Answer these two questions in the first place.
Is your email campaign generating the results you’ve expected?
Have you ever earnestly considered email marketing best practices?
Email marketing isn’t only a simple marketing channel. It shares industry related knowledge, works as a source of information regarding your product.
Email is the third most influential source of information than a direct recommendation from your surroundings, and industry thought leaders.
But, incidents occur. Often marketers can’t touch the desired success line. Some started to think the game of email marketing is worn out.
If that happens with you, there may be some problem lies in your email marketing strategies. You need to apply the best practices ASAP.
Are you feeling intrigued?
What are the Top Email Marketing Best Practices?
In this post, you are going to get some of the vital email marketing best practices.
All of them are actionable advice.
If followed correctly, they can help to improve your email marketing campaign.
Get you the maximum results.
Keep reading.
1. Create and Maintain a Robust Email List
What is the most crucial thing in email marketing? A clean email list. Whatever strategy you may take to ensure success, your campaign never reaches to anyone without it.
There are a bunch of tools floating around the internet which helps to generate fake email addresses. And, those address also fill up a lot of space in various resources, used by customers, and spammers.
So, while creating your list, extract email address from your opt-in list, don’t you think it’s a good idea to double check them?
Maybe they are related to real people. Perhaps not.
But before making it final, you must try for the real ones.
To make this right, you need to be more careful with your opt-ins.
The first step is to use a double opt-in process.
It will help to list people interested in getting your newsletters or emails.
The Second thing is, deleting all the fake email address from your list.
By making a clean subscription list, your chances of success get a strong possibility.
Reachability is the key to get a higher open rate. Convert people towards your service.
2. Go for Regular Split Testing
Split testing is a must. It’s fun and not only fun.
Before you get on the floor, you must check every portion of your email campaign.
As your subject line, it must be attractive. You should not use something that provokes gimmick. Use subject lines that let people open your email. It is the gateway.
Usually, most of the marketing email you get make the same mistake over and over.
Average marketers try to convince you; there’s no fault in it, the lack lies in their attitude, they want you to click on CTA or to provide links, and they don’t have any other intentions.
You do need to show other intentions.
For example, make them believe that you care for each of your customers.
So, you need to address them personally, point out their real issues, and show intentions that you have solutions to share.
Use great copy that converts. Reasonable images can get you a lot of help.
And, recheck your content then. Is it genuinely representing you?
The next step is all about the CTA button.
It takes your customers directly to your site. You can’t make them converting unless they understand your offers. Don’t you agree?
So, the CTA button shouldn’t be like ‘Shop Now,’ ‘Buy Now.’ I’m not saying it’s wrong.
My point is this kind of CTA button can create annoyance in the first place.
By split testing, you need to find the best word that works.
For example, if you are an eCommerce marketer, want to make your potential customer buy something, use ‘Get Yours,’ or ‘Learn More.’
And, keep reinventing every time. It is a continuous process after all.
3. Personalize Your Email Campaign to Make Yourself Reliable
Personalized email can increase your Click Through Rate up to 14%.
96% of companies around the world believe that personal email can boost their open rate and end up successfully.
On the other hand, according to ActiveTrial, more than 52% of customers go elsewhere or marked an email as spam if not personalized.
So, why shouldn’t you be more careful about this matter at hand?
Let’s see the example below.
Here, Alison makes it clear. And, it uses my name as they care for me.
Also, they don’t tell me to enroll in their courses. Rather than, they offer me something and throw a CTA which let me claim my discount of preferred course.
There are some points to become personal. Not only mentioning name is well enough.
ii. When you make decisions to give discounts, don’t make it random.
You shouldn’t send every email to every customer with a discount.
You need to research and analyze about customer behavioral process to find out a customers activities in your site.
Then you send a discount offer to the selected customer and make the whole thing so special for them.
ii. Here again, you need to use geo location-based information. Following a potential customers area and weather, you should make your offer.
iii. If you have a content-based website, send newsletters which are related to your customer’s interest.
Suppose, you have content about literature and film industries, you also published articles on political issues. Don’t mix up all the genres.
Find out the different likability on different readers. Then send the catered newsletters. It will work better.
However, make sure you are following the newsletter best practices while doing all this.
The meaning of personalizing your email is: be more relative and try to help with the valid concern.
When you address someone with random order in a crowd, do you think you get the right response?
4. Approach Your People within a Storytelling Mode
People love to get information in the form of a story.
It is one of the ancient techniques to get people hooked with your stories and then make a conversion out of it.
Why shouldn’t we apply the storytelling epoch in email marketing? It’s a good idea all the way.
When you send someone product updates or content promotion, why not let them know it within a story?
Human brains always attracted to it, and respond faster than anything else.
So, always try to approach which can connect your customer personally.
It is not like you are making up something, analyze your products and contents, then try to understand your potential customers. You will find the correct way.
5. Welcome Email is a Key, Make it Impactful
A customer is opt-in to get your emails and newsletters. After this, it depends entirely on you how you are going to maintain the relationship.
It starts with a welcome email. And, this is your first and last chance to create a positive vibe.
You need to narrate something that makes your customer happy to get more like this in the future.
The thumb rule is to send your potential customer as soon as possible after they sign up to get emails.
Follow the steps we think is the best way to create a welcome email or newsletter.
i. Understand the customer’s expectations. What were they expecting while opt-in to your list? Your welcome email must met their expectation.
ii. What content are you going to send them? Write and include all of your intentions strategically.
iii. Keep your message body short and to the point. Make sure that you insert some thought provoking image.
iv. Be reasonable, or make yourself understandable.
v. You must use a friendly tone, which must maintain in the future too.
A welcome email is your most reliable opportunity to get along with a fruitful customer relationship.
Also, you can ask for advice or opinion.
How would your customer like to get from you which add more value? You can find all this out with a welcome email.
6. Segment Your Email List and Increase Your Traffic Rate
You should reach to the right people with the right offers. That helps you to create value.
All of your customers aren’t want the same things; their personality differs, so the choices.
If you are running an eCommerce shop, you have plenty of varieties of product.
Or do you have an online news portal or content driven website? You must send content updates with their likeability based on your reader’s preferences.
Segmentation means you make a different list with the different types of customers. It will help you to become more personal, and people like to get their choices to maintain.
And, how important the segmentation is?
According to DMA, segmented and targeted email can generate 58% of the total revenue of a company.
77% of ROI comes from segmented, triggered, and targeted emails.
There are some ways to create a segmented email list. For example-
i. You can get help from your welcome email. Ask about their choices. Like ‘what makes your experience better with us’ or what do you like to get in future, what are your preferences’ types.
ii. Send them emails to complete their profile, which must let them update their desired topics.
iii. You can always use the previous purchase information of the customers to understand what kind of products update or issues they may love to get.
See the image below. Here, the marketer concerns a user to complete the total subscription process.
It is not a long email. Despite this, it’s quite successfully approached a customer to get valuable information.
I believe you get the thing, the importance of creating a segmented email list.
7. Are you planning your email marketing campaign barring mobile users?
People are falling for mobile devices, that’s old news. Mobile and smartphones become an indispensable part of our daily life for the decades.
62.9% of the world population is using mobile phones. The total number of mobile users will pass 5 billion marks by 2019. It is telling you the story that strikes.
So, if you think that your emails will be read only on the desktop, it’s wrong. The chances are high that people open your email on their mobile devices.
You can quickly grab that chances and become mobile friendly. The way is, you need to mobile responsive templates for your email campaigns.
The responsive template allows your email to be open in almost every computer and mobile devices.
You should know that nearly 70% of people said they would delete an email if it’s not fit in their mobile.
8. Merge Your Social Media Marketing with Email Campaign
Email marketing is anything but public content. How can social media make a difference here?
Well, when you include your social media account icons in the emails, it will help your customer to find you in social media.
Personally, your customers can reach your business page with this process.
On the other hand, you can include a video in your email. Adding videos is a very effective tactic. Who doesn’t want to watch an entertaining and relevant video?
By adding YouTube videos to emails, you can increase your open rate by 19% than average.
It doesn’t take you much effort but brings you great results. So, merging your social media marketing with email campaign is a great idea.
9. Apply Email Automation as a Powerful Weapon
Email marketing is changing. It has evolved a way more technical and practical sense.
The digital marketing channels expand more than ever — automation tools like push notifications gaining popularity day by day.
To keep up with the curve email marketing also adopt automation which makes it even stronger.
Email automation left you impressed by sending trigger sensitive emails, using a behavioral approach, and time-sensitive knock.
Automated emails improve your click-through rates by 119% than broadcast emails. B2B marketers believe automated email can increase the conversion rate as much as 50%.
To apply automation, you need to take help from the top email automation platform.
You can read our detailed post on top email marketing companies who offer automation quite successfully.
This practice let you think more about your strategy rather than form, templates, and technical efficiency.
Automation can help you to execute a systematic and successful email marketing campaign.
Final Thoughts
These are the top email marketing best practices following our research.
But, let me ask again, is there any stable and everlasting techniques for anything?
The answer is, you need to keep going. You can take the help of different email capturing tools to achieve your goal as well.
Following the best practices, and inventing new ones, you can get your highest results possible from email marketing.
Do you have something more in mind? Make us enlightened with your precious opinion.
