These days, most businesses have an email marketing strategy. However, with more than 294 billion emails sent every day, it is crucial for your business to stand out from the crowd. The last thing you want to do is spend your time and effort on creating an email campaign only to have your emails go unread. Here are five mistakes to avoid making with your email marketing campaign.

Sending Your Emails from a donotreply@yourdomain.com
Sending your emails from a donotreply or noreply email is incredibly unwelcoming and uninviting. Don’t be shocked if your open rate is low is you send your emails from one of these addresses. You always want to make sure you are sending emails from an address that your customers can reply to if they have issues or questions.

Sending Image Only Based Emails
Only about 33 percent of email subscribers will have their images turned on by default. This means that nearly two-thirds of your subscribers will not be able to read your email, but instead be faced with a long, empty box. Plus, text-only emails have a 40 percent higher click-through rate than those that contain only images. If you do decide to use pictures, make sure that you repeat everything in simple text.

Not Linking to Your Website
The entire goal of email marketing is to get people to click through to your company website. Your email needs to include at least one link that sends subscribers to a dedicated landing page that continues the email message. Similar to marketing campaigns that utilize search engines, you want to create a dedicated landing page for your email campaign, making sure that you include the link in the email.

Using a One-Size-Fits-All’ Approach
The most effective form of any marketing method is relevance. Your message needs to be relevant to your subscribers. The one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. Being relevant shows that you care about your subscribers. Only 11 percent of businesses segment their email lists, which makes creating relevant email marketing campaigns a competitive advantage for your business. Your segmentation can be basic or complex. By segmenting your list and customizing your message, you’ll have more engaged customers and higher click-through rates.

Ignoring Mobile
Fifty-four percent of all emails are now opened on a mobile device, and 40 percent of mobile users check their email more than four times a day. If your email campaign isn’t optimized for mobile devices many of your subscribers may not be able to read your message.

Avoiding these five mistakes can ensure that your email marketing campaign is successful. Email is still the most preferred communication channel for most customers, so creating an effective email campaign will help you out-perform the competition.