Common Email Marketing Mistakes: Bought Lists and Bad HTML

As more businesses rushed into email marketing in 2000, the same handful of mistakes kept showing up, often from teams that had real budgets but no real experience with how the channel behaved. Here’s what was going wrong, and what fixed it.

Buying a list instead of building one

List brokers were doing brisk business in 2000, selling addresses scraped or aggregated from various sources. Businesses that bought these lists saw a predictable pattern: a short spike in volume, followed by a wave of spam complaints and, in the worst cases, their sending domain getting blocked by major ISPs. The fix was unglamorous but reliable: build a list from people who asked to be on it, even if that meant starting with a few hundred names instead of fifty thousand.

Treating every subscriber the same

Many early campaigns sent the exact same message to an entire list regardless of what someone had bought or shown interest in. This wasn’t a technology limitation so much as a habit carried over from print mail, where segmentation was expensive. Email made segmentation cheap, but plenty of marketers hadn’t caught up to that yet. Splitting a list by past purchase or stated interest, even crudely, consistently outperformed one-size-fits-all blasts.

Designing for a browser instead of an inbox

As HTML email tools became more available in 2000, some teams got excited and built newsletters that looked like web pages, full of images and formatting. The problem was that most subscribers were still reading through Eudora, Outlook Express or webmail clients that rendered HTML inconsistently or not at all. A message that looked polished in the sender’s own client often arrived as broken code or a wall of alt text for everyone else.

Ignoring the early state anti-spam laws

Washington and California had passed some of the country’s first anti-spam statutes by 2000, and more states were considering similar laws. Businesses that treated email as a legal gray area with no consequences were starting to find out otherwise, particularly around deceptive subject lines and missing ways to opt out. None of this was federal law yet, but the direction was clear enough that ignoring it was a bet against where things were headed.

Chasing volume over relevance

The most expensive mistake wasn’t technical at all. Some businesses equated a bigger list with more revenue and pushed hard to grow subscriber counts without much thought to whether new subscribers wanted to be there. Growth without relevance produced higher unsubscribe rates, more spam complaints and, over time, worse deliverability for every message the business sent, including the ones going to people who wanted them.

Underestimating how fast a bad sender reputation spreads

A mistake teams made repeatedly in 2000 was assuming that deliverability problems stayed contained to a single bad campaign. In practice, a spike in spam complaints or a run of bounced addresses affected how ISPs treated every subsequent message from that domain, not just the one that caused the problem. A business that sent one careless blast to a purchased list could spend weeks afterward with its legitimate, opt-in mail landing in junk folders alongside the unwanted mail that triggered the complaints in the first place.

The businesses avoiding these mistakes in 2000 weren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones treating their list as something to earn rather than something to acquire.