Email Marketing Best Practices

The most popular service on the Internet, and undoubtedly the most beneficial, is email. Many people use the Internet to check their emails.

Email marketing is not an easy process, and if you miss out on any essential steps, it can do more harm than good.

However, there are things you may do to guarantee that your email marketing campaign is a success. We’ve put together a list of email marketing best practices for you in this article.

Deliverability

The most crucial issue in today’s email marketing industry is delivery. It is possible that legitimate emails could be identified as spam. The first step in a successful email campaign is achieving a good deliverability ratio. It’s simple: if your emails aren’t delivered to the user’s inbox, all your efforts will be wasted!

If you are using email service providers, you must look at their deliverability claims.

Most well-known email service providers like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, GetResponse, etc., offer high deliverability. And, of course, good providers come with a price.

On top of choosing a good provider, you also need a good sending domain name. A good email sending domain, like emailmarketingreports.com, would always have better deliverability than a free email service provider like @yahoo.com or @gmail.com, which often send spam emails.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

E-mail Popup Warning Window ConceptCAN-SPAM, or the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, is a law implemented to fight email spam.

Email marketers are required by law to follow specific CAN-SPAM regulations. These include having an email address in your email footer, including proper language in your email’s body and subject line, etc.

For example, emails should always have footers like:

The email footer should include your email address, and an unsubscribe link (http://www.yourdomainname.com/unsubscribe.php?email=myemail@yahoo.com&token=abcde12asdfghjklzxcvbnm). 

It’s a good idea to utilize a double opt-in subscription so that your subscribers must affirm their desire to be included in your email newsletter.

With double opt-in, email marketers can ensure that their email lists are not filled with email addresses of people who don’t want to get email newsletters!

HTML and plain-text versions

It’s critical to offer your visitors the option of receiving your email newsletter in HTML or text format.

There are several advantages to sending HTML email newsletters. HTML emails allow image embedding, and you can also track the opening and clicking of your emails. Long URLs can be hidden so that they look more professional.

Some users may still prefer the plain-text version. They may be using email clients that don’t support HTML emails. There’s also a lot of complexity to produce an email newsletter instead of a plain-text one.

Last but not least, some users do not receive HTML emails to protect themselves from viruses and other malware. Some people can include malicious code in HTML newsletters or use them for phishing.

As an email marketer, we should always cater to both email versions when sending out emails in a campaign.

From and Subject fields

The subject line in your email, which is a part of your From and Subject fields, plays an essential role in improving the open ratio and consequently delivering successful emails. It’s necessary to remember a few fundamental rules.

Inbox Communication Notification E-mail Mail ConceptFrom field must be consistent. You must pick one name, whether for a business or a personal name and use it frequently. When you change your From field, your open rates will probably drop.

It’s crucial that your subject line be brief and should grab the attention of your readers. In a crowded inbox, your email must be able to stand out.

It’s great that you standardize your subject area and use a relevant topic from the current issue’s material for the title.

For example, if you have a newsletter called Email Tips, your subject line can be something like this:

[Email Tips] How to Improve Your Open Rates

or

[Email Tips Issue #3] How to Improve Your Open Rates

With this consistency, your readers will find it easier to identify your emails. It will naturally stand out in the inbox. Plus, it will also make it easier for your readers to search your past emails.

Personalization & Segmentation

It would help if you also considered personalization when writing your email subjects. It is proven that adding your subscriber’s name to the email will increase the open rate.

For example,

[FIRSTNAME], thank you for joining!

When emails are addressed to the user’s name, they tend to open that email. Plus, it feels more personal, as if the email is written primarily for them.

Email segmentation is an essential concept when you want to increase your open rates.

Email segmentation is: email marketers can break up their email list into different segments and send email newsletters to specific groups.

For example, if we have a big email list of our product buyers, we want to send out the new features update to only them. Or, you might not want to include people who subscribed via your email invite form from your previous event.

Your email will become more relevant if you conduct email segmentation for it. If you don’t use it, your open rates may take a hit as readers feel that there’s nothing of interest for them when they read an email filled with tips that do not relate to them at all.

Email Length

Most email marketing experts recommend an email length of 250 to 300 words. Studies have shown that email campaigns with a shorter length get better email open and click rates, so it’s essential to keep your email newsletter short.

If you use long sentences or paragraphs in your email content, make sure they are scannable, as most people read email newsletters in an F-pattern.

A good rule is to avoid paragraphs altogether and instead break up text with bullet points.

You can also add HTML elements such as headings, facts, etc., which will nicely break up the email body for easy reading.

This way, readers won’t feel overwhelmed by the huge blocks of text and will be more inclined to finish reading your

Timing is everything

When it comes to email marketing, timing is essential because different days and times of the week have different email open rates.

For example, you might observe that emails sent on Wednesdays and Thursdays have higher email open rates than those sent on Tuesdays and Fridays. If so, sending emails at these specific timings will increase your email open rate.

You can also maximize email open rates by sending email newsletters at the right time of day. 

Don’t send emails too early or late in the day because email opens, on average, peak between 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. 

It may drop gradually until they reach their lowest point at around 4 p.m. 

The campaign may pick up again for an open email spike around 5 p.m., which falls off after 7 p.m.

Email campaigns can be further complicated when your subscribers are around the world. Some email service providers will have features like “Send at user’s locale.” 

That means if you want all your subscribers to receive emails at 10 a.m. using “Send at user’s locale,” the program will ensure that all your subscribers will receive your email at 10 a.m. at their local time.

You must create several email campaigns and evaluate which ones give you the best results to determine what timing is ideal for your subscribers. So you must test and track your email campaigns.

Tracking Your Emails

Email service providers provide email open and click-through tracking that you can use to measure email marketing campaigns, email newsletters.

These email stats will tell you which email campaign performed the best and how many people opened your email newsletter. Open rates range between 40% – 60%, so if yours is low, check for any typos or incorrect links, as this might be a reason why your email open rate is low.

You should also test different categories to find what works well with email subscribers of yours. Email list segmentation is one way to ensure that you’ll get relevant emails from us. Still, consistent testing will help email marketers discover success stories by accident!

Some email service providers even offer heat maps that indicate where readers have clicked in your email campaign. You might find that some links in email newsletters perform better than others, and you should follow up with them more.

Email service providers often provide advanced email tracking features to help email marketers go through the data tracked. 

They can track by email open and click-through rates to measure overall campaign performance, email website traffic, conversions from emails, and other key marketing metrics.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many email marketing best practices to consider when sending out an email.

Follow these tips and make sure your emails get delivered to potential customers’ inboxes by using appropriate subject lines, good content in HTML or plain text, personalizing it for each person on their list with segmentation strategies.

Apply all these tips, and you will see more successful email campaigns.

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