When it comes to marketing, email campaign management is critical. Simple mistakes have the potential to completely derail what would otherwise be a successful effort to gain new customers while increasing the loyalty of existing ones. A marketer can create an extremely compelling email message that ultimately yields little to no results because it was not formatted correctly, for example.

Here are three of the most basic, essential mistakes that marketers should strive to avoid.

1. Accounting for mobile

One of the most significant trends that has occurred, and is continuing to occur, in the field of email marketing is the rise of smartphones. Individuals are increasingly relying on their mobile devices to check their email accounts. As industry expert Janelle Johnson recently asserted in a MarketingProfs report, this trend means that a critical component of successful email campaign management is accounting for mobile users. A message that is easily readable on a desktop computer may not be as legible when read on a small screen using a different operation system. It is up to email marketers to optimize their methods to accommodate mobile email users.

2. Failing to use list management

Another key email marketing mistake, according to Johnson, is failing to use list segmentation to target different demographics. It is extremely inefficient to send the same message to both a long-time customer and someone who has never heard of the organization, as such an email will likely either be insufficiently welcoming or seem unappreciative.

Pamela Vaughn, writing for Hubspot, recently pointed out that list segmentation should factor in not just demographics, but also the sales cycle. By monitoring website activity, an organization can determine which visitors are close to making a purchase and which are casually browsing. A given message will not appeal to these two groups equally and can lead to missed sales opportunities.

3. Not measuring

As a separate MarketingProfs report indicated, measurement is another critical component of successful marketing campaigns, and failure to do so can lead to a inefficient effort. If an organization does not take the time to determine its goals and then measure results against those goals, it will not be able to judge the success or failure of a given campaign, which means the company won’t be able to make improvements in the future.