Are you doing Email Marketing right?
Having Email Marketing Best Practices ensures you’re creating maximum impact out of each email campaign, these email marketing best practices will guide you well.
The world today is buzzing with new and exciting marketing strategies – Innovative automation software has enabled sizing, personalization & omnichannel messaging.
Yet among the noise and excitement of novelty, a shining example of reliable service remains — the humble email.
What Are Email Marketing Best Practices?
Email marketing best practices can be thought of as guidelines, parameters, or a framework for successful email marketing campaigns.
When pulled together into an email marketing campaign, following these email marketing best practices, bring together a thoughtfully composed message that will nurture and delight your audience. Giving you the opportunity of turning a one-time visitor into a brand advocate.
Why Are Email Marketing Best Practices Important?
Email is one of the best marketing channels to keep in touch with your customers and keep them up to date on your latest products and services.
That said, the landscape of what an email subscriber expects from you, the marketer, or the brand your email represents, is personalization, privacy and value. That’s where following a set of Email Marketing Best Practices will help you create email campaigns that engage and nurture your audience.
Next time you sit down to compose your next email, write this 5 letter sticky on your screen: WIIFM?
“What’s In It For Me?” is the question your recipient is asking as soon as they open their inbox.
When creating your email campaigns, consider what your audience wants and what you want to achieve with the campaign. It’s at this intersection that we meet a happy brand/audience relationship.
Think of email marketing a way to convey your brand’s message while gift wrapping it in value.
Always provide value for the reader. After all, it is a real-life human at the other side of that send button.
let’s begin…
Email Marketing Best Practices Begin With The Right Marketing Platform.
Find an email marketing tool that meets your current needs.
It all begins with an email service provider that allows you to achieve your goals.
And, No -you can’t use your gmail or yahoo or aol. You’re a business.
You will need a reliable email service provider to implement professional email marketing campaigns.
When comparing features in ESP’s find the one that will bring you the specific solutions you need at this stage of your business at an agreeable price.
The email provider should offer features such as automated emails, tracking tools, signup forms. More robust features could include: Omnichannel marketing such as -SMS marketing + email marketing, landing pages, sales funnels, and segmentation.
I’ve listed out some of my favorite ESP’s and you can check them out here under the Email Marketing Section.
Data Protection and Privacy
Despite how you might feel about all the privacy regulations and notifications, this is a good thing.
Giving your audience the option to subscribe and to self-select how they’d like to receive marketing messages gives your audience peace of mind and builds trust in your brand.
It’s not that consumers don’t want to hear when you have a sale or when you want to communicate with them, they just want to be on the driver side and make their choices when it comes to receiving your marketing messages.
Tips:
- Allow your subscribers to select whether they’d like to join your list
- Allow your subscribers to select how frequently they’d like to hear from you
- Include a note on your opt-in form that states you respect their privacy and won’t sell your list to 3rd party vendors.
- Give them a chance to review your privacy policy.
Build Your Own Permission-Based Email List
It’s no surprise buying email addresses is NOT a good practice for email marketing.
Email service providers frown on bought lists, and will surely suspend your account if your imported list triggers their spam filters.
Bought lists are usually spam traps that contain spam emails and negatively affect your sender’s reputation, which can ultimately lead to your emails getting marked as spam automatically.
It all begins by making sure you have consent from those contacts who have made it to your list.
Create a personal email list and add contacts the organic old-fashioned way, obtain permission to send email communications.
Be clear on the benefits of joining your email list.
Create a landing page or an opt-in form with an offer will help you achieve this.
Building a large email list doesn’t happen overnight, but using landing pages with an irresistible offer will encourage one-time visitors to join your list.
Know Your Audience
The key to effective email marketing is to send your audience the right message at the right time of their buying journey.
You should have a buyer persona(s) and create campaigns for each stage of the buying journey.
Knowing the stages of your buyer persona will help you craft emails that will fit in perfectly and help answer all the questions they might have along the way from the awareness stage to the action/purchasing stage.
You should have campaigns to welcome them and introduce them to your brand if they are in the awareness/interest part of the journey
You should have regular newsletters and a nurture series when they are in the interest/desire part of the AIDA journey.
You should have onboarding or product information campaigns once they’ve made the purchase.
Write Engaging Email Copy
Now that you know who your audience is and what they want, it’s time to write the email copy.
The key to writing engaging email copy is to make sure your emails are relevant and interesting to your readers. This goes beyond just describing the product or service you’re selling – it means offering something of value.
The tone and voice of your copy are incredibly important. It’s crucial for your emails to be personal, friendly, and warm with just the right amount of professionalism.
Keep your emails short and to the point.
People are busy and don’t have time to read long emails.
The sweet spot is usually 200-300 words unless you’re writing a long-form newsletter.
Try to stick to one or two points max, and use clear, concise language and use tools like Grammarly to stay clear of spelling mistakes.
Dedicate Time to Email Subject Line
At the top of the list of email marketing best practices begins with a good email subject line.
The best email marketing campaigns are those that have high open rates.
Creating subject lines that are more likely to be opened and read is vital to any campaign.
A subject line that catches a reader’s attention and makes them want to open the email is more likely to read the entire message than one that doesn’t.
Granted, open rates are now only estimates and not a key metric to track after Apples latest Mail Privacy Policy update, however your email still needs to be opened, in order to get the subscriber to take the intended action inside of the email.
More tips on CTA’s later.
Expert email marketers know to dedicate 80% of their time to the subject line and 20% to content.
A well-crafted subject line can make all the difference between someone reading your email, deleting it, or leaving it unread.
Here are some tips for creating effective subject lines:
- Use a subject line that accurately reflects the content of the email
- Keep subject lines brief and to the point – no more than 50 characters
- Avoid spammy words and phrases like “free,” “sale,” and “urgent”
- Be creative and experiment with different subject lines to see what works best for your audience.
Personalizing your messages by adding the recipient’s first name in the subject line also helps make recipients feel you’re speaking directly to them.
Following these tips will help you create subject lines that get noticed, increase open rates, and boost engagement with your email marketing campaigns.
Optimize the Preview Text
A good tool to use to increase open rates is the preview text.
The email’s preview text is essentially a copy from your message text, which is normally displayed beside the subject line of the message.
A study suggests that preheaders can increase open rate and click rate by nearly 22%.
Instead of leaving the success to lady luck, create a captivating preview text that accompanies your message in its entirety.
It helps to increase the attractiveness of an email that opens immediately and can catch the attention of the reader quickly.
Use Storytelling to Build Trust
The human spirit loves to hear a story in its entirety. It combines logical and emotional parts in the brain with emotional connections.
A recent study has revealed that individuals who weave together stories have 22 x more chances to remember.
Successful marketers often use stories for building an emotional connection with customers.
This results in a greater sense of loyalty, improved engagement levels and increased trust. Stories can be funny and personally relatable and help to humanize the brand.
Storytelling can help you convert your audience into a successful customer with ease!
Stick to Consistent Branding
Every email is an opportunity to communicate your brands message, and solidify with your target audience what the brand stands for.
Ensure that all emails follow the brand guidelines including brand colors, fonts, and just as important tone, brand voice and use of words along with the brand logo.
Following your brand guidelines, throughout all communications takes your audience down the customer journey of getting to know, like and trust your brand.
Design or have a designer create one or multiple email templates that you can use at all times for your email campaigns.
Stick to Simple Email Design
For template designs, simple, modern and minimalist designs can go a long way.
Remember, your email should only have 1 over-arching call to action and all the graphics, copywriting and design need to steer the reader in that direction.
Overflooding the email template with excessive images, fancy fonts that are not easily readable or having inconsistent brand colors distract the readers and may even put them off.
Make sure you use a consistent logo for your brand, use enough white space in between Headers, Paragraphs and images.
Be weary of using only image based emails, there’s a high percentage of email subscribers that only receive plain text emails.
Make sure that if you have an image, you have supporting text in the email that can be read and understood even if the image can’t be viewed by the reader.
Have a Clear CTA
Every email must have a Call To Action, or CTA. Usually in the form of a button or a hyperlink within the email.
A CTA is an action you want them to take that will move your customer closer to the purchasing decision.
The CTA should align with the overall goal of the email. Let’s say you’re communicating a sale, your CTA should be to send them your website.
If you’ve just released a new blog post, the CTA would be to send them to the article.
Take a look at this promotional email from Teachable. The countdown timer helps to add to the psychological triggers of urgency and FOMO, fear of missing out. And The CTA is clear, Join Basic or Join Pro
If you want to increase your social media presence, the call to action on your email would be to send them to your social media channels. In the Teachable example above, this is not the main CTA, since they’ve added the links at the footer of the email.
You should only have 1 main CTA in your email, if you have multiple CTA’s it causes confusion and a confused mind says no.
For best results make it clear exactly what you want them to do.
Allow Your Audience to Unsubscribe Easily
I know this one might come as a surprise because you are growing your list.
It’s a fact, not everyone is your client and not everyone will want to be subscribed to your list. And that’s ok!
Unsubscribing is necessary to keep your lists clean with engaged subscribers. It improves your overall email deliverability and sender reputation.
A best practice for this? Make it easy for these unengaged subscribers to opt out easily and hit that unsubscribe link.
The default location for the Unsubscribe button is the footer section of your email.
Unsubscribing to emails should be easy and instant. Avoid concealing the unsubscribe link or deliberately avoid using font colors to conceal it.
Keep Your Email List Clean
Practice good list hygiene.
Having a large list might feel good, but unless most of the subscribers are engaged with your email message, opening and have good click-through rates over time, it’ll erode your deliverability over time.
Having too many bounced emails negatively affects your sender reputation. It’s crucial that you clean regularly.
First step is to delete any invalid emails. A hard bounce indicates that the e-mail addresses are no good. Remove hard bounced emails and it’ll improve your reputation, engagement and conversion rates.
Implement re-activation campaigns on a quarterly basis, to re-engage lapsed email subscribers.
Not only does this improve your deliverability and engagement metrics, you’ll no longer carry the load of dead-weight emails.
Platforms are increasing prices based on list size. Each subscriber is costing you money and when you’re no longer getting a positive ROI it’s time to archive or delete.
Experiment with Delivery Times
Email marketers know that to have a successful campaign they need to optimize the time that will deliver most engagement.
The best send times will depend on your industry and niche,
You should test your send times, and send days as well as email subject lines. The more you test with your audience, the more opportunities to find patterns.
Establish a Consistent Email Cadence and Frequency
“But I don’t want to spam my subscribers”
Is a common thought for business owners afraid of sending too many emails that may cause people to unsubscribe.
Your welcome email should lay out the expectations for your subscribers, including how frequently you plan to email.
It’s ok to change your mind about the frequency between email campaigns and a best practice would be to inform your subscribers of any new changes to email frequency.
A simple short FYI message updating your subscribers of the changes will go a long way and they’ll appreciate the notification.
Your email frequency should align with your Marketing/Content Calendar. It should include newsletter emails, sales promotions and one-time broadcasts or press releases.
You can choose to send out weekly newsletters, bi-weekly or monthly.
Many content creators communicate daily with their subscribers with short, straight to the point emails. The subscribers come to appreciate the emails and even come to expect seeing them in their inbox.
The more frequent emails you send, the more opportunities for brand awareness and more opportunities for potential customer to get to know, like and trust you.
Send Welcome Emails
Many people get this email marketing best practice wrong. Not sending a welcome email.
When it comes to email marketing, make sure your newly subscribed contacts hear from you immediately. They are expecting an email from you.
Marketing automation is a standard feature with most email service providers.
Welcome emails are the most common to set up. It’s just a matter of creating the welcome email template once and letting it do the greeting for you automatically over and over to new subscribers.
If your opt-in offer is a coupon or discount, make sure you include the promo code inside your welcome email.
Download my Welcome Email Checklist Here to know what needs to be included in your welcome emails.
Segment Your Email List
Different clients need different things.
To reach your audience in the most efficient way you’ll need to create customer segments.
Thankfully, marketing automation features in email platforms makes segmenting and sending relevant content to your subscribers a breeze.
In general, you can segment your audiences based upon their previous purchase history, location, campaign activity, or more details such as gender, and age. You can also segment subscribers according to their purchase preference.
Use a Double Opt-in
You may send a confirmation email to subscribers that they have subscribed with a subscription link.
Using double opt-ins serve two functions:
It ensures you’re only capturing verified addresses
It ensures your subscribers that actually do confirm their subscription will be engaged subscribers.
Adding two opt-in options can help you increase delivery of your emails.
A/B Test Your Email Campaigns
How can you craft a great email campaign without having to spend a lot of time on marketing and design?
Running A/B Test campaigns is quite simple.
In short, the campaign comprises sending two different variations of one campaign.
You can test emails with subject lines, content, and send times.
Running tests between campaigns helps you gauge what works and what doesn’t. You only get better at email marketing when you have data to support those marketing efforts that have proven to be successful.
Take a look at A/B testing within Omnisend:
Don’t Forget Your Sender Name and Email Address
An often-overlooked email marketing best practice is the sender name and email address.
The sender name and the sender’s email address affect the overall email performance.
Subscribers need to know who is sending the email and from what company they’re associated with.
Both email address and name of the sender must be compatible with the domain.
Avoid using a sender address that comes from @gmail or @yahoo or any other free inbox provider. Not only does it affect deliverability rates, it looks unprofessional.
Also avoid a no reply email address, your email recipients want to know they can communicate with you.
Recap Email Marketing Best Practices Do’s and Don’ts
- DO segment your email list by interests and demographics. This will help you send more targeted messages that are relevant to each group.
- DON’T forget to include a clear call to action in your emails. Ask your readers to do something, such as visit your website or sign up for your mailing list.
- DO personalize your messages whenever possible. Add the recipient’s name and other details that will make them feel like you’re speaking directly to them.
- DON’T use too many images or graphics in your emails. Some people’s email programs may not display these properly, or they may take a long time to load. Stick to text-only messages whenever possible.
- DO make sure your emails are mobile-friendly. More and more people are reading their email on their phones or tablets, so you’ll want to make sure your messages look good on these devices.
- DON’T use spammy language in your emails. This will only cause people to delete your messages without reading them.
- DO test different email formats and subject lines to see which ones get the best response. You may need to try a few different things before you find what works best for your audience.
Summary: Email Marketing Best Practices
Well, there you have it! The best tips for creating successful email marketing campaigns.
By following these best practices for email marketing, you’ll be able to create more effective email campaigns that will generate more leads, more website visitors and loyal customers.
We hope that this guide has been helpful and provided you with some useful information to get started.
Suggested Reading: How To Effectively Use Email Marketing