15 Bad Email Marketing Practices That Can Ruin Your Brand
Email marketing has become a powerful tool to grow a business online. Since people started using emails, they gained popularity because they are less intrusive than phone calls and more appealing and friendly than ads. People can read emails at their convenience, have the flexibility to choose which emails they want to receive, and opt out when they want to.
While email marketing attributes are designed to make marketers’ lives easier, it does have a hard-featured side: bad email marketing practices. According to EmailToolTester, 160 billion spam emails are sent every day, and the majority of people (96.8%) have received spam in some form.
The statistic proves that businesses and even seasoned email marketers make mistakes, some of which are irreversible.
To help you make better decisions, we want to spread the word about bad email marketing practices, give bad email examples, and explain how they can harm your brand reputation. But we also want to share email marketing best practices to help you stay on the good side of email marketing.
The Importance of Email Etiquette in Modern Email Marketing
Email etiquette or good email marketing practices refers to following guidelines and best practices for sending professional and polite messages. It ensures effective communication, eradicating room for misinterpretations.
Some of the key principles in email etiquette are:
- Maintaining professionalism and clarity,
- Using a polite and respectful tone,
- Structuring the email well,
- Using correct email attachments,
- Using compelling email sign-offs,
- Responding to emails in short intervals.
Email Advertising Best Practices
Email advertising is a powerful tool in connecting with the audience.
Here are the best practices in email advertising to maximize engagement:
- Utilize opt-in emails and build a quality email list.
- Personalize and segment your audience.
- Use compelling email subject lines.
- Provide valuable email content.
- Optimize email cadence.
Email Blast Best Practices
Email blasts refer to sending the same message to multiple recipients simultaneously. Since it’s large volume-sending, the chances of spam traps affecting email deliverability are high.
Keep the following best practices in mind:
- Target the right audience through email segmentation strategy.
- Use urgency in the subject line to increase curiosity.
- Follow email design best practices and optimize the layout.
- Use email personalization and dynamic content.
- Implement email security protocols and authentication.
- A/B test different elements to find the most resonating ones.
Email Marketing: Essential Stats to Know!
Few people think email marketing is dead, but as email marketers, we know it’s not.
Although the email marketing industry is filled with good and bad emails, we are going to show you why email marketing works and why it does not (for a few).
We have been in the game long enough to say — email marketing works wonderfully when you pay attention to the details.
Here are key email marketing statistics to consider for your campaigns:
- Marketing emails influence the decision of 59% of consumers (OptinMonster)
- Email marketing contributes to 87% of the business’ success (Hubspot)
- 71% of emails are more effective with automation (Hubspot)
- Friday records the highest open rates, almost 19% (Hubspot)
- Emails with personalized subject lines are 50% more likely to be opened (Oberlo)
- 58% of businesses use email automation as a strategy (Forbes)
These statistics serve as a starting point for a well-planned email marketing operation, but if you’re not aware of the bad email marketing practices in the industry, your operation might fail despite good initial prospects.
The Common Pitfalls of Email Campaigns
Whether it’s promotional emails or follow-up emails, these mistakes can sabotage your email open rates and click-through rates:
- Poor subject lines: Generic or spammy subject lines can lead to lower open rates and even email deliverability.
- Overloading with information: Long and cluttered emails can make the readers lose interest.
- Lack of personalization: Using generic greetings, such as “Dear customer” can make the email feel less interesting.
- Sending too many emails: Bombarding recipients with too many emails can lead to email fatigue.
- Failing to analyze campaign performance: Not reviewing your email performance can lead to creating boring and irrelevant content.
Examples of Good and Bad Emails
The following table offers good and bad email examples to help you move on the right path.
| Aspect | Good Emails | Bad Emails |
|---|---|---|
| Subject line | “Exclusive offer just for you–20% off inside” | “Urgent: Grab the 20% off now, hurry!” |
| Personalization | “Hi [Customer Name], check out your custom credit offers” | “Dear customer, view our deals” |
| Design and layout | Well-structured, branded, and easy-to-read. | Messy layout, too much text, and improper formatting. |
| Content relevance | Focused on user interest and past behavior. | Generic promotions unrelated to the recipient. |
| Tone and language | Friendly and professional. | Too casual or aggressive. |
| Loading speed | Optimized for all devices with fast loading times. | Slow loading times with heavy images. |
Even the best marketing communication can be wasted if the sender does not
first have the right audience and a compelling reason for them to engage.
Beyond optimizing email content and timing, knowing the standard bad email marketing practices can help you craft compelling types of email campaigns.
15 Worse Email Marketing Mistakes
A few bad choices in design, copy, or email practices can wreck a wonderful campaign. These 15 bad email marketing practices along with examples of bad emails have the potential to harm your email open rates and marketing conversions, let alone your brand image.
It is always best not to:
1. Send Without Consent
Sending emails without permission from your customers can result in spam complaints and higher email unsubscribe rates. Although you may not intentionally send spam, you can still be penalized for violation and spam, especially if you buy email lists.
ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are closely watching for this. If you fall prey to spam traps, it’s possible that your email domain will be blacklisted and your emails blocked.
2. Sell Too Hard
Email marketing subscribers usually sign up for emails in the hope of receiving valuable information. When the emails contain hard-sell tactics, it can lead to a high unsubscribe rate, especially with larger email lists.
Additionally, sending too many emails can also result in lower engagement, affecting your sender reputation.
3. Avoid Customer Segmentation
Defining your target audience and implementing proper email segmentation strategies is one of the first steps in email marketing. When you disregard it, you could send emails to the wrong people and waste resources. Sending emails to a broad audience can also end in poor open and click-through rates, eventually leading to lower email deliverability and ROI.
4. Mislead With Subject Lines
An email subject line is the first element subscribers notice about your email. It also determines if your emails will be opened or not. Misleading, boring, generic, or inappropriate subject lines can decrease trust and interest in your brand.
For example,
- ” Earn $1000 in 3 hours with this amazing system”
- ” Thousands have succeeded with this product. Get it now!”
- ” Want to earn more? Use this FREE tool”
These types of subject lines can confuse the audience, suggest scammy behavior, and trigger spam filters.
To understand how to write intriguing subject lines, go through our guides on:
5. Forget to Optimize For Mobile
More than ever, consumers are using their mobile devices to access emails. But almost 1 in 5 email campaigns is not optimized for mobiles. When emails don’t fit a mobile screen, they can be hard to navigate and sometimes impossible to read.
Not implementing mobile email marketing is a missed opportunity to build a positive brand experience, because smaller screens allow for brighter colors and have many options to create visually appealing content.
6. Ignore Sender Reputation
ISPs set sender scores to protect against malpractices such as spam. But many small-list senders neglect these scores, assuming it will not affect them. In reality, sending fewer emails does not always equal a higher sender reputation. Even worse, the more your emails bounce or go to spam, the poorer your sender’s reputation score will be.
In addition, it can also affect your IP reputation leading to poor email deliverability rates.
7. Fail to Include Clear CTAs
Audiences will appreciate your efforts and reward you with higher engagement if you tell them what to do and how to do it. Failing to include a clear CTA will make the audience feel uncertain about your brand.
They are bound to feel that your email campaigns do not have a purpose and are not relevant to them.
8. Ignore GDPR Regulations
According to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), all businesses must obtain the consent of subscribers and provide an unsubscribe option. Compliance is a fundamental part of email marketing, and ignoring these regulations can affect your email deliverability, sender reputation, and overall performance. Remember to adhere to email security best practices to stay a safe email sender.
Moreover, compliance will become absolutely mandatory for all senders who send to Gmail and Yahoo addresses as of February 2024. Luckily, Campaign Refinery clients are well ahead of this.
9. Neglect Email Deliverability Best Practices
Email deliverability is an important factor in deciding your sender score. It represents the percentage of emails delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Neglecting this metric can result in poor sender score, making it difficult to reach your audience in the future.
10. Neglect Analytics
Analytics refer to the data such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, unsubscribe rates, and bounces. Ignoring email campaign metrics is one of the most damaging bad email marketing practices, making it difficult to optimize and improve your email marketing performance.
11. Include Too Many Images
Although having images in your emails makes them more attractive, they can slow down the loading time of your messages if not formatted properly. Moreover, there are subscribers who might have disabled the images in their emails, which means your emails could end up looking lifeless and unreadable.
Also pay attention to your email design practices to avoid overwhelming readers.
12. Forget to Personalize Campaigns
Email personalization is applying user data to create more relevant messages for each target audience. If you forget to personalize your campaign messages, it could lead to poor engagement. An example of bad personalization is sending the exact same email to all subscribers.
13. Forget to Check Email Size
Emails wider than 650 pixels are not optimized for all devices and may end up looking shabby on mobiles. Forgetting to run email size checks will make it hard for subscribers to engage with it.
14. Ignore Your Email Automation Process
Automation holds your email marketing in place — it sends emails at the right time, to the right audience. It is an added opportunity to send subscribers bonuses or rewards, such as free guides or email coupons. Backsliding on this practice will make subscribers feel they don’t have enough incentive to subscribe to your emails.
15. Forget to Authenticate Email Domain
Email domain authentication means validating email addresses and domains for accuracy and authenticity. Not performing domain validation could make your email activities seem suspicious to ISPs and the result is typically decreased email deliverability, bad sender reputation, and campaign failure.
Campaign Refinery team has a holistic approach to email marketing campaigns. We want our clients to be safe from falling into bad email marketing practices. Hence, we make it compulsory for clients to go through domain authentication after signing up, and we provide support every step of the way to ensure campaign success.
After working with multiple clients and sending out millions of emails every month, we know what email campaigns should not look like. And we want you to know it, too.
Bad Email Marketing Examples
Consumers spend around 10 seconds reading emails from brands, on average. It is already difficult to retain their attention span, and bad email marketing practices can make it even worse.
To paint a clearer picture what these harmful practices look like in real life, here are 3 poor email examples you should stay away from:
1. Bad Email Etiquette Examples – Lousy layout
Event invitation emails exist to give the readers easy-to-read information, packed in a visually engaging layout. However, similar to the example below, the event emails could lack color coordination, have clumsy typeface, and have too much text with no clear CTA. The result is frustrated subscribers and emails that can easily be discarded.
2. Bad Business Email Examples – Salesy Copy
If you use lengthy subject lines, inappropriate puns, or extra long email copy, your emails will likely be deleted or tossed into spam. Explicit or aggressively salesy copy can tire readers and make them opt out.
A bad email copy would look like this:
Hello!
Looking to make the most of your holidays? Then, look no further. We have the best packages for you without breaking the bank!
It’s a bad example because
- It has a generic introduction, and
- It sounds salesy without featuring the benefits.
3. Bad Newsletter Examples – Too Many CTAs
Many senders think that if they fill their emails with CTAs, customers might click on one of them. The truth is that customers click on buttons and links only if they are convinced a product or service can help them.
The image below is flooded with CTAs without room for important information like brand stories, product benefits, and customer testimonials.
Bad email marketing practices not only interfere with your email marketing success but can also tarnish your brand image, and here’s how.
The Impact of Bad Email Marketing Practices on Brand Reputation
The costs of rebuilding a brand reputation are significantly higher than starting afresh. These expenses can include remarketing, PR, and customer outreach. The above is only one example.
Bad email marketing practices could have more adverse effects on your brand, such as:
- Loss of trust and credibility,
- Loss of potential customers,
- Increased unsubscribes,
- Reduced email engagement,
- Even legal consequences in some cases.
In conclusion, bad email marketing practices can provoke negative consequences for your brand to an extent where it becomes unrepairable.
Why Purchasing Email Lists Could Be the Worst Mistake of All?
Purchasing email lists is doable. But it’s considered spam and illegal in many regions.
When you purchase email lists, you send emails to people who have not consented to receive them. Doing this damages your sender reputation.
If you constantly have bad results, you are likely experiencing the consequences of bad email marketing practices. Identify the consequence to understand the reason behind it:
| Consequences | Reason |
|---|---|
| Low-quality leads | May contain outdated or incorrect email addresses |
| Legal issues | Considered offense under many anti-spam laws |
| Ineffectiveness | Low response rates |
| Lack of targeting | Lacks specific segmentation |
| Wasted resources | ROI is relatively low |
| Short-term strategy | Can result in long-term problems |
Purchasing email lists is not a good way to go and is forbidden at Campaign Refinery.
Our team regularly reviews accounts and suspends users with purchased lists or cold emailing practices. We know it is the most effective way to avoid the dangers of poor email marketing practices.
The Inbox Formula Could Be a Game-Changer for You. Here’s Why
A step toward the best strategies to scale and optimize your campaigns, The Inbox formula covers industry secrets to increasing email deliverability, opens, and click-throughs.
Campaign Refinery was built on the foundations presented in The Inbox Formula, and we still use the same practices to date. Why? They give the best results on the market, according to our clients.
Our goal is to get even better over time. That means we want to streamline the email marketing process to the level of a high-speed train — no bumps in the road, no friction. And you can have a part in our journey, too, even without subscribing right away.
Just download The Inbox Formula and start your email marketing journey in the right direction.
It’s free and always will be!
What worries us looking at the overall email industry landscape are still ongoing malpractices, one of the worst ones being purchasing email addresses.
To help you step up your game, stay safe, and perfect your email marketing, we recommend you read the following informative articles:
The Best Way To Avoid These Pitfalls is To Work With Campaign Refinery!
Once you go overboard with bad email marketing practices, they are difficult to reverse. The best solution is to follow proven email marketing best practices from the beginning.
At Campaign Refinery, we work with responsible clients to uplevel their email marketing revenue, while being a keeper of their good practices. With expert support, clear guidance, and easy-to-use features, we set the foundation for the highest performance for your emails!
Our clients continue to record their highest open rates after joining us — one of them reached $0 to $3.6m in the first twelve months of using Campaign Refinery software.
Apply now to become our client, and see your conversions and revenue grow!
FAQ
What are email marketing best practices for 2025?
Email marketing best practices help improve email engagement, deliverability, and email marketing conversion rate.
Here are the best email marketing practices to follow:
- Build a quality email list.
- Craft engaging subject lines.
- Provide value in every message.
- Implement mobile email marketing.
- Use a strong CTA.
- Comply with email marketing laws.
What are the 10 worst email marketing mistakes?
Email marketing mistakes might be common as you step into this digital strategy tool. However, not rectifying them can damage your email sender reputation and lead to legal trouble.
Here are the top email marketing mistakes and examples of poor email etiquette:
- Not getting explicit permission while sending marketing emails.
- Using weak or misleading subject lines.
- Not using personalization or segmentation.
- Overloading with sales pitches.
- Sending too many or fewer emails.
- Ignoring email deliverability best practices.
- No clear call-to-actions.
- Not optimizing for mobiles.
- Not testing or analyzing the performance.
- No easy way to unsubscribe.
What should I know about the email marketing best practice guide?
An email marketing best practice guide is a valuable resource that helps email marketers and businesses optimize their email campaigns while staying compliant with email marketing regulations.
To know more, read our best practices guides on:
- 11 Email Marketing Automation Best Practices You Should Start Using Today
- Creating a Perfect Email Sequence: Types, Best Practices, and Examples to Use in 2023
- Email Workflow: What It Is, How to Create One, Best Practices
- Make Your Holiday Email Campaigns Special: Ideas and Best Practices
- 18 Email Security Best Practices: The Ultimate Guide for 2025
- What is Email Campaign Management? Best Practices and Examples
- What is an Email Header? Uses, Best Practices, and Examples
- What is a Re engagement Email Campaign? Actionable Tips and Best Practices
- What is a Broadcast Email? Exploring the Benefits, Strategies, and Best Practices
- How to Build a Welcome Email Campaign? Examples and Best Practices
- How to Set up and Send an Automatic Confirmation Email with 5 Best Practices
- Get Your ‘Back in Stock Emails’ Right: Best Practices, Tips, and Examples For a Triumphant Reunion
- Email Spam 101: Best Practices for Users and Senders
What should I know about email strategy best practices?
A robust email strategy is super important to drive engagement, conversions, and brand loyalty.
Keep the following tips in mind:
- Define your goals and KPIs.
- Build and maintain a high-quality email list.
- Use dynamic email content.
- Craft compelling subject lines and preheaders.
- Improve deliverability by avoiding spam-trigger words.
- Automate email campaigns.
- Create a consistent voice and brand experience.
How do marketers address the concerns relating to e-mail marketing spam?
Email marketers address spam concerns by following email marketing best practices, and adhering to the following:
- Obtaining explicit permission from recipients before emailing them.
- Following CAN-SPAM requirements and understanding the GDPR compliance checklist.
- Maintaining a healthy sender reputation.
- Avoiding spam triggers in content.
- Providing clear and easy unsubscribe options.
- Sending relevant and valuable messages.
What are the email marketing analytics best practices?
Tracking and analyzing email marketing performance is crucial for optimizing campaigns and improving overall engagement and user experience.
Remember the following:
- Define your goals and KPIs,
- Track key email campaign metrics,
- Segment your data for deeper insights,
- Analyze email engagement over time,
- Track revenue and ROI from email campaigns,
- Use AI in email marketing for smarter analytics.
Is free email list bad for your company’s reputation?
Yes, using a free email list can negatively impact your company’s reputation for the following reasons:
- Spam risk because free email lists often have addresses without consent to communication.
- Low email engagement due to people being disinterested in your content.
- Compliance issues because purchased lists can violate marketing regulations.
- Reputation damage if recipients start reporting for spam complaints.
Purchased email lists can also ruin your email deliverability rates due to higher spam complaints and lower engagement.
Here are more resources to understand this topic in-depth:
What are the email copy best practices?
Good email copywriting is key to capturing your audience’s attention and driving action.
Crafting effective copy starts with understanding email marketing psychology and implementing the following:
- Know your audience’s interests, behavior, and needs.
- Craft and engaging and short subject lines.
- Use clear and compelling email copy.
- Ensure the reader understands what’s in it for them.
- Build trust by including social proof such as testimonials.
