5 Common Email Marketing Mistakes (And What You Can Do About Them)

Did you know an email can display more than 300,000 different ways depending on the email client, device, and reading environment?

In other words…there are 300,000 potential ways an email can break. 😱

And that’s before all of your stakeholders decide to poke and prod your code in different ways. With 60% of companies needing at least four stakeholders to review an email before it goes out, you’re going around and around and around testing and tweaking for every campaign.

Email geeks know that creating exceptional emails has never been harder. 

Customer expectations are higher than ever—86% of customers will leave a brand after only two poor experiences. No pressure, right?

We tested five million emails last year. Here are the top five most common email mistakes we see (and how to fix them):

1. Deliverability issues

Did your email make it to the inbox in the first place?

Deliverability issues often go overlooked because they’re not directly related to the content of the email (and let’s face it, deliverability can be a pretty tricky technical topic.) But if your emails don’t actually get to the inbox, your email marketing program won’t get much traction.

There’s never a bad time to do a check-up on your deliverability practices. Make sure you’re optimizing every facet of your deliverability. Double check allllll those acronyms: DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and BIMI.

2. Default preview text

68% of emails we tested contained preview text errors. We see countless examples in our inboxes of emails missing preview text, or defaulting to the first line of copy in an email…aka “CAN’T READ THIS EMAIL?” or “VIEW IN BROWSER.”

Examples of great preview text in Gmail

This may be because of a common misconception among email marketers that preview text is the same as preheader text. Preview text appears in the inbox alongside your from name and subject line, while email preheader text appears at the top of the body of the email. However, if you don’t write any preview text, most ESPs automatically pull the preheader text in…resulting in confusion over the terms and a lot of missed opportunities for email marketers.

Missing preview text ruins your chance of making the best first impression. That’s because it comes right after your subject line, giving you prime real estate to further entice your subscribers to open your emails. And we all know that without an open, you can’t get a click.

3. Inaccessible emails

90% of the emails we tested contained accessibility issues.

Email geeks, this is NOT okay.

It’s one thing to miss out on an ROI opportunity with preview text, and another to exclude an entire set of your audience because you’re not adding ALT text to your images or using large enough font sizes (both very easy, very quick fixes!) Make sure you take into account mobile devices, screen readers, and dark mode when you put together your email designs.

Inaccessible emails limit the reach of your email, but they also negatively impact your brand reputation by leaving subscribers feeling excluded.

4. Broken emails

96% of the emails we tested contained content issues…aka broken emails. This includes images not displaying properly, wonky formatting in email clients, and classic mistakes like typos and broken links (it’s happened to all of us!)

Still, that’s a LOT of broken emails out there.

When you send an email with a mistake in your content, you’re basically wasting your email campaign. If subscribers can’t take action from your email campaign, you’re not going to generate any revenue. But it also causes subscribers to lose trust in your future campaigns, reducing your email engagement and damaging your brand reputation over time.

5. Missing email personalization

Irrelevant, unengaging emails is one of the most common mistakes we see that is much squishier to fix than a typo or weird rendering issues in Outlook. 

What’s missing in a lot of these irrelevant emails? Personalization.

ICYMI, personalization is everything these days when it comes to email marketing. While this isn’t the same kind of mistake as a typo, for example, forgetting to personalize an email (or worse, sending something that says, “Hey NAME!”) is a common issue with underperforming emails. 

When you take into account that 71% of customers feel frustrated by impersonal experiences—and that 83% would willingly trade personal info for a more personalized experience—then lacking personalization in your email marketing isn’t a nice-to-have anymore; it’s keeping your email marketing program from performing the way it should.

Too many brands leave ROI on the table

It’s not a matter of if a mistake will happen, but when. No one is perfect, so don’t put pressure on yourself to be. These common mistakes are common for a reason!

With Litmus, you never have to worry about actually sending an email with those mistakes in it. Not only does Litmus catch errors like typos, missing links, and broken code, our suite of tools works together to help marketers completely maximize their email marketing ROI. 

Don’t let a common mistake cost your business again. Say goodbye to broken emails with Litmus.