10 Email Marketing Mistakes That Ruin Deliverability on Shopify and PrestaShop

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10 Email Marketing Mistakes That Ruin Deliverability on Shopify and PrestaShop

Posted At: Mar 12, 2026 - 424 Views

10 Email Marketing Mistakes That Ruin Deliverability on Shopify and PrestaShop

You run a Shopify or PrestaShop store and send email campaigns regularly, but your open rates are flat, your emails end up in spam, or your ESP warns you that your bounce rate is too high? Very often, the problem isn't just your content: it's also the quality of your list. Plus a few recurring mistakes that most merchants make without realizing it.

Here are the 10 most common mistakes, and how to fix them in practice.

Mistake 1: Sending campaigns to invalid addresses

This is the most common and most costly mistake. An invalid address generates a hard bounce every time you send. A hard bounce rate that is too high gradually damages your sender reputation. Over time, your emails may be delivered less reliably, land in spam more often or trigger alerts with your ESP.

On Shopify and PrestaShop, customers create their accounts without their email address being verified. One typo at sign-up and the address is invalid from day one — without you knowing. The only way to catch these addresses before they cause damage is to verify them with a dedicated tool.

Solution: GTMailHygiene (Shopify) and MailHygiene Pro (PrestaShop) check the technical validity of each address using SMTP checks, without sending any message.

Mistake 2: Keeping disposable email addresses in your database

Yopmail, Mailinator, Guerrillamail, Temp-mail… Hundreds of temporary email services let your customers create an account with an address that disappears within a few hours. The result: you collect contacts who will never read your emails and who artificially inflate your database.

These addresses don't necessarily cause immediate bounces (some disposable domains stay active for a while), but they drag down your engagement rates and skew your segmentation statistics.

Solution: GTMailHygiene and MailHygiene Pro include automatic detection of disposable email domains on import. These addresses are immediately classified and excluded from your usable lists.

→ Using Shopify? Install GTMailHygiene on your store and clean up your customer list in minutes.

Mistake 3: Never cleaning your email database

An email database naturally decays by about 20 to 25% per year. Addresses change, mailboxes are abandoned, domains expire. If you haven't cleaned your list in more than 6 months, a significant share of your contacts is probably unusable.

Cleaning is not a one-off task: it's a routine. Ideally before every major campaign (sales, Black Friday, abandoned cart reminders) and at least once a quarter.

Solution: Export your customers from the Shopify admin or your PrestaShop back office as a CSV file, import them into the tool, and keep only the valid addresses. It takes less than 10 minutes for a list of 5,000 contacts.

Mistake 4: Overly aggressive or spammy subject lines

Spam filters analyze your subject lines before your email even reaches the inbox. Some patterns systematically trigger alerts: all caps, excessive punctuation, words like “FREE”, “URGENT”, “Win”, “Limited exclusive offer!!!”.

But be careful: a subject line that is too bland doesn't work either. The goal is to be relevant and honest rather than flashy. A subject line that matches the content of the email exactly performs better in the long run than a clickbait subject line that generates unsubscribes.

Avoid: “SALE -70% NOW!!!! Hurry and GRAB IT”
Prefer: “Your winter selection is here — until Sunday”

Mistake 5: Too many images, not enough structure

An email made up of 80% images and 20% text is a red flag for spam filters. In addition, many email clients block images by default. If your main message is in an image, it will never be read.

Structure your emails with a balanced text-to-image ratio. Every image should have a descriptive alt attribute. Your calls to action should be clickable text, not just a graphic button.

Mistake 6: “Click here” links everywhere

Links are among the first things the eye picks up when scanning an email. A link labeled “Click here” or “Learn more” says nothing about what awaits the reader. Worse, spam filters treat this type of link as a negative signal.

Label your links with descriptive, actionable phrases: “See what's new in the fall collection”, “Download your invoice”, “Track your order”. Readers know what to expect, and your email gains credibility.

Mistake 7: A hard-to-recognize sender

The sender name is the first thing people see, even before the subject line. If your email comes from “noreply@boutique-12345.myshopify.com” or a generic address, your open rate collapses and the risk of spam complaints increases.

Set up a clear sender name that is consistent with your brand (“The [Your Store Name] Team”), sending from a domain you own with SPF, DKIM and DMARC properly configured. This is the foundation of good deliverability, regardless of content.

→ Using PrestaShop? Install MailHygiene Pro to detect problematic addresses directly from your back office.

Mistake 8: Campaigns that are too long or lack a clear structure

An email is not a blog post. If your newsletter has more than 3 blocks of information, many of your readers will never scroll to the last one. Every email should have one main goal and a single priority call to action.

For long-form content (guides, articles, comparisons), use the email as a summary with a link to your website. The email triggers the click; the website delivers the content. This model also boosts your SEO by driving qualified traffic to your pages.

Mistake 9: Sending the same campaign to your entire database without segmentation

Sending the same email to your active customers, to contacts who have been inactive for 18 months and to newsletter subscribers who have never ordered is a targeting mistake that hurts your deliverability. Mailbox providers analyze engagement signals: if a large share of your recipients never open your emails, your domain is gradually penalized.

At a minimum, segment by: last order, type of purchase, subscriber status and engagement level. Even simple segmentation (active vs. inactive) significantly improves your results. And before reactivating a cold list, always start by cleaning it.

Mistake 10: Ignoring risk signals on the e-commerce side

In an online store, some orders show a combination of warning signs: a disposable email address, an inconsistent shipping address, a different email on the account and on the order. These patterns are often associated with fraud or discount code abuse.

GTMailHygiene helps you identify these email signals at the customer and order level in Shopify. MailHygiene Pro does the same on PrestaShop by cross-checking email quality with other indicators available in your back office.

In summary

Email deliverability isn't just about content or subject lines. It starts with the quality of your list. On Shopify and PrestaShop, that list keeps degrading if you don't actively monitor it.