Although email marketing is a highly effective advertising medium, just like everything else, if it's not used properly it won't work. There are numerous mistakes new email marketers make time and time again, and if you want your newsletter campaigns to drive awareness and sales, you should make sure you don't make the following four mistakes.

Trying To Get Too Many Subscribers

When running an email marketing campaign, list quality beats quantity. You could have a subscriber list of millions, but if they aren't your target market, you will be severely wasting your money and time. Of course you're excited about your new email newsletter campaign and want it to be successful, but placing your email sign-up form too obviously on your site and overselling it only leads to a truckload of poor quality subscribers. As a professional email marketer, your job is to ensure list quality over quantity, as this is the only way to drive sufficient ROI from your email marketing campaigns.

Insufficient Tracking

Sure, keeping up with your campaign's statistics can take some time and analytical skills, but it's one of the most important parts of your marketing campaign. How else are you going to know if you're wasting your money or not? New email marketers often ramp up their campaigns without sufficient tracking mechanisms in place to gauge successes. The best email marketers often base key newsletter decisions, such as design, content and subject line text on hard data and past results. This is why they are able to make so much money from their lists, because they have spent a long time optimizing it.

No Strategy In Place

Although it's easy to simply say, "we'll just start the campaign and see what sticks," doing so will ruin your campaign before it even begins. Just like all other market vehicles, your newsletter strategy must be well thought out and sound. Do you have a content schedule, timeline & overall goals in place? If not, you should seriously consider creating an overall strategy that will lead to a predictable email newsletter campaigns. You will ultimately save yourself work, and your subscribers will most certainly thank you for it.

Poor Email Service Provider

Lastly, many email marketers choose to go with the cheapest email provider (or worse, email software) they can find. Not conducting proper research into which email marketing company is best for you can cause some problems down the road. Choosing the right email marketing service provider is very important, as it has a direct correlation with how many of your emails make it to your subscriber's inboxes. Good email marketing companies have struck special deals with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that keep your email messages clear of spam filters, and thus it's incredibly important to make the correct decision.

Just because it's easy to send emails doesn't mean it's easy to run a successful email marketing campaign. But if you take the time to make sure that you don't make the mistakes above, you will be on the right track to driving huge ROI from your email marketing efforts.