5 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2027 (and How to Fix Them)

Sending from a domain with no SPF, DKIM or DMARC

These are three DNS records that prove an email really came from your business. Without them, Gmail and Outlook can't tell your newsletter apart from someone pretending to be you.

• SPF lists the services allowed to send email for your domain, such as Google Workspace, Zoho Mail or your email marketing tool.
• DKIM adds a digital signature to every email. Inboxes check it against a public key you publish in your DNS.
• DMARC tells inboxes what to do when those checks fail, and sends you reports. You can start with a policy of "none", which only watches and blocks nothing.

Google asks every sender to set up SPF or DKIM. Bulk senders need all three, and Google says that once you've been classed as a bulk sender, you stay one. Microsoft applies the same three records to anyone sending more than 5,000 emails a day to Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live addresses, and says mail that fails them is rejected.

How to fix it

Open your email tool's domain settings. Zoho Campaigns, Mailchimp, Brevo and Shopify Email all have a domain authentication page that gives you the exact records to copy. Add them wherever your domain is managed (GoDaddy, Hostinger, Namecheap or similar), then add a DMARC record like this one:

New records can take a few hours to show up. Gmail also wants mail sent over TLS, the same kind of encryption behind the SSL certificate on your website, and every mainstream email tool already handles that for you.

Emailing people who never asked to hear from you

Bought lists, scraped lists and "everyone who ever sent us an enquiry" lists all end the same way, with spam complaints. Complaints are the quickest way to lose the inbox.

Google wants the spam rate shown in its Postmaster Tools kept below 0.1% and never reaching 0.3%. That's 3 complaints for every 1,000 emails, and a list of strangers can pass it in a single send. You've probably seen WhatsApp forwards selling "lakhs of verified Indian email IDs" for a few hundred rupees. Nobody on those lists asked for your email, and plenty of the addresses are dead, so you collect bounces as well as complaints.

There's a legal side in India now too. Under the DPDP Act, 2023, consent has to be "free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous", and people must be able to withdraw it as easily as they gave it. The Rules notified in November 2025 fill in the details, and most of them apply from 14 May 2027. If your data privacy basics aren't in order, sort them out before then.

How to fix it

• Stop buying or renting lists, starting with the next campaign.
• Say on every signup form what people will get and how often, for example "one email a month with new stock and offers".
• Use double opt-in on website forms, so each address is confirmed by the person who owns it.
• Put a one-click unsubscribe in every marketing email. Gmail recommends acting on unsubscribe requests within 48 hours.
• Remove hard bounces after every send, and people who haven't clicked anything in six months or so.

Skipping the welcome email

The first email after someone signs up is the one they're most likely to read, and a lot of small businesses don't send one at all.

GetResponse looked at more than 4.4 billion emails its customers sent in 2023. Welcome emails had an average open rate of 83.63% and a click rate of 16.6%. Across all emails, the averages were 39.64% and 3.25%. Open rates are inflated these days (more on that in mistake 5), but clicks aren't, and welcome emails got about five times the usual click rate.

A good welcome email does four small jobs. It thanks the person, says who you are, says what's coming and how often, and gives them what they signed up for. Here's a short one for a made-up block-print clothing brand in Jaipur:

It has one button, one reply question and a promise about how often you'll write. Replies help twice. They tell you what people want, and they're a good sign to inbox providers that your mail is welcome.

Designing emails for a laptop screen

Most of your readers will open your email on a phone, so design for the phone first and check the laptop second.

In India this isn't close. Android ran on 93.89% of mobile phones in September 2026, according to StatCounter, and Gmail comes as the default mail app on most of them. These three go wrong most often:

• One big poster image as the whole email. It's everywhere around Diwali sales. On a phone the text in it is tiny, it shows as a blank box when images don't load, and spam filters see an email with almost no words. Put the offer in real text and let the image support it. If you want the poster anyway, get the graphic design done at email width, about 600 pixels.
• Emails that get cut off. Gmail clips any message over 102 KB of code and hides the rest behind a "View entire message" link. Your unsubscribe link usually sits at the bottom, which is exactly the part that gets hidden, so some people will press "Report spam" instead of hunting for it.
• Buttons too small to tap. Make them at least 44 pixels tall with space around them, and keep body text at 14 to 16 pixels.

Before every campaign, send a test to a Gmail address on an Android phone and look at it in dark mode too. Logos with a transparent background and dark text often disappear on a dark screen.

Judging campaigns by open rate

Open rates stopped being reliable in September 2021, so judge each campaign by clicks, replies and sales instead.

That month Apple added Mail Privacy Protection to iOS 15. When it's switched on, Apple's servers load the tracking pixel in your email in the background, so the email counts as opened whether anyone read it or not. Litmus says more than half of all email opens now happen on devices with this feature turned on.

How much it affects you depends on who's on your list. iPhones are only about 6% of phones in India, so a list of Indian shoppers is much less affected than a list of export buyers in the US or Europe. GetResponse put the average open rate in India at 25.84%, against 39.64% worldwide, and fewer iPhones is probably part of that gap.

Track these instead:

• Click rate, and which link got the clicks
• Replies, if you sell to businesses or sell a service
• Sales or enquiries from each email, with UTM tags on your links so Google Analytics can see where they came from
• Unsubscribes and spam complaints per send (Postmaster Tools shows complaints from Gmail users)

It also helps to ask for one thing per email. One button gives you a clear answer about what worked. With six links, the numbers tell you very little.