In email marketing, there are mistakes, little flubs and errors that we wish we hadn’t made (like spelling errors), and there are MISTAKES. These can cost you customers and cost you money. Some may even trigger lawsuits or complaints. Here are some of the biggest, and how to fix them.

Failure to comply with CAN-SPAM

CAN-SPAM requires that you put a physical address at the bottom of every commercial email: whether or not it’s for a direct sale. This applies to follow-ups, customer service queries, everything. It doesn’t have to be a street address; a P.O. box is OK. Add an opt-out link to every e-mail. Only one click to a single site should be required. You can, however (and this is recommended, see yesterday’s post) allow subscribers to opt-out selectively (keep one newsletter but not another). You may not charge a fee for this. If you don’t include this, and get reported, there are large fines for not complying.

Lack of a privacy policy

Tell your customers what you will (and will not) do with the information they are giving you. Will you share it with affiliates? Sell or rent it to other companies? Spell it out in clear language. People do more business with companies they find trustworthy; a privacy policy is one way of building trust, and attracting more customers.

Deleting landing pages after a campaign

Keep them up for several months. Most of your orders will come in the first six weeks or so, but some may find your offer months later. If a particular promotion has expired, redirect visitors to the current one. That way, you may still get a sale.  Taking the page down right away can cost you future sales.

Too many bounces

Check to see how many of your emails are not being delivered.. Emails can bounce (fail to be delivered for a number of reasons, including challenge-responses (e-mail systems that require a personal note back before accepting delivery), dead e-mail addresses, or a busy server. Have a system in place to manage bounces and clean up dead addresses.

Higher email marketing charges

If your email vendor charges by list size, bad addresses will add to your email marketing bill without adding anything to your revenues.

They’ll also decrease your response rate, as fewer people will receive your message.

If there are enough bounces and bad addresses, it can even overload your host’s servers.