Email Marketing Best Practices

 

In a world of social media, you could wonder how would email marketing be a good option for a business.

Well, according to Campaign Monitor (2019), 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email, and not through social media. More than this, when it comes to receiving promotional content, 72% of people prefer to receive it through email.

Email marketing is a strong marketing channel that uses email to promote the business’s products or services. This form of direct marketing can help make the customers aware of a business’s latest items or offers by integrating it into the marketing automation efforts. (Mailchimp, n.d.).

Being one of the oldest forms used in digital communication, many good practices related to email marketing have been shaped in time, but there are also mistakes of which you should be aware if you want a successful email campaign.

                 Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels

Best email marketing practices

When it comes to email marketing, one of the best practices is to personalize your emails.

It is important to consider the experience and make your email recipients you're talking directly with them. It might be good to save some time through automation, but this should never be at the cost of the experience. Marketing emails should be personalized to the reader and contain information that is relevant to them.

For example, instead of using the common "Dear Sir/Madam", it could be much better using their name. This can be easily done by using personalization tokens. (Lindsay Kolowich, n.d.)  

Testing emails is another practice you should not underestimate if you are after success in your campaigns. There are many reasons to test an email before clicking the send button and  some of the most common are, according to Salmeron D. (2019): Broken email designs, Broken, incorrect, or untracked links, Good First Impressions, Spelling & Grammar Errors, Images Displaying Properly, Font & Text Displaying Properly.

In other words, it should become a habit to double-check if an email looks as good as you expected.

It is a good idea to preview what the email looks like in different email clients and devices that are popular with your audience. Another good practice is also to send a test  version of the email before sending it out for real ensuring it is properly working for everyone on the email list.

All of these actions should be considered as final steps in your email review process. (Lindsay Kolowich, n.d.)

Call to action

An email should integrate an instruction that encourages to action almost every time. There are exception like Thank you email which doesn’t have to use a Call to action. For the rest of the emails, it is necessary to have a call to action depending on what you are after. (Sean Tinney, 2021)

Practically, through a Call to action subscribers are being encouraged to go from reading the email to the next stop on the digital journey. This could be a CTA button or hyperlink which redirects subscribers to a company website, product page, blog article, or social sites. (Campaign Monitor, 2019)

Optimize emails for mobile users it is for sure another good practice to take into consideration.

It is well known that more and more people use their mobile devices to read email and navigate internet. This is why it is important to design emails with mobile users in mind. Otherwise, their user base will be significantly affected. (Lindsay Kolowich, n.d.)

There are also a few mistakes that should be avoided when sending an email.

Not sending a welcome email is one of them because this type of email have the highest open rates, which makes it a huge opportunity to connect with customers. That is the reason why you should send a welcome email immediately after signup instead of a regular newsletter.

Not letting your subscribers reply is another mistake and unfortunately it is a common one.

A subscriber will not be happy to receive an email without being allowed to reply to it. That is why you should make sure you will give the subscriber an opportunity to communicate back. (Enginemailer, 2021)

Another huge mistake will be to purchase an email list because sending emails to people who didn’t provide permission for is considered spam and illegal. When people starts to mark you as a spam, the delivery rates will decrease and your emails will start going directly to spam folders where cannot be seen. (Sean Tinney, 2021)

 

Reference List 

1.    1.     Campaign Monitor (2019) The Anatomy of an Effective Email, [online]. Available at: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/the-anatomy-of-an-effective-email/ [accessed 13 February 2022];

2.     Mailchimp (n.d.). Email Marketing [online]. Available at: https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/email-marketing/#:~:text=Email%20marketing%20is%20a%20powerful,into%20your%20marketing%20automation%20efforts [accessed 13 February 2022];

3.     Lindsay Kolowich (n.d.) 26 Examples of Brilliant Email Marketing Campaigns [online]

4.    Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-examples-list [accessed 13 February 2022];

5.     Salmeron D. (2019) Test Before You Send: The Importance Of Email Testing [online]. Available at: https://www.wpromote.com/blog/email-marketing/test-before-send-importance-email-testing [accessed 15 February 2022];

6.     Lindsay Kolowich, (n.d.) 23 Simple Email Marketing Tips to Improve Your Open and Clickthrough Rates [online]. Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/make-emails-more-clickable-list  [accessed 15 February 2022];

7.     Sean Tinney (2021) Email Marketing Best Practices for 2022 That Drive Results [online]. Available at:https://blog.aweber.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-best-practices.htm#h-5-have-a-call-to-action [accessed 15 February 2022];

8.     Enginemailer (2021) 11 Common Email Marketing Mistakes And How To Prevent Them [online]. Available at: https://www.enginemailer.com/blog/email-marketing-mistakes [accessed 15 February 2022]