We see a lot of email that goes out from builders and developers and the following are a few common mistakes we see that can easily be corrected.

Sending One Big Image

Many times a design team has put together a great looking piece promoting a community or project. It gets converted to an image, the image gets uploaded to an email template and it gets sent out. It takes all of about 5 minutes to do this. Simple, easy and effective, right? Wrong. The image may look great if the majority of your recipients could see the image, but the challenge is that the majority of people block their images so all they will see is a red x. Plus it often gets tagged as spam as this is a method that spammers use to send out email. The solution? Use a balance of text and images in an email. It takes a little longer and often you will need to enlist the help of someone with HTML coding skills, but it will be far more effective in the long-run. And don’t forget to add title tags to your images!

No Call to Action

Every email should have a call to action; an action that you want the recipient to take. Whether it’s registering their interest in a new project or community, clicking on a link to get additional information, or responding to an event invitation, your call to action should be close to the top of your email.

A Complicated Design

Every email provider – Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, etc. render email differently. Because of this you MUST keep your email design simple by avoiding embedded CSS and background images, as well as being cautious of using white text with a dark background as some ISPs strip away background colors causing your white text to become invisible. Many web developers code email templates like they are coding a web page; this method doesn’t work. Code like it’s 1999!

No Testing

Looking at your email template in “Preview” mode is not testing your email! To effectively test your template you actually need to send it out to your test email accounts and review how it renders in different browsers, checking to make sure all the images are displaying properly, the links all work, and you’ve checked for spelling and grammatical errors. Send it to someone in your office who hasn’t been involved in the creation and ask them to have a thorough look at the email content!

Ignoring Reporting Detail

Creating and sending the email is important but it’s important to read your reports and the information you get from the reports. Which recipients are fully engaged and opening and clicking on links in the email? If someone hasn’t opened an email in six months, maybe it’s time to stop sending them emails and call them to determine their interest level. Are you cleaning up your emails and reviewing those that have bounced? Your mass mail reports can also provide insight to those prospects who are really interested – those who have opened all the emails, clicked on links – prompting sales to call the prospects and provide more information!

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Also be sure to check out our upcoming Webinar on Email Marketing with Meredith Oliver on September 22nd!


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