In this article, you are going to learn about the 25 email marketing best practices tips.
Email marketing has been around for ages, and it serves as a primary component for businesses across every industry to reach out to their customers across the globe.
And in order to keep track of your email marketing program, you have to maintain the day-to-day details of the conversions coming from your email marketing campaigns.
To make it a lot easier for you, I have compiled the top 25 email marketing best practices.
And here’s a breakdown of what you are going to learn from this article:
- Most important email marketing best practices.
- The latest email marketing tips and tricks for reaching the inbox
- Email marketing design best practices that will help you craft beautiful, engaging campaigns
- Updated information to help you find the latest and great email marketing guides and resources.
25 Email Marketing Best Practices.
Below are the 25 email marketing best practices:
- Understand your audience.
- Use experiments to discover what resonates.
- Create a checklist of all your important steps.
- Choose meaningful metrics to track and measure against.
- Personalize your emails.
- Write attractive subject lines.
- Come up with your holiday plans.
- Quality matters more than frequency.
- Figure out the perfect time to send out your emails.
- Have a reward for your VIPs.
- Be very mindful of your email design.
- Review your landing pages.
- Build your own mailing list
- Segment your mailing list.
- Make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your mailing list.
- Clean your mailing list on a regular basis.
- Adapt your copywriting for email
- Remove the no-reply from names.
- Send your subscribers a warm welcome email.
- Make it double opt-in.
- Maintain consistency in sending your emails.
- Stick to the rules: GDPR.
- Know how many IP addresses you need.
- Test email rendering every time
- Stay up to date with the latest email marketing guides and resources
1. Understand your audience.
One of the most important aspects to take into consideration when starting out your email marketing campaign is to understand your recipient audience.
And you need to look beyond this recipient audience as just a mere demographic group, rather than ask yourself the following questions and come up with answers in detail as much as possible.
- How and when is it right to communicate to this audience and get their best positive response?
- Is there a specific language or slang you could use to communicate with them better?
- What types of actions or activities set your audience apart from the general population?
If you are able to use the answers to the above questions to amass critical insights and data about your recipients; you will be able to make intelligent changes that will help you get positive results from your email marketing campaigns.
2. Use experiments to discover what resonates.
It is very important to run A and B tests of your email marketing campaign.
This should range from your subject lines to calls to action etc.
Below are some important tips to keep in mind while doing so:
- Test only one element at a time else your results will be inconclusive.
- Ensure you have a significant sample size in your testing
- Never move on to the next test until you find a winning element.
3. Create a checklist of all your important steps.
To save yourself from falling in your next email marketing campaign, make sure you create a checklist of all the important steps you need to put into consideration before pressing “send”.
Also, ensure you add your own custom items to your checklist to ensure you have a seamless sending experience every time.
4. Choose meaningful metrics to track and measure against.
Do not allow your metrics to get complicated; that is your open rates, click-through, click-to-open rates, and so on.
In order to determine what metrics you have to monitor best, you must first and foremost determine the purpose of your mail.
For instance, if you want to extend an offer or discount, you should watch your visits and conversions from your offer.
5. Personalize your emails.
Even though email personalization is not necessary for 2022, it is becoming increasingly important to add it to email marketing campaigns.
In order to personalize your emails, make sure you consider what user data you have on the ground.
6. Write attractive subject lines.
Your subject lines hold the key to your recipients clicking through your emails.
And for that reason, you need to keep your subject line very concise and attractive.
One trick for doing this is to consider writing the main components of your email first before you use that to decide on what your subject line should be.
7. Come up with your holiday plans.
While the holiday season is approaching, email subscribers are looking up to increased promotions and deals; and as a result of this, most emails are going to end up as spam.
And for this reason, you need to be mindful and courteous about how you send out emails to avoid overwhelming your subscribers.
8. Quality matters more than frequency.
Sending email marketing campaigns out every now and then does not mean your email marketing campaign is going to be effective.
To be very frank, sending too many emails to your subscribers will likely generate the opposite result; because most of them are going to unsubscribe if they ever feel overwhelmed by your messages.
Or they might even mark your emails as spam.
Therefore, you need to take it one step at a time and learn more about quality than frequency while sending out your email marketing campaigns.
9. Figure out the perfect time to send out your emails.
Figuring out the perfect time to send out your email is very very important.
We are not going to suggest any perfect timing for you rather we encourage you to send out your emails and watch the best time people are engaging more with it.
10. Have a reward for your VIPs.
Your biggest brand ambassadors are your VIPs; that is those who always click, open, and engage with your emails.
And for this reason, these kinds deserve extra attention for their loyalty and engagement.
Thus, you need to reward these kinds with special offers and discounts.
Once you are able to reward and retain these kinds, you will see a greater benefit coming from them in your email marketing campaigns.
11. Be very mindful of your email design.
Whether you are simply using a template, hiring an email designer, or having a developer on hand to code your emails, make sure your email design aligns with the overall brand found on your website.
So while designing your templates, make sure you make it easy for your recipients to know exactly who is sending them the email and where to take the necessary actions.
Here are a few tips that can help you in this aspect:
- Make sure your colors align with your brand
- Include your logo at the top of your email as well as the links back to the website.
- Use short Hypertext and URL destination
- Includes relevant company details and unsubscribe links in your footer.
- Avoid using too much text and images.
12. Review your landing pages.
You need to spend more time and effort in designing and writing copies for your email marketing campaigns.
And as a result, you need to make sure you send your recipients to landing pages that will make move them t take the necessary action.
For instance, if you want to send your recipients to where they can get a certain product, make sure you send them to the landing page for that product, not your homepage or product line homepage.
13. Build your own mailing list
It is very pertinent to ensure that your subscribers are the ones who free-willingly added their own names to your mailing list.
Make sure you do not rent or purchase email addresses; because a lot of these purchased emails are never real people.
And once your email service provider discovers this, they will definitely shut down your account.
Your aim should not be to build a large mailing list, but rather to have a few subscribers who are always more than ready to engage with your email marketing campaigns.
14. Segment your mailing list.
Back in the day, email marketing used to involve sending a particular message to everyone on your mailing list, not minding if it is what interests them or not.
But these days, you need to direct your emails to specific characteristics if you want to experience a higher conversion rate.
Below are some of the factors you need to consider when segmenting your mailing list.
- The kind of products each customer purchased recently.
- Your customer’s location.
- The time they engage with your emails.
Thus, the more you carter for subscribers’ tastes, interests, activities, etc., the more likely you are going to reach and resonate with your recipients
15. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your mailing list.
There will always come a point in time where those who subscribed to your mailing list will get tired of receiving emails from you and they are likely going to unsubscribe.
This is a natural part of the email life cycle; therefore you have to provide a visible button for your subscribers to unsubscribe anytime they want.
In other words, the ability for people to unsubscribe from your mailing list should never be confusing.
Rather it should be available in one click, and moreover should be very instantaneous.
Never forget that if people do not see where to unsubscribe from your email list, they will use the SPAM BUTTON; and that is most dangerous.
16. Clean your mailing list on a regular basis.
Even though some people will take the time to unsubscribe themselves if they are no longer interested in opening your emails, many will just ignore your emails indefinitely.
And this can be very harmful to your delivery rates, and it may send signals to ISPs that you may not be sending wanted emails.
To address this issue, make sure you check every now and then for these kinds and use them to clean your mailing list on a regular basis.
17. Adapt your copywriting for email
Whether you hate or are looking forward to writing an email copy, look out for the few high-level pointers that will help you to efficiently and consistently craft engaging copy.
18. Remove the no-reply from names.
Be mindful of what you put as your name for your email marketing campaign.
At the very least, remove the no-reply response e.g. “noreply@mrtaculia.com”. Because sending an email with a no-reply stifles the impression of having a 1:1 conversation in your email messaging.
Besides, it looks just so unfriendly.
You may decide to use or not use a personal or business name, but the only way to know what works best is to use different names and see the one that yields the most response and stick with it.
19. Send your subscribers a warm welcome email.
One of the best email marketing best practices is to send your subscribers a warm welcome email.
Welcome emails will give you an opportunity of saying hi, and re-introducing yourself as well as set expectations for the kind of email your recipients will be receiving from you and how often.
20. Make it double opt-in.
When sending out your email marketing campaign, make sure you use a double opt-in method, which requires recipients to not only click a box on your sign-up page but to follow a link in your email which will go on to double confirm that they meant to do that in the first place.
21. Maintain consistency in sending your emails.
One of the email marketing best practices tips is that you need to maintain consistency in sending your emails.
This means you must maintain a good reputation with your ISP.
For example, sending 50 emails on Monday and then 500 on Tuesday will send a mixed signal.
ISP will pass your 500 emails for spam.
The trick is not to increase your sending volume instantly but rather to ensure you build up your sending frequency gradually.
22. Stick to the rules: GDPR.
In 2018, GDPR started to dominate a lot of email marketing conversations; and this is expected to continue in 2023.
If you are sending emails to European users, it is critical to understand the law and know if you need to make any changes to your program.
23. Know how many IP addresses you need.
An IP address is a unique number block that identifies a device by using the Internet Protocol (IP) to communicate over a certain network.
And when it comes to your email, your IP address behavior will affect your sender’s reputation, and how ISPs judge your sending patterns.
Most email service providers (ESPs) provide the option to send an email on a shared IP pool or a dedicated IP address. When you’re sending from a dedicated IP address, you are the sole sender and your reputation (and how it affects your deliverability) is yours, and yours alone.
If you’re sending both transactional and marketing emails, it’s a good idea to separate those two streams of email. Because transactional email is crucial and requested by your user, don’t risk that delivery by combining it with the reputation of your marketing emails (typically much lower engagement).
24. Test email rendering every time
Based on your recipient’s browser, inbox provider, and other factors, there are many ways your email can display.
However, tools exist out there that provide a complete picture of how your emails can render across these options.
One of the tools you can use is Litmus.
25. Stay up to date with the latest email marketing guides and resources
Even though email marketing has been around for a long time now, it has been subjected to several changes and adjustments.
Best practices emerge, regulations evolve and email marketing tips have grown tremendously.
However, keeping up with all the changes in email marketing is one of the greatest challenges.
Please share this article to help others learn about the 25 email marketing best practices that work.
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