7 Email Marketing Best Practices
As a business owner or marketing manager, you understand the importance of email as an essential tool in customer acquisition. To maximize success with email marketing, it’s essential to comprehend its best practices. From attracting new subscribers to avoiding spam complaints, there are numerous aspects of successful email campaigns that must be understood and adhered to.
1. Design Your Email With Your Brand in Mind: The initial step to successful email marketing is creating a template that aligns with your overall brand on your website. Doing this helps prevent any misunderstandings between recipients and what you send them via email. Whether you hire an outside designer, employ developers, or have staff on-hand, ensure the design of your email matches other materials created under your brand umbrella.
2. Utilize Personalization: Personalized emails are much more effective than generic ones and can increase your open rate by up to 42%! By segmenting your list and using data effectively to match content and tone with each subscriber, you can boost both open rates and click-through rates significantly.
3. Segment Your Email List: Utilizing segmentation, you can target different segments of your email list based on provided information such as age or location. This enables you to send tailored, granular campaigns that motivate customers to take action on your call-to-action.
4. Utilize Personalization: The most basic form of personalization involves addressing your recipients by name in both your subject line and greeting message. Alternatively, you can create dynamic content tailored specifically for each audience by combining their email address with other information from your database.
5. Customize Your Offers: Whether sending an offer to a cold prospect or existing customer, offering discounts and freebies can be an effective way to increase open and click-through rates. By tailoring the offer for each recipient, you make your email more pertinent and memorable to your readers.
6. Confirm Your Emails Are Accessible: Many users access email via mobile phones or tablets, making it essential for your emails to be designed in an accessible way for these users. Test your message using a keyboard-only device to confirm the text is legible.
7. Include a prominent Unsubscribe Button: Your readers don’t want to receive unwanted emails from you. To protect yourself against spam and ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR, include an easy-to-find Unsubscribe button at the bottom of each email sent out.
8. Maintain Your Contact Database Regularly: Keeping your contact database healthy is a critical aspect of effective email marketing. Dirty data can adversely impact deliverability, leading to increased costs if you don’t regularly clean lists.
9. Be Consistent With Your Content: It’s easy to get off track from your content strategy occasionally, but this will only lead to loss of followers and decreased open and click-through rates. To prevent this from occurring, ensure consistency across all emails with concise messages that get straight to the point.