Email marketing is one of the oldest yet most effective online marketing strategies that has never been out of trend. It is a primary source of customer acquisition across all industries.
No matter if you are new or an expert in email marketing, all you want is to build an interactive email list. A list that converts the best. And, to achieve this, it is important to follow best practices for your email marketing campaigns.
So, here are the essential email marketing best practices you must keep in mind to make the best use of your email marketing campaigns.
Table of Contents
Email Marketing Best Practices
1. Know your audience
Before you start emailing, you must know your audience well. They are more than just a demographic group. Try to identify how much and what to communicate with them.
Understand what would be the best time to send them an email. Do they understand the slang language? What makes your audience different from the rest of the population?
Asking yourself such basic questions will help you understand your audience and the right way to proceed with marketing with them.
Sending wrong messages to the wrong audiences can be harmful to your list. They may unsubscribe from your list and lose trust in you.
So, it is necessary to understand their interest and purchase behavior. For instance, if you are a fashion brand, you would want to send women’s collections to women and men’s collections to men.
Think otherwise. Being a woman who subscribed to receive emails about handbags, how would you feel receiving an email with men’s outfits and wallet collections?
You might ignore it once, but it may lose your interest and you may unsubscribe, won’t you? So, understanding who your audience is will help you address them in the right direction.
Therefore, segmenting your list based on location, click-through behavior, gender, and age is one of the most important email marketing best practices.
2. Send welcome emails
A study confirms that welcome email enjoys approximately 80% of the open rates. And, their click-through rates are 25%. Moreover, the welcome emails are a huge benefit.
Firstly, welcome emails are a confirmation to the users that they have successfully signed up for a real newsletter. Secondly, they show that you are a genuine person or company to the recipients. Consequently, it builds trust.
Apart from this, you can find out if there are any wrong email addresses and remove them from your list.
Furthermore, try to be creative with the sender’s name. For example, when mentioning the sender’s name in the emails, it is common to send it from the company’s name. However, you could consider using a person’s name, such as “Your Name from the respective Company“.
For instance, when readers subscribe to my list, I use my name “Nisha Garg” instead of “EarninFewDays”. Even better, if you want to include your company name too, name it “Nisha Garg @EarninFewDays” or “Nisha @EarninFewDays”.
In addition, it is a best practice to send an email from your business address instead of a “No-Reply”. Subscribers mostly like to hit a reply and email you back. By having the sender’s email address as “No-Reply”, you may lose the interaction they may have otherwise gone through.
Moreover, recipients can opt-out of your emails which you never want. Do you?
Apart from this, always include your name in the email signature. Receiving emails from a real person and not a company makes it more personalized and trustworthy.
For instance, if you are contacting an XYZ company, you would always look forward to a name you would address back. So, instead of mentioning the XYZ support team in the signature, include “Name” and then “XYZ support team”.
Overall, sending a welcome email, using the appropriate sender’s email address, and including a signature are other important email marketing best practices.
3. Consistency is crucial
It is important to define the time of your marketing emails accurately. Identify the best time to send an email to different audiences across different industries and locations. Most email autoresponder tools help adjust send-time based on subscriber’s common behavior.
However, be aware that consistency does not mean sending emails every hour or day. Consistency means sending emails at the same time intervals. For example, you may send one email every three days or every week. The general practice companies follow is one email every week.
Companies that are not consistent with sending emails often lose revenue-making opportunities. They tend to make a poor sender reputation and lower lifetime value. Moreover, companies in the past have experienced increased complaint rates due to under emailing.
Another important email marketing best practice is to pick the right email frequency. Do not send emails too frequently. Frequent emails or over emailing give a spamming impression to the readers.
They may right away unsubscribe and mark your emails as SPAM. Due to this, companies in the past have experienced low engagement rates, low visibility, and a large chunk of complaints.
So, consistency is important. Never over email or under email your subscribers.
4. Make the subject lines look interesting
Subject lines are crucial. They are the deciding factor for subscribers as to whether the email is worth opening or not. Therefore, it is best to have short and descriptive subject lines that you feel would entice readers.
People subscribe to many newsletters these days. So, making your email stand out from several others is really a challenge. And since subject lines are what readers see in their inboxes, they need to be interesting enough to be clicked.
One of the best practices is to include a sense of urgency in your subject lines. Like “hurry”, “do not miss”, “limited time offer”, and so on. You can also ask a question like “did you check the discount email?”, “did you miss my free Christmas voucher?”, etc.
In addition, the subject lines can have the recipient’s emails, an emoji, action verbs, up to 50 characters content, and a perfect value proposition matching the content of your email.
However, the subject lines must follow consistency. Nevertheless, avoid typos, uppercase letters, spammy words such as buy now, win free and deceptive lines that do not match the content of the email.
Also, as far as possible, avoid using too many dollar $$$ or exclamation (!!!) signs in a subject line.
A survey conducted by Invesp shows that almost 47% of email recipients decide whether to open an email or not based solely on the subject line. And around 69% report email as spam if subject lines are not good enough.
So, drafting appealing and interesting subject lines is again one of the most important email marketing best practices.
5. Create click-worthy emails with engaging content
Of course, you haven’t started your email marketing campaign just to share free information, did you? So, it is important that you write interesting emails. Emails that recipients are attracted to click through.
This is commonly known as click-through rate (CTR). A recent chart shows an average CTR of 3-7% is good enough including all industries.
Apart from this, video emails have shown click-through rates of approximately 8%. The emails with images have shown roughly 4% CTR, while just the text shows only 2.5 to 7% CTR.
Therefore, to get the best out of your emails, make them click-worthy and at the same time engaging. Keep your email content short and sweet. People normally close the emails that are long enough.
So, try to create a scannable email that grabs the attention cutting out the unnecessary chase. Place your promotional links reasonably in order to drive sales.
6. Have a Clear Call to Actions (CTA)
Again one of the most important email marketing best practices is to have a clean and clear call-to-action. To make an email marketing campaign successful, you must convince the subscribers to take action.
Avoid giving them multiple choices. Confusions can make subscribers take wrong steps, such as unsubscribing to the list. Instead, make it clear about the action they must take.
The call to action should be clearly visible to people checking emails on mobile phones. It is okay to add a button or put a simple text link until it’s clearly visible.
Also, make sure you test CTAs. See what performs best for your audience. In addition, keep your call-to-action “above the fold”. The more your links are visible and above the fold, the more the chances of increased click-through rates are.
Furthersome, you can add a countdown timer and inform the readers when does an offer expires. For credibility purposes, you can add a testimonial as well.
7. Make unsubscribing easy
There are many reasons people sign up initially but later get disinterested in receiving your emails. Forcing them to stay and receive emails make a negative impression.
This will either make them send your emails to a folder they never or add your emails to the spam list. So, it is better to keep unsubscribing email options easy.
When they unsubscribe, let them know why they were getting emails in the first place. Make sure to have a single or two-click unsubscribing process with a hyperlink in the footer. This link should be visible enough so that mobile users can easily unsubscribe.
8. Test your emails
Do not make silly mistakes. Make sure to test your emails before sending them. Emails with improper image formats, broken subject lines, or dull personalization lose the interest of the readers.
Also, make sure the receiver names are correct since it is the most common problem we see today!
Here’s how you can do. First, send the email to yourself. Furthermore, send it to your friend. Proofread it to ensure there are no typos. Check that the image formats show up well and the links are clickable. In addition, confirm how your email get displayed on both desktop and mobile device.
It is important to have your email mobile phone optimized. After all, the maximum engagement is through mobile devices these days. A recent study reports that by 2025, the number of mobile users will hit 5 billion.
9. Check the analytics
You must track and analyze the analytics to make future decisions on email marketing campaigns. This analysis includes open rates, A/B results, click rates, popular content, number of conversions, etc.
Find out which kind of CTA worked well. Incorporate that more often in the future. Likewise, find answers to questions like what type of articles gained popularity, where the textual links better than buttons, was the content strategy well off to meet industry standards, etc.
Analyzing such questions will help you review your performance and make better decisions on email marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Email marketing is not dead neither it has reached a saturation point. People or companies who claim so are wrong. Email marketing is still the most effective online marketing strategy and will stay here for a long.
Moreover, if you follow the above-mentioned 9 essential email marketing best practices, you are sure to see positive results and drive sales.
In addition, work hard on deliverability. If your emails are going to the spam folder, it is you who need to work on the better ways to make it hit the primary inbox.
Almost all autoresponder tools have the spam check option. So, check your score and work on it if required. Rest, keep looking for the latest trends and methods to improve your email open rates and CTRs. Good Luck 🙂
