- The same email goes to the entire list every time
- Segmentation never happened, so the message is written for an average subscriber who does not exist, and everyone gets something slightly irrelevant.
- Open rates are being reported as the result
- Opens stopped being reliable when mail privacy features arrived. A program judged on them can look healthy while producing nothing on the site.
- The list has not been cleaned in years
- Hard bounces, dead addresses, and subscribers who have not opened in two years are dragging down deliverability for everyone still reading.
- Sends are irregular and reactive
- Email happens when someone remembers, usually to push a promotion, so subscribers never learn what to expect or why they subscribed.
- The emails do not render properly
- Image heavy templates, tiny tap targets, and layouts that break on a phone, which is where most of the list is reading.
- Nobody set up authentication
- The sending domain is not properly authenticated, so a growing share of mail lands in spam and no one can explain the decline.
- The signup form promises nothing specific
- People subscribe without knowing what they will receive, then treat the first send as unexpected mail, which is where unsubscribes and complaints begin.
- Email runs disconnected from everything else
- The paid campaign says one thing, the website says another, and the newsletter arrives with a third message on an unrelated schedule.
- An automation was built once and abandoned
- A welcome series references a product that no longer exists, and it has been sending to new subscribers ever since.
- Nobody can say what email is worth
- Reporting stops at the click, so the channel is defended with engagement metrics rather than with the actions it produced.