsubscribe rate. Why? Well, when a user clicks “update my preferences” and the only call to action is to unsubscribe, what do you think they do? 

And if you find that frustrating, imagine this — you took the time to update your preference page with relevant selections for your audience and (here’s the kicker) you do nothing with the data.

To understand the consequences of this, it’s best you put your consumer hat on for just a moment. If you explicitly told a brand you were not interested in product education emails, but your inbox is full of it, how would you feel? Confused, annoyed, or even eager to unsubscribe? 

All that to say — don’t let something as simple as preference management damage your relationship with customers or dip into your profits.

19. You see plain text emails and think “boring”

Many email marketers sleep on plain text emails. 

Some will say they’re boring. Others think they’re a shortcut. And many adhere to the baseless belief that they don’t perform as well as their branded counterparts. 

These are all common misconceptions. 

Expert short-form copywriters can bring any plain text email to life. Plus, you can’t deny these benefits: 

• Plain text emails are more likely to land in the main inbox.

• They help to establish brand integrity and support long-term loyalty. And this approach resonates with customers. In fact, many customers even reply to these emails thinking you actually sent it. 

• Due to their straightforward setup, implementation and analysis of A/B tests are simpler tasks.

• They are compatible with smart watches, fitness trackers, and other wearables, meaning they will display similar to text messages on these devices. 

Not to mention, if you really want to take your plain text emails to the next level, you can add a coded signature block like the one below. 

20. You don’t code your flow emails in HTML

Not everything that came out of the 90s was worth keeping around. But HTML emails definitely make the cut.  

Some drag-and-drop builders (like Klaviyo’s editor) now support more flexible layouts and responsive design — but HTML still wins on precision and performance.

No fluff. Here are the facts about HTML: 

• You can modify email copy with ease — Making the same updates to text in an image-based email is a much bigger lift. 

• You can bank on optimized load speed — If your image-based email is not optimized properly, it’ll take a few seconds longer to load in the inbox than it would with HTML. Code is “lighter” than images, so your email will populate quicker when set up correctly. 

• You can’t beat the mobile responsiveness — Images and image-based text appearing far too small on mobile devices is a non-issue with HTML. When done correctly, HTML emails will appropriately display for all device types and sizes.

• You can add unique value to your flows — Ever thought about what happens when a product goes out of stock while a subscriber is in the middle of your cart abandonment flow? Using HTML, we can add code to abandoned checkout, added to cart, and browse abandonment emails so that they do not send if the product being featured is out of stock. 

• Your emails are more accessible in the inbox — If a subscriber searches for a certain piece of text in their inbox, the matching text in your email will appear in their Gmail search. The same cannot be said for images. If the text is baked into an image, you cannot search for it without alt-text.

21. You waste your time and money

We saved the biggest mistake for last. 

And while it might strike as biased, we have the client testimonials to prove it. Like this:

“We’re SUPER HAPPY with everything that was delivered! Our new automated flows have dramatically improved retention and boosted monthly sales, while giving us confidence that our investment with Fuel Made will continue to compound in value as we accelerate brand growth.”

— Paul Jauregui, Co-founder, BK Beauty

And this:

"I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years building this business. I’m continually blown away at how much pride you take in your work, as well as your attention to detail."

— Patrick Coddou, Founder, Supply 

On a real note: You can’t cut corners in your search for premium email marketing services that deliver results. 

And when you do, a trail of poor partnerships, problematic ROI, and a distrust in agencies often follows suit.  

We have seen this too many times. This is why all of us at Fuel Made are so grateful to have the opportunity to reinvigorate email marketing and redefine trusted partnerships for so many brands. 

We pride ourselves on delivering the highest quality copywriting, design, strategy, and technical nuances within email marketing. These are critical components of our value. 

But we firmly believe that these competencies are nothing without the genuine care we extend to our clients. 

So, before you make that next move to better your email marketing, ask yourself: 

1. Does this team carry the expertise to deliver results without making these 20 mistakes? 

2. Do they, beyond a doubt, care about my business, value my investment, and prioritize the quality of our partnership? 

We’ll let you take it from here. 

Questions? Book a call with our team.