Best Email Marketing Practices to Create Winning Campaigns

A survey by The Manifest found that 69% of businesses spend time and money on email marketing. This points to good news for the effectiveness of email marketing, but it also means you are competing for attention in people’s inboxes. With competition high, you want your emails to be at the top of their game.

Email marketing can be an art, not a science, to get right. We’ve put together a list of best practices that can help to ensure your emails are getting opened and are doing their job once readers have their eyes on them.

Personalize

Personalizing emails for each recipient could help to build trust and increase open rates and sales. Include first names at the start of messages where you can. You can also personalize with the content you use, sending relevant things that add value. Neil Patel recommends pairing personalized emails with personalized landing pages for extra impact. You can personalize the offers you send and the images you use, too, the list goes on.

Optimize for Mobile

The amount of people viewing emails on their phones is pretty significant, with Litmus finding that 46% of all email opens were from a mobile. Take the time to ensure that your messages on phones look as good as possible. Look for mailing platforms that offer responsive designs that shift the appearance of an email depending on what device it is viewed on. CopyPress has written a handy guide to help you out.

Superb Subject Lines

Your subject line is an essential factor for determining whether your email gets opened at all. You want to be careful not to include any words that could get your email sent to the spam folder. But in general, you don’t want to be too salesy, avoiding anything to do with the word’s ‘money’ or ‘free’. For an extensive list of words to avoid, look at Emarsys article.

You want to write something that will draw the reader into the email and is relevant to its content. You could write something attention-grabbing but with no connection to what’s inside. This could get your emails opened in the short term, but you risk annoying readers and decreasing trust in your company.

List Hygiene

It’s essential to keep a clean email list for a number of reasons. Including that it reduces the chances of your messages being sent to spam and ensures your emails are being sent to people who may be interested in them, saving you time and money. Cleaning your email list involves removing inactive email addresses and/or those with low or no engagement. How you determine who to remove is up to you. This can happen with email addresses for several reasons, such as:

• Subscribers did not give a valid email address when signing up.
• Changed email addresses.
• Poor or little segmentation of your list.

When cleaning your list, pay attention to hard and soft bounces. Hard bounces point towards a permanent reason for your messages not being delivered, compared to soft, which indicates a more temporary issue that could be resolved.

Segment Your List

Segmentation is splitting your list into smaller lists based on specific subscriber characteristics. This means that recipients are more likely to receive content that is relevant to them. Hopefully, increasing open rates, decrease unsubscribed, and in the long run, generate more sales.

Segmentation allows you to laser-target specific demographics.

What Amount and When?

It’s essential to find the right frequency of messages for your business. If you send too many, you risk annoying subscribers. Too little, and they may forget who you are, or you may not move them along the funnel enough to make a sale.

Finding out the optimum time of day to send messages could help too. This is the time that works for your business personally. Moosend pointed out that for a while, 10 am on a Tuesday was suggested as the best time to email. But this meant that everybody posted then, which meant that your email was more likely to get lost amongst all the others. And this didn’t consider who you are sending your emails to either. Night shift workers, for example, might have different inbox-checking patterns than someone that works 9 -5. Find what works for you.

Optimize your Call-to-Actions

Your CTAs should be clear and concise and tie in with the rest of your message. Here are some tips:

• Make the color and font consistent with your branding.
• Choose your words wisely. Spend time finding high-converting phrases.
• Optimize for all devices. A clear CTA on a laptop may fade into the background on a mobile if your design is not responsive.
• Be sure to AB test each element.

Encourage Social Sharing

People on your list have already shown an interest in your company, so it makes sense to let them know that you are also active on social platforms. Adding to the platforms, you can use to build relationships with them and keep them updated.

AB Test

Make sure you test separate elements of your emails to keep them optimized for conversion. What works for others may not work for your company, so finding your way is essential.

Wrapping it Up

It can take trial and error to get solid results from email marketing for your company. But, hopefully, we have shown you some good places to start. AB testing is your most valued accomplice when formulating best practices. Find what works for you, as there is no one size fits all. And continually test to stay at the top of your game.

Following best practices when creating and sending emails is a great idea. But you need to have a list to send to in the first place. MailOptin’s lead generation plugin makes creating and optimizing email subscription forms easy. With various types to choose from, eye-catching display effects, and simple-to-use AB testing.

Once your list grows, you can use our email automation plugin to send event-triggered emails and newsletters. Or you can integrate many popular email platforms if you want to do something more complicated.

What are you waiting for? Get MailOptin today.