If you’ve landed here, you’re likely keen on getting better results from your email marketing campaigns. You’re in the right place, as in this article we’ll discuss 7 challenges you’ll encounter in your strategy and how to tackle them
Design isn’t the most important thing, readability is
I’m sure it’s happened to you more than once: you open an email and you’re greeted with a warning from your email client saying that the message contains external images or scripts that could be risky, asking if you wish to load them. This is completely normal in modern email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook, or many webmail services.
This point often sparks recurring debates with certain email marketing clients. They want a sophisticated HTML design, packed with images, colours, eye-catching fonts, and visual effects. And yes, technically we can do it. The issue is that, in many cases, it’s counterproductive. One of the main reasons is exactly what we’ve just mentioned: the filters and warnings from email clients.
The typical response is: “Well, they can just click the button and that’s that.” But reality is quite different. Many people, upon seeing a security warning, simply don’t dare to load the content. The result is that, by opting for a visually elaborate email, you’ve managed to ensure a significant portion of your recipients don’t even read it.
On top of that, not all email clients render HTML the same way. Some only accept plain text, others severely limit styles, and many block images by default. Add to this the fact that a large portion of emails are now read on mobiles, on small screens ( it must be responsive, meaning it adapts to all screens ) and in low-attention contexts. And increasingly, AI agents that read, classify, and summarise emails are coming into play, prioritising textual content over design. ( In fact, design confuses them ).
And the worst of it? Those emails that consist solely of one big embedded image, like a poster. If the image doesn’t load, the message simply vanishes. Literally, there’s nothing to read.
This is where the challenge lies in balancing the “strategic” service of helping the client succeed with their campaign, and the mechanical side of copywriting and layout. It’s also the critical point where few agencies make a real difference and guide the client towards the right decisions. You can ask an AI to draft an email for you, even provide the HTML template, but can it make that email convert prospects into customers? For that, you need to make the right calls.
All this leads to one conclusion: the cleaner, clearer, and more direct the text is, the easier it will be for the message ( which is what really matters ) to reach its recipient. Using short paragraphs, punchy sentences, and a clear structure is usually far more effective than any colour scheme or images. Good copywriting trumps an overloaded design every time.
Quality and value beat quantity
One of the main reasons people unsubscribe from a newsletter is straightforward: they feel you’re “being a pest”. When designing an email funnel for a campaign, it’s not enough to just chain sends together; you need to think about the buyer journey, that is, the path the reader takes through your content. Each email should have a clear purpose and, above all, provide real value to the subscriber. Why is it worth stopping everything they’re doing to read it?
The trouble starts when emails turn into filler or constant “buy, buy” pushes. At that point, the reader makes one of three choices: unsubscribes, starts ignoring you outright, or worse, sends you straight to the spam folder (we’ll talk more about this and its consequences later in this post). And once any of these happens, regaining that attention is virtually impossible.
The sale should always be a logical outcome of the value you’re providing, not the result of hammering away repeatedly. Funnels based on messages like “ flash offer ”, “ last few left ”, or “ hurry before it’s gone ”, playing on scarcity and urgency biases, might generate the odd sale. Especially if you have a huge list: by sheer statistics, someone will buy (law of averages). However, in the medium to long term, this approach tends to “ burn out ” your audience more than it sells.
It makes far more sense to build a relationship based on trust and perceived value. When the reader sees that your emails offer something useful (information, learning, inspiration, or real solutions), buying stops feeling forced and starts making sense. Plus, if you handle inbound marketing well, you can nurture your subscribers with content that educates them, supports them, and helps them mature naturally into customers.
Avoid relentless badgering. Instead, focus on long-term commercial relationships, looking after every send and ensuring each email earns its place. The goal isn’t for them to tolerate your emails, but to look forward to the next one.
Avoiding the spam folder
There are several reasons why an email might end up in the spam folder. The most common is that a reader has manually filtered you because your messages no longer interest them, as we mentioned earlier. However, there’s a far trickier scenario: your emails landing in spam without the recipient even realising it.
Spam ( unwanted email ) has become an ever-growing problem, to the point where it accounts for a huge percentage of daily emails. To combat it, email providers apply increasingly aggressive filters. Even hosting providers like us include specific technologies such as SpamExperts ( available at no extra cost on all our hosting plans for corporate email accounts ) to stem this flood of unwanted messages.
The issue is that these systems, necessary as they are, aren’t perfect. They sometimes produce false positives: legitimate emails marked as spam. This can happen due to overly strict rules, a subject line or content that triggers alerts, a suspicious message structure, or poorly trained filters. And these aren’t the only possible causes.
For instance, if several users of a service like Gmail start marking emails from your domain as spam, that information feeds into shared blacklists among providers. The effect is particularly severe because it doesn’t just penalise one specific account, but the entire domain. So any email sent from your domain might start going straight to spam by default. If the account newsletters@yourdomain.com caused the issue, it will also affect sales@yourdomain.com, for example.
Now imagine the consequences for your business if all the emails your company sends (quotes, customer replies, internal communications) start routinely ending up in spam. The impact could be catastrophic. And the worst part is that it’s far easier to get on a blacklist than to get off it, though there are procedures to try to reverse it. For this reason, it’s often good practice to use a separate domain solely for sending newsletters and email marketing campaigns.
Another critical factor is the DNS records configuration for your domain. Poor setup can mean emails aren’t properly validated as legitimate. This is especially common when using external tools for mass email campaigns, autoresponders, or marketing automation platforms, which need to be correctly authorised to send on behalf of your domain.
Similar issues can arise when sending emails via PHP’s mail function from a website hosted on an IP different from your mail server. If the message origin looks dodgy to the filters, it can trigger an anti-spam mechanism that starts a chain of distrust towards your domain, labelling it “suspicious” or “potentially abused” by email providers.
All this means it’s better to carefully review your newsletter tool’s setup and regularly check your domain’s health. There are online tools like MX Toolbox that let you see if your domain is on any blacklists. It’s also wise to check expired domains before buying them.
In many cases, professional advice is key to ensuring everything is set up properly before problems arise: angry clients because they aren’t receiving your emails… or worse, clients who never reply because they never saw them.
Your newsletter needs subscribers
A very common mistake in email marketing is investing in expensive tools, spending time and money designing the “perfect” email sequence, and obsessing over every detail… only to realise there’s no one to send them to. Without a qualified audience, all that investment is pointless.
That’s why designing a newsletter or any email marketing strategy should always start by defining your buyer persona: a detailed profile of your ideal customer. Once you know who they are, what worries them, what they need, and their pain points, it’s much easier to create relevant and useful messages. Without this upfront step, you’re likely writing in the dark.
Once you’ve defined that profile, you need a clear reason for that person to hand over their email address. It could be a discount or one-off promotion, but the most common (and effective) approach is to capture the user before they’re ready to buy, through a “lead magnet ”. A lead magnet is a high-value piece of content you offer in exchange for their email, serving as the entry point to your funnel. From there, subsequent emails should align with that initial content and the reader’s needs.
It’s worth noting that “high value” doesn’t mean “very expensive”. It means something the potential customer sees as useful and relevant. For example, if you run a cruise company, a good lead magnet might be a PDF with tips on choosing your first destination, or a guide to “ the 10 most romantic places to visit on a cruise ” if your target audience is couples. The production cost can be low, but the perceived value can be sky-high.
Defining your buyer persona properly also helps you know where to find those leads. Sticking with the example, it wouldn’t make much sense to promote cruises for retirees on TikTok, since most people over 65 don’t use that platform. Unless, of course, you’re targeting grandchildren to gift the experience to their grandparents. In that case, the channel could work… but the message, tone, and approach would change completely.
And that’s the key: when everything is well defined ( buyer persona, channel, message, and content ), the strategy starts to fit together as a coherent whole.
Legal considerations
Another major challenge when creating an email marketing campaign is the legal side. These days, there are very strict data protection regulations in place. In the UK, for instance, we have the Data Protection Act 2018 and the PECR 2003. In Europe, the GDPR and ePrivacy ( Directive 2002/58/EC / PECR ) apply, with some national variations, such as the well-known Robinson lists, where individuals can sign up to avoid unsolicited commercial communications ( usually by phone, but not exclusively ).
These kinds of regulations govern in great detail how personal data can be lawfully obtained and used ( including email addresses ), whether your company is based in those territories or your recipients are individuals or businesses resident there. The key is consent: data must be collected with explicit, informed, and verifiable consent for the specific purpose you’re going to use it for. Something as seemingly minor as a poorly placed or worded checkbox on a form can lead to significant financial penalties.
Moreover, these laws recognise a series of fundamental rights for users: access to their data, rectification, erasure, portability, and objection, among others. That’s why features like the “unsubscribe” button aren’t just a polite gesture, they’re a legal requirement. Someone might be tempted to “remove” that button to avoid losing subscribers, but without a clear and accessible way to delete personal data, a fine could well come knocking sooner or later.
Another particularly serious issue arises with buying email lists. At first glance, it might seem like a tempting shortcut to grow your database quickly. However, for it to be legal, every contact on that list should have given valid, specific consent for their data to be passed on for the exact purposes you’re intending (usually commercial). Can you guarantee that with absolute certainty? If the answer is “no”, you’re opening yourself up to an unexpected complaint. And it’s worth remembering: you’re the one legally responsible for any misuse of that data, regardless of whether you later try to claim against the list seller, who might be in a jurisdiction that’s hard to pursue legally.
Many of the lists sold out there come from scraping techniques (automated searches for emails across the web), without any consent at all, or they’ve been passed around so many times that they’re completely “burnt out”. Did you think they’d only sell it to you? It’s impossible to know how many years that database has been circulating, how many times it’s been reused, or how many of the emails are even still active.
A similar legal problem crops up with some lead capture tools. From a legal standpoint, these platforms often “wash their hands” of any misuse by the user. For instance, the popular Apollo extension for Chrome lets you extract email addresses and phone numbers from LinkedIn profiles using APIs and light scraping techniques. This speeds up commercial prospecting, but it doesn’t automatically apply GDPR compliance filters for contacts in the European Union or the United Kingdom. The responsibility falls entirely on the user.
This means that if you extract contacts from the EU or UK without checking their location and add them straight into an email marketing campaign, you’d be acting without prior informed consent or a registered lawful basis, which is a breach of the GDPR. Potential sanctions can reach up to 4% of global annual turnover or €20 million. In fact, the fine print in tools like Apollo’s own documentation recommends explicitly filtering out EU and UK citizens from such lists. But not everyone reads that…
In any case, the best strategy remains the simplest and safest: attract leads to your content and let them subscribe voluntarily themselves, with the appropriate checkboxes. Sending unsolicited emails or those without permission almost always ends up causing trouble, whether legal, damage to your brand, or penalties from anti-spam filters. It’s far more effective to build a garden where the butterflies want to come and stay of their own accord, rather than chasing them with a net.
You need to recoup the investment
One aspect that’s often overlooked is that a newsletter isn’t just a channel for sharing content: it has to be profitable. It sounds obvious, but many times people focus more on “providing value” or showing creativity than on assessing whether the investment actually pays off.
Consider everything involved in launching and maintaining an email marketing campaign: the time spent planning, writing, and designing the emails; implementing and automating them; creating lead magnets and capturing subscribers; and, of course, the cost of tools, sending platforms, and any professionals involved. All this adds up to considerable expense that, if not managed, can turn the campaign into more of a Bermuda Triangle, where your money vanishes, than a revenue source.
That’s why profitability should be a central criterion from the very start. It’s not enough to have good content or attractive emails: you need to constantly ask whether each email, each lead magnet, each automation delivers a real return on investment (ROI). How much does it cost to acquire a subscriber? How much revenue does an average converted subscriber bring in? Without these clear metrics, it’s impossible to make strategic decisions to improve results.
As I mentioned, one of the most common mistakes is focusing solely on content quality or the value given to the reader, and forgetting to measure and optimise the campaign’s performance. Sustaining a newsletter long-term requires resources, and if those resources don’t translate into tangible benefits or at least indicators that move you closer to your business goals… sooner or later the campaign becomes unsustainable.
For example, sending emails with excellent copy and design but without segmentation or conversion tracking might generate opens or clicks, but very few actual sales. In the end, the best metric is the revenue the campaign generates for you.
This is where KPIs come in: specific metrics that let you evaluate whether your strategy is working and spot areas for improvement. Some essential KPIs in email marketing include:
- Open rate: shows the percentage of recipients who open your emails, useful for assessing subject lines and send times. If no one reads them, what’s the point?
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): indicates what percentage of openers interact with links or calls to action.
- Conversions: how many recipients complete the desired action (purchase, sign-up, download, etc.). They might click but not actually buy, for instance.
- Unsubscribe rate: helps you understand if you’re overwhelming your audience or if your content isn’t relevant.
- Campaign ROI: how much direct or indirect profit each pound invested generates. Don’t forget the cost of time, especially if you’re handling it yourself (we tend not to value our own time, but it’s a real opportunity cost).
But measuring once isn’t enough: regular review and improvement is essential. Analysing results, testing changes in subject lines, segmentation, design, or frequency, and adjusting based on data allows you to progressively boost the newsletter’s effectiveness. In other words, a successful email marketing campaign isn’t static: it’s a dynamic process of testing, learning, and continuous optimisation.
Ultimately, the key is finding the balance between value and profitability. It’s not about sacrificing content quality, but ensuring every action in the campaign has a measurable purpose and contributes to a tangible outcome. Only then can a newsletter become a genuine growth engine for your business.
Think about scalability: avoid letting your tool eat into your ROI
Many entrepreneurs and businesses make a classic mistake: choosing popular email marketing tools like MailChimp, MailRelay, HubSpot, or AWeber because “ everyone uses them ” and they work brilliantly at first. But there’s a problem that almost inevitably arises: as your list grows, so does the cost, sometimes exponentially. What started out affordable can end up devouring your ROI.
These platforms are built to scale, yes… but at the expense of your budget. Every new subscriber, every increase in sends, means higher fees. If your goal is a sustainable, long-term campaign, this “penalty for growth” can become a real brake on your strategy. In short, you’re paying more for something that should be making you money.
This is where self-hosted tools come into their own, and Mautic is undoubtedly one of the most powerful open-source options. Unlike traditional subscription-based solutions, Mautic is installed on your own server, meaning costs don’t depend on list size or send volume. With our hosting, for example, you can send up to 500 emails per hour, with full control over your campaigns, database, and metrics. This lets you scale your business without worrying that the tool will “eat into” your profits.
Mautic doesn’t just give you financial freedom, it offers strategic flexibility too. You can automate complex sequences, segment your audience precisely, personalise messages, and track results with clear KPIs, all without artificial limits based on list size. And the best part: installation is easier than it seems. With our hosting, you can set up Mautic effortlessly via Softaculous, no technical headaches.
But it’s not just about installation: our team is here to guide you through the whole process, from campaign planning and automation setup to monitoring and optimising results. So you don’t just get the tool. With our hosting, you get a strategic partner ensuring every email sent hits its mark.
If you’re looking to grow sustainably, cut costs, and keep full control of your email marketing strategy, a solution like Mautic is undoubtedly the smartest choice. Your newsletter won’t just be effective and scalable, it’ll become a true business driver, without nasty surprises on the bill every time your list expands. If you’re after something simpler and also self-hosted, there’s PHPlist too, though it’s more basic.
Or, if you have questions, get in touch with our team right now
Conclusion
Creating a newsletter isn’t just about sending pretty emails; it’s about designing a strategy that combines value, legality, profitability, and scalability. Each of these elements is crucial for your campaigns to truly work and become a genuine growth engine for your business.
The content must provide real value. Building a relationship of trust and educating your subscribers about your product or service leads to more sustainable conversions in the medium and long term. Every email should be useful, relevant, and aligned with the buyer journey of your audience.
Building an effective newsletter requires strategy, discipline, and the right tools. When you combine valuable content, legality, profitability, and scalability, you transform your newsletter into a true business driver. It’s not just about sending emails: it’s about creating lasting relationships with your audience, maximising your investment, and scaling your growth without any nasty surprises.
