A wise man once said, "Email marketing is the most metal thing there is," and he's still right today. Email marketing is an effective, low-cost way to drive engagement and conversions. As a matter of fact, it tends to be the channel with the lowest cost per conversion since it is at the bottom of the funnel.
However, that doesn’t necessarily make it easier. It’s one thing to know you should send emails, but it’s another to actually execute them. We’ve identified some email marketing best practices you can use this year to kick off your campaigns.
The first is: Send welcome emails
Whenever someone signs up for your email list, send them a welcome email. Thank you for keeping in touch with your business! A lot of brands will offer a discount to website visitors who sign up for their email list, such as 10% off. This is a great way to grow your list and engage with them right away. You can automate this with your email platform; just make sure you choose a regular cadence, such as daily instead of weekly, to keep it on schedule.
The second is. Put an emphasis on personalization
Just like other aspects of marketing, campaigns perform better when they are relevant and timely. Personalization is the key to relevancy. Emails can be personalized in a number of ways, from inserting a first name to segmenting your audience. If your clients and prospects sign up to receive emails from you, it’s okay to ask what information they’d like to receive. Would sales alerts be helpful? Stock updates? Email newsletters? Put that information in the appropriate audience for each tactic.
Three. Create a schedule, plan ahead
You should stick to a regular time if you’re planning to send a recurring newsletter to your subscribers-whether it’s monthly, weekly, or daily (but that’s a little too much). As a result, they will know when to expect it in their inbox, and you can plan the content ahead of time
You don’t need to stick to a recurring schedule if you’re planning a big promotion (such as Black Friday deals, Labor Day sales, or a bi-annual sale). Make sure to incorporate a follow-up email send schedule for people who didn’t open the first email or didn’t click through. Email marketers hate adding last-minute emails to their queue more than anything else.
Four. Stick to consistent branding
Make sure you are consistently leveraging your brand voice in emails to your audience. When you send serious updates and fun promotions from the same branded template, it can be overwhelming, so make sure to assign colors, typefaces, and email signatories to each.
Five. Customize the preview text and subject line.
Most marketers focus on perfecting the content of the email and ignore the subject line and preview text. The subject line is like a handshake. The subject line is the first impression your audience will have of the email you want them to open.
Consider using a consistent subject line for newsletters, such as “Your Weekly Update from Business.” You can also include your preview text, such as “The sky is falling, shoes are on sale, and more.”
The sixth point. Standardize measurements
The idea is pretty simple, but you don’t want to change the template size every time you send an email. Standardize the size of your templates to ensure your comfort and the satisfaction of your audience. You should try to keep the width under 600 pixels. Although the length can vary more, bear in mind that email service providers may truncate the content if it gets too long.
If it comes to marketing best practices, we can tell you what we *think* you should do, but you’re the only one with the power to actually figure out what works. Only by testing can you determine what time of day has the highest open rate, what types of subject lines resonate with your audience, and what copy makes the most clicks.
The eighth. Analyze your email marketing campaigns
Finally, a successful email marketing program needs to be able to determine if it is, indeed, successful. Everyone enjoys reporting on Monday mornings. You can choose which metrics to highlight, but I suggest tracking opens, clicks, bounce rates, and unsubscribes. Consider a platform that offers heat mapping, which lets you track exactly where your audience clicked. You can easily track the best and worst performers by including some screenshots of the SL/preview email in your report.
These are best practices in email marketing you must follow
As a marketer, you know that best practices are a dime a dozen. However, these 8 email marketing best practices aren’t just ideas to experiment with or strategies to test-we’ve compiled a list of the 15 email marketing best practices that you must follow. Take a look:
- Send a welcome email
- Emphasize personalization
- Plan in advance
- Ensure consistency in branding
- Write optimized subject lines
- Use standard dimensions
- Determine your own best practices
- Report on your email marketing efforts
