Email Marketing Best Practices

Know Your Audience for Great Email Marketing Practices

When you understand when, how, and why your audience likes to engage, your email marketing soars.

• Give careful thought to the tone of your messages. Is your brand casual, sophisticated, or playful? Readers are more likely to engage with emails that correctly convey your brand.
• Time your messages carefully. Study your metrics to discover when readers are most likely to open your messages and then schedule them accordingly.
• Customize your messages to specific segments of your list. For instance, if you own a pet supply company, craft one set of messages specifically to cat owners and another for dog owners. Similarly, if you’re an apparel company, you can send separate messages to men and women. You get the idea.

Focus On Quality over Quantity

Nobody wants to be flooded with emails from the same sender. Therefore, it’s much smarter to fight email fatigue by carefully timing your messages. That is to say, start slow and monitor your unsubscribe rate. This data shows whether you are engaging or annoying subscribers. Without doubt, this is one of those email marketing best practices everyone should follow.

Of course, the frequency of your broadcasts depends on your brand. For one industry, it may be more effective to send a single message each month—but another may merit two or three messages. To gauge what’s best for you, subscribe to your competitors’ lists and see what you get.

Avoid Noreply Sender Messages

Emphatically, noreply sender addresses signal your disinterest in the audience’s opinions and needs. Use an address that includes your company’s name instead. This opens the door to both trust and feedback. When you make it easy for readers to make comments and ask questions, subscribers really appreciate it. Think of this tip as an email marketing best practice that serves as a long-term investment in subscriber engagement.

Confirmed Opt-In Functions Reflect Email Marketing Best Practices

When it comes to your email list, you should make sure that subscribers really want to receive your messages. Otherwise, your messages can get flagged as spam. Therefore, when you create a confirmed opt-in function, you not only improve your email deliverability, but you also clean up your list to include only the most engaged subscribers.

Email Marketing Best Practices Pro-Tip: Test Subject Lines

When you perform split tests with your subject lines, you get a clear picture of what motivates your audience to engage with messages. As an example, you can test how many people click on a message that includes the reader’s name against an anonymous email that announces a sale. The results inform subsequent email subject lines and make your marketing game stronger and stronger.

Make It Easy to Unsubscribe

Think about all the emails you receive that don’t allow for easy opt-outs. Don’t they annoy you? Moreover, doesn’t this difficulty give you a bad impression of the sender? If you want to maintain a good reputation, make it easy for readers to unsubscribe from your list. In the long run, former subscribers are much more likely to opt back into your list when it’s convenient for them.

Test Emails Before You Send Them

By previewing messages before sending them from your list, you avoid embarrassing mistakes. As with any proofreading process, it’s always wise to have at least a second pair of eyes to check your messages. Furthermore, it’s smart to check your messages both on computer screens and mobile devices—just to make sure everything looks great on both platforms.

Create Complementary Subject and Preview Lines

The preview line expands on the subject line, thereby giving your readers more information about the content of an email. After you catch the reader’s attention with a snappy subject line, an informative preview line increases the odds your message gets opened. This is one of those email marketing best practices that really bolsters your brand. When subscribers feel confident your messages contain something helpful, necessary, or both, you become an email marketing master.

Clear CTAs Signal Email Marketing Best Practices

A clear call-to-action button not only increases your chances for conversions, but it also makes it easy for readers to access what they want. It’s a win-win. Ideally, a CTA should be all of the following:

• Simply Designed—A button that contains 4 words or fewer is perfect.
• Eye-Catching—Choose a legible font that is easy to read against a different colored background.
• Well-Placed—Funnel the body of your copy and use your CTA as a focal point.

Make Your Email Messages Easy to Skim

Let’s face it: we’re all busy. When you make emails easy to read, you score big points with subscribers. The following techniques make your emails skimmable:

• Concise headlines
• Bullet points or numbered lists
• Lots of white space
• Text that is organized in small, digestible blocks
• Highlighted key phrases