Whether you’ve got an out­dat­ed email mar­ket­ing cam­paign or you’re about to cre­ate your very first, there are some dos and don’ts to know before you mas­ter the craft. From mod­ernising your design choic­es to cre­at­ing effec­tive CTAs, here are the best prac­tices you should adopt.

Across all kinds of indus­tries and com­pa­nies, email mar­ket­ing is a sig­nif­i­cant com­po­nent of cus­tomer acqui­si­tion efforts. It’s not sur­pris­ing: email mar­ket­ing is a bril­liant way to gen­er­ate and con­vert leads, reen­gage dis­tanced sub­scribers, reward loy­al cus­tomers, and pro­mote your brand.

Email mar­ket­ing has been around for a while. Chances are you’ve got a sys­tem in place already. But things change, and inter­net users are becom­ing accus­tomed to high­er qual­i­ty pro­mo­tion­al emails. Whether yours is a new or old email mar­ket­ing pro­gram, you’ll want to keep it in good shape.

If you don’t keep it in good con­di­tion, some risks arise. First­ly, hav­ing out­dat­ed or unin­ter­est­ing emails means you’ll lose a lot of leads, which is bad enough in itself. But as a result, your email open rate will drop, which can dam­age your rep­u­ta­tion as a sender and poten­tial­ly label you as spam. Fur­ther­more, inef­fec­tive email flows can break sales fun­nels, caus­ing you to lose poten­tial customers.

This arti­cle will dis­cuss some key areas you can address. Once you’ve ticked each item off your list, you can rest easy know­ing you’ve got an opti­mised email mar­ket­ing program.

Here are our 10 email mar­ket­ing best prac­tices to keep your emails in tip-top shape.

1. Personalise your emails

Know­ing and under­stand­ing your recip­i­ent audi­ence is high­ly impor­tant. When you take the right steps toward per­son­al­is­ing your emails, recip­i­ents will respond bet­ter and be more like­ly to engage with your brand.

Once you have data on your audi­ence, you can use it to per­son­alise your emails. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, new com­pa­nies with lit­tle to no cus­tomer data will find email per­son­al­i­sa­tion dif­fi­cult. The quick­er these busi­ness­es get their emails out there, the quick­er they can obtain data and per­son­alise their future emails.

Per­son­al­i­sa­tion can mean hav­ing sub­scriber names at the top of your emails, as well as tweak­ing any­thing that caters your emails toward spe­cif­ic audiences.

To under­stand your audi­ence bet­ter, we’d rec­om­mend ask­ing your­self these key ques­tions. They’ll help per­son­alise your email efforts:

• When does your audi­ence pre­fer to receive emails?

This will help you decide the day and time you send your emails.

• Does your audi­ence respond bet­ter to for­mal or infor­mal language?

This will help you dis­tin­guish the tone of your email copy.

• Do you know your sub­scribers’ birthdays?

If you already have access to this data, you can begin send­ing spe­cial offers on users’ birth­days. If you don’t, you could incor­po­rate this step into your email sign up process.

• What’s the aver­age age of your audience?

Know­ing this will influ­ence things from the tone of your emails, whether you men­tion cur­rent events, and the types of prod­ucts you pro­mote to spe­cif­ic audi­ence segments.

• What types/categories of prod­ucts do cer­tain groups tend to buy more of?

This will help you when it comes to send­ing out pro­mo­tions based on audi­ence segments.

If you want to send out a spe­cial offer that only applies to a spe­cif­ic prod­uct type, you should­n’t send this to every­one on your mail­ing list. For exam­ple, if you were a vape retail­er and had a spe­cial offer on CBD vapes, you’d send out the offer to your cus­tomers who have bought CBD vapes before. This will pro­tect your sender rep­u­ta­tion as unin­ter­est­ed cus­tomers may view it as spam.

Includ­ing cus­tomer names in your emails is a huge part of per­son­al­i­sa­tion. Many mod­ern email­ing tools allow you to do this. You can also use dynam­ic con­tent to pro­vide spe­cial con­tent for seg­ments of your audi­ence. For instance, you could send recip­i­ents pro­mo­tions they can access in their loca­tion by col­lect­ing their geo­graph­ic data.

Epit­o­mis­ing email flows are automa­tions. Automa­tions make per­son­alised sales fun­nel efforts easy. By set­ting up cer­tain emails when recip­i­ents take spe­cif­ic actions, you can guide them through the sales fun­nel jour­ney at every step.

Top tip: Send out wel­come emails when users sub­scribe, aban­doned cart emails when they fail to com­plete a pur­chase, or re-engage­ment emails when recip­i­ents have stopped engag­ing with you.

2. Perfect your call to action

If your emails don’t dri­ve peo­ple to your site, you’ll nev­er turn them into customers.

Many experts rec­om­mend keep­ing to just one CTA per email so that recip­i­ents aren’t dis­tract­ed or con­fused. How­ev­er, you can use this same CTA mul­ti­ple times through­out your email so they can click on it at any time whilst scrolling through your email.

Entice recip­i­ents in with the email by sug­gest­ing they’ll gain ben­e­fits from click­ing on the link and going to your land­ing page. Keep the CTA snap­py, rel­e­vant, and engag­ing. You might even want to out­source help with your CTA from a UX design­er who will know about opti­mis­ing their design.

Top tip: ensure your CTA, email, and land­ing page are har­mo­nious and the same in design. This ensures con­ti­nu­ity and nur­tures the idea that users are on a journey.

3. Value quality, not quantity

When recip­i­ents get too many emails from com­pa­nies they’ve pre­vi­ous­ly engaged with, they feel over­whelmed and like you’re spam­ming them. It can become very irri­tat­ing to receive pro­mo­tion­al emails too fre­quent­ly and push leads away.

This is called email fatigue, and it can lead to users unsub­scrib­ing, dis­en­gag­ing, and even mark­ing your emails as spam. You can fight email fatigue by reduc­ing the num­ber of emails you send and keep­ing con­tent rel­e­vant to seg­ments of your audience.

Take your time and look at mail­ing list seg­men­ta­tion seri­ous­ly. Send­ing rel­e­vant con­tent to your sub­scribers is one of the most sig­nif­i­cant things you can do to get results. You can look at things like gen­der, age, pur­chase his­to­ry, pur­chase fre­quen­cy, and geog­ra­phy to hone in on what dif­fer­ent seg­ments want to see in their inboxes.

Top tip: If you’re des­per­ate to find out what your audi­ence thinks “qual­i­ty” emails are – ask them! Cre­ate a sur­vey and send it out to ask what your sub­scribers want to see more or less of. If they feel par­tic­u­lar­ly strong­ly about the issue, they’ll like­ly reply.

4. Include links to your other platforms

You want to make it easy for users to engage with and fol­low your brand. Link­ing your social media plat­forms with­in your emails is one of the best ways to do this. You can also sug­gest that they share your email with friends or fam­i­ly – espe­cial­ly if there’s some­thing in it for them, such as a “Refer a Friend” discount.

Top tip: You could do a week­ly email that includes all your recent social media posts, and write in the sub­ject line, “Have You Seen Our Lat­est Posts?”.

5. Reward loyalty

You’ll want to reward your loy­al cus­tomers. You can do this by offer­ing some appre­ci­a­tion for those recip­i­ents who make a lot of orders and fre­quent­ly share your emails. It’s a very pop­u­lar cus­tomer reten­tion tech­nique to offer spe­cial dis­counts to return­ing customers.

Top tip: Allow your loy­al cus­tomers to sign up for a birth­day pro­gram where they can get spe­cial dis­counts around their birthdays.

6. Welcome newcomers properly

The peo­ple who have just sub­scribed to your mail­ing list are at their most inter­est­ed stage. That’s why you should cre­ate an effec­tive and engag­ing wel­come sequence. If you get it right, you’ll be on your way to com­plet­ing a suc­cess­ful sales funnel.

First­ly, make sure site vis­i­tors have ample oppor­tu­ni­ty to sign up for your mail­ing list when they explore your web­site. Then, you’ll want to send a wel­come email once they com­plete the form. Make sure your wel­come email has high-qual­i­ty visu­al ele­ments, con­vinc­ing copy, and an entic­ing CTA. It’s also com­mon prac­tice to offer a first-time buy­er discount.

Your wel­come email could also help nav­i­gate your site or explain how your unique busi­ness works. If you have any data on why pre­vi­ous sub­scribers have dis­en­gaged, you could answer any poten­tial FAQs at this point to pre­vent confusion.

Top tip: Your first email to new sub­scribers should be easy to navigate.

7. Keep tabs on the data

You must stay in touch with how your emails are per­form­ing. How will you know that they’re work­ing effec­tive­ly if you don’t? Email mar­ket­ing met­rics can help you make impor­tant changes to your strat­e­gy that, in turn, improve sub­scriber engage­ment, lead con­ver­sion, and brand awareness.

Here are some of the met­rics you’ll want to keep an eye on:

• Time of day that emails are opened

Send­ing your emails out at the right time can sig­nif­i­cant­ly pos­i­tive­ly affect brand engagement.

• Unsub­scriber rate

If this rate has rapid­ly increased or decreased after chang­ing your cam­paign, you’ll know very quick­ly whether it’s been effective.

• Click rate

This met­ric can help you know if you need to make your emails more engag­ing and “click­able”.

• Open rate

Want to know who’s inter­est­ed in your emails? Your open rate will tell you that. Com­par­ing your open rate to your click rate will pro­vide some insight into how entic­ing your emails are and if you’ve got your per­son­al­i­sa­tion efforts on point.

• Earn­ings per subscriber

Any­one con­cerned with financ­ing an email mar­ket­ing cam­paign will be con­cerned with this one. Make sure that your cam­paign is mak­ing more mon­ey than it’s costing.

Top tip: No sin­gle met­ric should deter­mine your email mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Make sure you take a holis­tic view of your cam­paign’s per­for­mance to get a thor­ough understanding.

8. Make your emails look good

These days, too many busi­ness­es’ emails look out­dat­ed. This can result in users find­ing your brand untrust­wor­thy or just not inter­est­ing enough to engage with. Above all, your emails should be easy to nav­i­gate, clear in pur­pose, and encour­age CTAs.

You want your sub­scribers to know (and recog­nise) who’s send­ing them an email. So, make sure your brand’s logo and colours are at the fore­front. Keep every­thing on-brand – from your CTAs, land­ing pages, and every email.

Main­tain the right bal­ance between images and text. GIFs can also be engag­ing pieces of mul­ti­me­dia. The text should be friend­ly, clear, and engag­ing. You should take steps to under­stand what your audi­ence wants to see before you send out emails. For exam­ple, if your demo­graph­ic is women between the ages of 20 and 30, look at how oth­er com­pa­nies with that audi­ence are design­ing their emails for inspiration.

You’ll also want your emails to be mobile-friend­ly. More than 70% of emails are opened on mobiles, so this for­mat must be catered for.

As well as mak­ing your emails look good, you’ll want to give off a good impres­sion. One of the most annoy­ing things for email sub­scribers is the dread­ed “no-reply” account. You should­n’t use this, as it will only dis­en­gage your audi­ence if they want to reply or need some cus­tomer ser­vice help. Even with recip­i­ents who don’t need to reply, a “no-reply” address can come across as unfriendly.

Top tip: Make that sub­ject some­thing that will stand out in your recip­i­ents’ inboxes.

9. Test your emails first

Imag­ine this: you’ve spent loads of time and mon­ey cre­at­ing the per­fect email sequence, so you send it out. Then, you realise that it does­n’t show up on cer­tain mobile devices and email providers.

This prob­lem is eas­i­ly solved by send­ing test emails to staff mem­bers before launch­ing your email mar­ket­ing campaign.

When you test your emails, make sure they look how you want them to look and that all click­able ele­ments are func­tion­ing as intend­ed. Plus, make sure you test your emails on dif­fer­ent types of mobile devices and email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, and Out­look, for example).

You can also con­duct email per­for­mance tests with dif­fer­ent cam­paigns. By dif­fer­ing each one slight­ly and com­par­ing results, you can check how dif­fer­ent vari­ables affect per­for­mance. For instance, you could test which time of day receives the most opens and clicks or test the effi­ca­cy of dif­fer­ent phras­es in your sub­ject lines.

Remem­ber that if you want to test the effi­ca­cy of new changes, only test one at a time. If you change four dif­fer­ent things on your emails and sud­den­ly get great results, you won’t know which thing worked the best.

10. Remove inactive recipients

Hav­ing a high num­ber of inac­tive recip­i­ents means your email open rate will drop. This can be prob­lem­at­ic as it wors­ens your sender rep­u­ta­tion. Email providers such as Google keep tabs on this, and you don’t want them to iden­ti­fy you as spam.

We’d rec­om­mend hav­ing a clear-out of your mail­ing list every three months. If recip­i­ents haven’t engaged with your emails in that time, it’s doubt­ful that they ever will.

It might sound counter-intu­itive but mak­ing it easy for your email recip­i­ents to unsub­scribe could be valu­able to you. It’s entire­ly nat­ur­al for some peo­ple to decide one day that they don’t want to receive your emails. Since these users will stop engag­ing with your emails and there­fore threat­en your rep­u­ta­tion as a sender, it’s bet­ter for your com­pa­ny if you let them go.

Do not make the unsub­scrib­ing process com­pli­cat­ed. If it is, unin­ter­est­ed recip­i­ents will just hit the spam but­ton. Once you decide to start tack­ling email fatigue, you could send inac­tive sub­scribers an email ask­ing, “do you still want to hear from us?” and allow them to unsub­scribe eas­i­ly. If they don’t reply, remove them yourself.

Top tip: Offer a dis­count to dis­en­gaged users to see if they reengage.

Final thoughts

Your emails will be a fun­da­men­tal part of user engage­ment, cus­tomer acqui­si­tion, sales fun­nels, and brand pro­mo­tion. The sig­nif­i­cance of email mar­ket­ing means that your process must be nur­tured and per­fect­ed, as its poten­tial results are so huge.

If you fol­low these email mar­ket­ing best prac­tices, you’ll be well on your way to hav­ing an email pro­gram that deliv­ers results: whether you want to con­vert leads into cus­tomers, reen­gage dis­tanced sub­scribers, mod­ernise your style, pro­mote your brand, or increase your rep­u­ta­tion as a sender.