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7 Mistakes Destroying Your Email Marketing (Without You Even Realising It)
Episode 341 • Bonus Episode • 12th October 2026 • The Email Marketing Show • Email Marketing Heroes
00:00:00 00:11:39

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Your email list could be hiding a fortune in lost sales, and seven simple mistakes might be the reason you're missing out! Business owners spend money on ads, build email lists, and bring in fresh leads every day. Yet most of those leads never become paying customers.

And here's the shocking part.

The problem isn't always your product, your prices, or even AI. People simply have more choices than ever before, and their inboxes are packed with messages fighting for attention.

But there's good news. By fixing seven common email marketing mistakes, you could start making more money from the subscribers you already have, without spending another penny on ads.

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.

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Transcripts

These mistakes are costing business owners millions of dollars a year. Because you're already building your email list and you're bringing in new leads, but most of those leads go unconverted. And it's probably because of these seven mistakes that we're going to get into today.

You see, most people think that conversions are down because of higher skepticism or AI or any other reason you want to throw into it. But the actual reason is that people are overwhelmed and they've got more choice. Not only have they got more choice, they've got more better choices than they've ever had in history.

So I'm going to show you how you can make more from that email list of yours. So as the ad costs go up, you don't have to care because you're able to make more and more money from every penny that you are spending. Just fix these seven things and you'll start making way more sales.

Mistake number one, emailing everyone. That's crazy. So instead of writing your email and just hitting send on it, where some of your subscribers are really super engaged and opening all of your emails, reading everything, they love you.

And you've got other subscribers who aren't in that position. That's all damaging your placement in the email inbox. So what we're going to do instead is something called engagement jacking.

And here's how you do it. You're going to take the email you've written and rather than sending it to everyone, you're only going to send it to all the people who've engaged in your emails in the last seven day period. So anyone who's opened or clicked an email in the last seven days, they're going to get this email.

And then that means when your email lands, because they're the most engaged people, you're going to have a really high open rate and engagement rate on that email, which is great. It shows Gmail and it's Vandermere Men that this email was great and your list is engaged. People wanted it.

So they love you for it. And that sets up the engagement jacking because you then duplicate that email, exactly the same subject line content. You're sending it from the same address.

Everything's the same, but you're going to send it out two hours later to all the people who've engaged eight or more days ago. What does that mean? It means that when that second bunch of emails go out to your less engaged people, you're going to get prioritized placement in the inbox because Gmail has already seen from the previous time you sent this one two hours ago that this is a really highly valuable email that people engaged with. So every time you send an email, send it to your seven day subscribers first, then your eight plus day engagers about two hours later.

Number two, emailing weekly or monthly. So the number one reason that people unsubscribe and report you as spam is not because you email them too often, it's because they don't recognize your name. Think about your own behavior.

Someone's name drops into your email inbox and you don't recognize them. You're either immediately deleting them, reporting the spam, or if you do open the email, you're going in there pretty skeptical, thinking, what does this person want? How did I get on their bloody email list? Are they a dirty, rotten spammer? It's not until you get in there, you go, oh yeah, I did sign up to that email. It's not a good way of starting a relationship.

So how do you overcome that? Well, if you just show up in people's email inboxes two to three times a week minimum, you're not giving people the chance to forget your name and what you do. Another great thing to do to make sure that they don't forget your name is to make sure when a new email subscriber joins your list, you've got a welcome sequence, an automated sequence of emails that lasts about four days and it connects with your subscribers, makes an impact so you're more unforgettable. If you want to take a look at my Trust Accelerator, I did another video about that.

It's my welcome sequence called the Trust Accelerator. I'll put a link around this video somewhere about that. But you want to have a welcome sequence that no matter when someone joins your email list, they go through this and you cement your name, your brand and what you do in people's brains.

So in the future, when they see your emails, they're like, oh, I know who that is. Number three is facts over emotions. When people send emails, most people just reel out what is happening or what the thing does like features and benefits as like lists of stuff.

You've got this feature, which means that and all that sort of good stuff. The problem with that is people cannot have any kind of emotional response to lists of facts and stuff. And we need people to have an emotional response before they can buy it because the pattern of behavior from psychology shows that people need to feel before they can decide, before they can buy.

That's the process, feel, decide, buy. But most of the emails that I look at have absolutely no emotional response at all. And the easiest way to get people to feel something from your emails is to actually make it a story.

You can literally make anything into a story. All you need to do is to give it a location. That's the ultimate cheat code.

As soon as you give any fact or anything a location, it now has emotional resonance and it becomes a story. For example, look at the difference between these two pieces of email. Version one, there are three things you need to do to make a good cup of tea.

Now we're about to go into like a list of three different things. No emotional response. Compare that to, I spat out my cup of tea all over the kitchen bench because someone had put the milk in before the tea bag.

What happened? Well, we now know that I'm in the kitchen. As soon as we can see a visual in our brains of me standing at the kitchen counter, probably spitting tea all over it in a sort of embarrassing, maybe funny way. Now what happens? We have an emotional response to that thing purely by the very nature of having a location.

So we need to stop writing fact-based emails and make everything a really simple story that has all the pieces inside of it. Number four, AI without humanizing. Yes, most of us are using AI to do the first draft of our email because it's way better than that intimidating blank page that we used to have to face and put off dealing with a few years ago.

So most people are using AI to come up with their emails. But if you just send out those emails without adding your human touch to it, you are going to blend in with the 50 shades of beige that everybody else is sending out. So how do we do that? We're going to come up with an email from your favorite AI and you're going to go through it like an editor.

It's going to take you like five minutes. You're going to add in some specificity because AI is great at being broad and generic. You're going to add in some punch.

You're going to punch up some of the emotions because again, AI likes to dull emotional resonance. It likes to be quite generic. So if you can take all those emotions up, instead of saying they were upset, you might say they were devastated.

So we're going to just punch up all of those things and use your specific turns of phrase or your personal examples. So what are the kind of ways you would express something was great or something was sad or something was bad or something was confusing? What are the kind of turns of phrase? Might not be words. They might be complete phrases that you would use based on your upbringing, the kind of things that are you-isms.

What are my Kennedy-isms, right? What do you say? I was crazy. Or do you say I lost my mind. The difference between those two things is I was crazy.

AI can write that. I lost my mind. That's the kind of thing that only I would say.

And that means you don't have to abandon using AI for your emails. Not at all. If AI is helping you to get that email out, let's keep doing that because that blank page is a bastard of a thing.

But I want you to take it up a notch so that you're no longer blending in with that sea of beige AI emails that everyone is kind of sending out. The way to think about it is AI is giving you that outline, which is way better than starting with a blank sheet. But you have to color it in.

Give it color. Give it depth. Number five is no offer introduction.

When we ran a survey to my list a bunch of years ago to find out the number one reason that they hadn't bought my program, the answer came back and it blew my mind. The number one reason was they didn't know what I was selling. They weren't clear on what it was or how it helped.

So every person who joins my email list now goes through an automation, which is called the overture, which introduces the core concept of my offer. So every person who joins your list, they have to get to know what it is that you sell. So you set up an automation.

It literally tells them what you sell. It can be between six and 12 emails depending on how complex your offer is, how much social proof you've got, all that good stuff. And then basically it goes through what's the problem you solve? Why is it different? Examples of people who've had great success with it.

Why they should fix this problem that you solve now. And what that means is you set up this asset, this six to 12 or 13 emails so that every person joins your email list. They go through the welcome sequence we talked about earlier.

Then they go through this sequence. And now every single person who's on your email list knows what it is you offer. What does that mean? Yes, you'll make some sales right there and then from that sort of top 1% of eager buyers, but way more importantly and more strategically, now it means that every single email you send out in the future forevermore will convert much higher simply because every person you send an email to already has a core foundation of what on earth it is that you sell.

Before you've got that, you've got a lot of heavy lifting to do in those emails and sales pages. And you set it up once and it's completely automated. It's awesome.

Callaway for you to see number seven, but first number six, fake scarcity. And this one is so easy to do accidentally without intending to do. It's easy to say this is ending and then come up with a reason that you're extending it.

Or this is the last ever one of these things and then you do it again next year. What happens when you do that is the next time you say the last ever or this is closing, you kill the very urgency you were trying to create because now they don't believe you. Not only do they not believe you about this, they now start to question why you're the kind of person they can trust and believe with anything that you are saying.

Hey, if you break someone's trust, it's really hard to rebuild it again, isn't it? And that's the same here. Don't just do this kind of thing, which is I hear marketers say all the time. Oh, well, everybody does it.

No, they don't. And just because they're doing it doesn't make it right. Don't extend deadlines.

Don't do it again when you said the last time ever. If you know you are going to do it again, don't say it's the last time ever. Don't say it's definitely closing.

Number seven. And this is a big one. It's jumping offers.

Jumping from one offer to another is a huge mistake that people make in their email promotions. Until any business has hit $1 million in revenue, they need one main offer they sell. We call it a Rome offer.

The all roads lead to Rome offer. Everything you do in your business, therefore, once you've decided what your Rome offer is, everything in your business should be directing people to that thing. Every single thing.

I made my first million dollars in this particular business with one Rome offer. It was a membership, right? So what you end up doing is figuring out new ways to present that offer to your audience over and over again. But you repackage it in different ways until they see the specific angle that clicks with them and they see why they should be buying it.

In fact, if you want to see the exact system I used to go from zero to my first million dollars in this business without ads, check out this video next. I'll show you the whole thing. See ya.

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