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Email marketing is kind of like a souffle -- so effective and impressive when done correctly, but so easy to do wrong.

We don’t know how many ways there are to screw up a souffle, no doubt imaginative klutzes are coming up with more each day, but CustomerThink has done a good job listing five fairly common ways to lower the effectiveness of email marketing. Oh a fallen souffle is still edible, and you’ll get some response from your email marketing even if you’re committing some of these “facepalms,” as CustomerThink columnist Yo Noguchi calls them.

But you’re not using email marketing just to be passable, are you? No, we didn’t think so.

All right, then, if you’re committing any of the following sins stop immediately.

Emailing Without Permission. Goodness sakes, as long as we’ve been telling you not to do this and you’re still doing it? How often do you enjoy getting newsletters or other marketing materials you didn’t ask for? Believe it or not customers are human, too, just like you. Nobody likes it. Buying a list and hitting everybody on it is about the lowest, least-effective way of email campaigning, Noguchi recommends building a far more effective list via opt-in forms on websites, signup sheets and the like.

So no more emailing without permission. Are we clear on that? Good. Call your mother too.

Ineffective, Irrelevant Subject and “From” Lines. Look, how many places do you get to make an impression on a marketing email? If the recipient even gets to the body of the message, count yourself lucky, but they’ll see the “From” and subject lines. The subject line should have “short, digestible information that’s likely to be of interest,” Noguchi says, adding that if there’s nothing interesting or recognizable on the sender line it probably won’t get opened either.

Oh, and no Gmail or Yahoo! addresses. Only small-time operations use those.

Blasting Irrelevant Content. You really should make sure that the recipients are at least in the ballpark when it comes to being interested in the content of what your email is. The example Noguchi gives, and it’s a good one, is signing up for a travel site as a family, and getting information about singles or swingers vacations. Not impressive.

No Purpose. Don’t send out email one if you can’t clearly state your purpose. Noguchi gives a handy checklist -- are you doing this to educate your recipients? Start a dialogue? Pass along industry news? Irritate the jeepers out of them? Send around cat videos? Important to get this nailed down.

No Entry for Dialogue. Ask your readers their opinion, start a conversation, find out about your customers, lock in loyalty. What’s not to like?