Stop what you're doing. If you're sending emails to your list, you might be walking straight into an email marketing minefield.

These aren't small mistakes. We're talking about things that can get your account shut down, your domain blacklisted, and your hard-earned audience permanently out of reach. You’ll see your open rates crash, your click-throughs nosedive, and your emails vanish into spam folders, maybe forever.

The worst part? These mistakes are hiding in plain sight. They’re being recommended in online courses. They’re built into your email marketing platform. And yes, even smart, successful marketers are doing them.

In this episode, you’ll uncover five email marketing landmines that most coaches, experts, and online business owners are stepping on without realizing it. These aren't outdated tricks or theoretical risks. They are real, active dangers that can ruin your ability to sell, connect, and grow through email.

Useful Episode Resources

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

00:01.89

Kennedy Kennedy

Today, I'm going to share with you five things that most coaches and experts do in their email marketing that will get you blacklisted, your email account shut down, and kill your email deliverability so no one ends up seeing your emails.

00:17.58

Kennedy Kennedy

That's why you'll notice your open rates and click-through rates are dropping off a cliff. What's crazy is that these are things that well-meaning experts are actually teaching us all to do, and even your email marketing platform allows you to do them.

00:31.89

Kennedy Kennedy

Thank you.

00:58.80

Kennedy Kennedy

Hey, it's Kennedy. If you're new around here and you send emails and you want to make more sales from them, make sure you hit the subscribe button so I can make sure that more content like this shows up in your newsfeed. Look, before we get into today's video, where I'm actually going to show you these five different things that most people are doing in their emails that can get you shut down and blacklisted, I'm going to tell you about this.

01:23.33

Kennedy Kennedy

This, I've just written a book. When I say just written, I've been working on this for 10 months. It's called Psych Stacked Email Marketing, 16 Unconventional Ways to Pull More Money Out of Your Email List.

01:36.65

Kennedy Kennedy

And it is available now. If you go to emailmarketingbook.com, you can pick up your copy of this beautiful book. We've got it digitally and we've got physical ah books you can order as well.

01:49.04

Kennedy Kennedy

And I think you'll get an absolute load out of this. So this is my brand new book, PsychStack Email Marketing. Go order it at emailmarketingbook.com. So let's get into these five things. Obviously, you've already paused the video to go and grab a copy and book, right?

02:03.00

Kennedy Kennedy

You've You've done that, haven't you? Yes. All right, cool. All right. So these five things, and it's amazing that even with my private consulting clients, I got a ah WhatsApp message from one of them over the weekend.

02:14.33

Kennedy Kennedy

And he was like, oh, should we do this? And I'm like, no, God, that's awful idea. And that's one of those things. Actually, that's going to be the second thing I'm to talk about today, but but let's get let's let's not get ahead of ourselves.

02:24.76

Kennedy Kennedy

So the very first problematic thing that people are teaching, people are doing, and it really is dangerous is, Pushing your unsubscribe link right down the email so it's out of sight.

02:39.78

Kennedy Kennedy

Okay? So I'm talking about you write your email and somebody some people are saying tight i put in a whole load of carriage returns. and to Enter, to enter, enter, enter, enter. To push the unsubscribe link all the way down out of sight, out of mind so the email looks personal, some people can't see the unsubscribe link.

02:59.18

Kennedy Kennedy

This is a really awful idea. The reason it's really awful is, first of all, the law, the Cannes Spam Act, many of these GDPR, all of these acts say you it must be simple and easy for people to unsubscribe from your list. So that's the legal element of it. I'm not a lawyer. i'm not really going to get into that.

03:18.14

Kennedy Kennedy

The main reason is it's spammy as heck, man. Like, we don't need to be doing that kind of thing. If people want to unsubscribe, let them unsubscribe, okay? If it's not for them anymore...

03:33.39

Kennedy Kennedy

because they don't want to read your emails anymore, they may as well leave rather than being held hostage on your email list, right? When people can't find the unsubscribe link, which means they can't click unsubscribe and just leave your list peacefully and without a fuss, the very next thing they do is they go hit the big spam button.

03:52.67

Kennedy Kennedy

And when people hit the big spam button in their email inbox, which you can't hide, what happens is your sender reputation takes a big kick in the nuts. And it's awful because that means that goes back to your email marketing platform. If you get enough of them, you're going to be shut down.

04:10.44

Kennedy Kennedy

right And even if your email marketing platform doesn't do it, enough spam complaints from emails sent from your website domain are going to throttle your your reach and end it with your domain on a blacklist so you can't even send emails anymore. They don't even reach the spam inbox when you do that.

04:28.42

Kennedy Kennedy

Don't hide the unsubscribe link. Allow people to get on your list easily and allow them to get off your list easily. You don't want to be holding subscribers hostage. That's the first one. The second one is what I alluded to before. One of my private clients actually texted me saying over the weekend just saying, hey, should we do this? I was like, whoa, please don't do that.

04:45.68

Kennedy Kennedy

This is a feature of most email marketing platforms. And while technologically it's possible, and it's fairly easy and many of them allow you to do it, it's really not advisable.

04:56.18

Kennedy Kennedy

And that is to resend your emails to unopens. um I heard recently that somebody in a high-level mastermind was giving this advice. And this is a really dangerous thing to do.

05:09.31

Kennedy Kennedy

We've all been taught it. It's been proliferated. It's been repeated. It's been regurgitated time and time again to send an email. And then a few hours later or even the next day, find all the people who didn't open the email and resend that email to those people or take or change the subject line and then resend it, which a lot of the platforms allow you do. I know high level allows you to just check tweak the subject line and resend it.

05:34.67

Kennedy Kennedy

Look, the problem with that is, one, it's not good for email deliverability. Secondly, let's think about what's really going on here. is You're basically saying, hey, there's this email that this bunch of people didn't give a shit about, and I'm going to resend it to them.

05:52.75

Kennedy Kennedy

You're going to resend a thing they didn't care about to those people. And the most important part of this is, Since about two or more years ago now, open rate reporting has been broken.

06:08.05

Kennedy Kennedy

like Because Apple rolled out that whole thing of we're we're going to have super privacy agenda and we're not going to tell you accurately who has opened your emails and who hasn't opened your emails, it means all of the people who are listed as hasn't opened your email in your email platform, who you're about to send that email to again, and There's a chance if they're an Apple user that they did open your emails.

06:32.36

Kennedy Kennedy

So the very data set, the very fact you're basing that resend on is completely broken. It's null. It is void. so even Before that was the case, i was advising people to not re-send to unopens because of the send a reputation issue where it depletes your send your reputation because we want to see fresh content. We want to see valuable content.

06:55.44

Kennedy Kennedy

But the fact that you're going to be re-sending now to people who did already open your emails because of the technological restriction here means you should absolutely not do that. It's amazing.

07:07.47

Kennedy Kennedy

But a lot of platforms, most platforms allow you to do this. And why are they allowing you to do it? Because their users are asking for it, right? Their users are saying, can you please do this? And of course, they're like, OK, well, we'll do what our users ask, even sometimes if it's not in our people's best interests.

07:23.58

Kennedy Kennedy

Number three of four is sending people directly to affiliate links. If you promote other people's offers and you do that in exchange for a commission, or even if it's not a flu commission ah for a commission, if it's just because you want through a tracking link, I would recommend you don't put the...

07:44.16

Kennedy Kennedy

Thrivecart link or the, ah you know whatever, the the Clickbank link or the JVZoo link or whatever it is. Don't put that in your email. A few reasons for that.

07:54.66

Kennedy Kennedy

One, a lot of the email platforms are pretty tetchy about doing that. When they see a link go into one of those platforms, they can see it's affiliate link. They get a bit like, is this good or is this a little bit dodgy?

08:06.28

Kennedy Kennedy

Because some of those platforms have and there's lots of platforms. I'm not picking on any particular one platform, but some of them sell dodgy products, not really the ones that I mentioned, but some that some of these other affiliate platforms do, and that can be really dodgy.

08:17.84

Kennedy Kennedy

The thing is when you send an email you need to be sending it with links in it to trusted sources, what they call trusted sources. And a trusted source is either e globally trusted source, so a Google platform, so you're sending it straight to a YouTube video, or you're sending it straight to a Google Doc, or you're sending it straight to something that Google owns, to Google, right?

08:41.86

Kennedy Kennedy

Or another platform, so pretty much you know Amazon's pretty trustworthy. It's one of those big websites, a big news website, something like that. The other thing it classes as trusted is your own domain.

08:55.32

Kennedy Kennedy

So if I'm sending my email from emailmarketingheroes.com, so it's coming from hello or hey at emailmarketingheroes.com, which is where our emails come from. If I'm sending you emails from that domain,

09:07.65

Kennedy Kennedy

to a website, to a page on emailmarketingheroes.com, that matches up. It looks like I'm not trying to hide anything. I'm emailing i'm emailing from that domain. I'm sending you two links on that domain.

09:19.41

Kennedy Kennedy

That's another great trust builder. So how does this work with affiliate links? Well, What we do is we use redirects on our own domain. So in our case, we have a WordPress website.

09:31.60

Kennedy Kennedy

So I use a free plugin called Pretty Links, which allows me to basically say, if you go to emailmarketingheroes.com slash, and then I can say any word, I can make it in it using this Pretty Links plugin on my WordPress. So of that when somebody visits that URL, that website address, they get forwarded to any page I want. It could be to a naughty page if I really wanted to. Obviously, I wouldn't, but people could.

09:55.26

Kennedy Kennedy

But what you want, it could literally go to anywhere. And that's where you're going to redirect. So inside the email, let's say I'm promoting, i know, let's say I'm promoting um Amazon for whatever reason.

10:06.91

Kennedy Kennedy

and Rather than going to putting a link in straight to Amazon, I would put in a link to emailmarketingheroes.com slash Amazon. And when they go to emailmarketingheroes.com slash Amazon, that then forwards them over to Amazon's website.

10:20.91

Kennedy Kennedy

That means in that case, I'm not putting a link in the email to an affiliate thing, an affiliate link. And also means I'm doing it to my own domain. The third thing I really like doing about this is if for whatever reason in the future, you don't want to be promoting that thing anymore.

10:38.85

Kennedy Kennedy

I had an example of this um where I just wanted to switch off people being able to visit that website. So if I was linking from the email straight to their website, there's nothing I can do about it. If somebody pulls up the old email from months ago, they click on the link and they're able to get on that website, there's nothing I can do about that.

10:55.91

Kennedy Kennedy

But if the link in the email actually goes to mywebsite.com slash somewhere, slash the place, I can go to the redirect area of my website and turn that off. I can say, now that's going to just go somewhere else.

11:07.77

Kennedy Kennedy

It's going to go to where this offers expired page, that kind of thing. The reason I did that, by the way, is because I promoted somebody else's offer as an affiliate. It was a piece of software. and they said, oh, the offer ends on Friday. So I told my list, the offer ends on Friday, offer ends on Friday, offer ends today, now it's ending, this the last chance, that ah done.

11:27.32

Kennedy Kennedy

And then I get a message from this guy who owns the product who says, we're extending the offer over the weekend it's going so well. I was like, that's bullshit. That's deceptive. I'm not cool with that. I've been honest to my list and told my audience that ends on Friday.

11:42.30

Kennedy Kennedy

i'm now I'm not going to U-turn on them and say, oh, actually, I've changed my mind. You don't need to believe anything I say in the future. So if I'd been linking straight to that guy's website through his affiliate link, then I would not be able to anything about the fact they could now click the links in my past emails and go and buy the offer.

11:58.17

Kennedy Kennedy

Instead, I said, absolutely not. That's not okay. It's not legitimate. ah I'm killing the links. So I went into my redirect ah area on my platform and I turned it off and i I made it so that it went to a 404 page to this offer is expired page. So a bunch of reasons to send people really through your own domain.

12:17.43

Kennedy Kennedy

And you can do this on many platforms. You can do this through your web hosting, but don't send, don't put links in Straight to affiliate pages. Number four is tricky subject lines. And the the worst tricky subject lines for me.

12:31.50

Kennedy Kennedy

Yes, there's some more awful ones like um your payment for, you know, things that are just like total clickbait, horrible, the kind of things that spammers and scammers will use ah to try and trick your mom out of her life savings.

12:44.38

Kennedy Kennedy

We don't want to use those ones. But also, just the ones that begin with RE, as if they're a reply, like RE and then a semicolon, or FW, as if someone's forwarded the thing in a semicolon.

12:55.08

Kennedy Kennedy

Again, they're just not true. They are picked up upon by Google as being dodgy and deceptive. So again, those are the kind of things that are going to get you into lots of trouble. So don't be using fake reply, fake forward subject lines.

13:11.03

Kennedy Kennedy

And the final one, and this is a huge one, is make sure you're not constantly emailing inactive subscribers, right? A lot of people, we all know you've spent a lot of time and it's a lot of money, a lot of effort building your email list.

13:27.70

Kennedy Kennedy

Of course you have. And that's no mean feat. And you've worked very hard to do it. But here... is the thing. If those people, if some of those people have stopped opening your emails, they're no longer engaging your emails, they are damaging your reputation as a sender.

13:46.56

Kennedy Kennedy

So all the people who do want to receive your emails are are not going to receive them because they're going to go with the promotions, they're going to go to the spam because that's what that's what a spammer would do. They would just collect loads of emails. They don't care whether people open or don't open the emails because they're playing a big numbers game, usually with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of contacts.

14:04.20

Kennedy Kennedy

Even if you've got hundreds of contacts or tens of contacts or just thousands of contacts or tens of thousands of contacts, it's the same game, right? So what we're going to do is only email our most engaged people.

14:18.71

Kennedy Kennedy

We're not going to keep emailing people who've not opened or clicked on a single email in and the past six months. If they haven't engaged the last six months, we need to put those people through a specific re-engagement email sequence.

14:31.43

Kennedy Kennedy

And I can link you to one in the in the comments below of how you have how we do that. And it works extremely well. And anybody else who doesn't re-engage, we get them off the list. Look, email subscribers are not Pokemon.

14:42.89

Kennedy Kennedy

You don't have to catch them all, right? We're playing. Often people are like, I don't want to delete those subscribers. And unfortunately, it's just a vanity of your list size. And that is hurting your deliverability. So all five of them, again,

14:58.31

Kennedy Kennedy

One, don't be pushing your unsubscribe link out of view. Two, don't resend to unopens. Three, don't send people directly to affiliate links that are in your emails.

15:10.63

Kennedy Kennedy

Four, don't be using tricky subject lines. That's like a right nag, don't I? And then number five, don't be emailing your inactive subscribers. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, make sure you do hit subscribe and I'll make sure that more episodes like this appear in your newsfeed.

15:26.61

Kennedy Kennedy

I'll catch later.