10 Email Marketing Best Practices To Skyrocket Your Results

When following email marketing best practices, emails can prove to be very helpful in growing your business. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize how you can utilize email marketing to keep your potential and current customers engaged with your brand or product.

When you send an email to a customer, you are also keeping them in the loop with updates about your products and services. This, in turn, will make the customers feel welcome and valued. Once your email list grows, you’ll see that emails can be a powerful sales tool that will help you in closing deals and gaining new customers. Aside from these, there are more reasons email marketing is important for a business. 

Read below to learn more about email marketing, its benefits, and how you can improve your strategy to get the best results. 

Email Marketing And Its Benefits

Email marketing is an efficient and cost-effective form of online advertising and direct mail, utilizing email to promote a company or organization’s products or services directly to their customers. It helps keep the clients informed about new products or promotions.

Email marketing is considered to be one of the best ways to disseminate information and drive sales. Apart from this, it helps to build a relationship with customers by sending personalized email content that makes them feel valued. You will also be able to use this tool to build your credibility in your market. Finally, it can help you to convert prospects into loyal and regular customers.

Further Reading: 15 Amazing Benefits of Email Marketing No One Ever Taught You

Best Practices In Email Marketing

All of the mentioned benefits will only be possible if you follow the best email marketing practices. With that said, here are the ten best email marketing practices that can produce the best results for your business.

1. Avoid Spamming

Spam email, also known as junk email, is a message sent to a recipient without his/her express permission. To reiterate, spam email is sent for the purpose of spamming and deceiving. Spam emails are outright deceitful or sometimes try to sell bogus products. In most instances, spam emails disguise themselves through seemingly genuine offers that often turn out to be bogus.

You have to be careful when planning out your emails as you don’t want them to be flagged as spam emails. This is a no-brainer if you are starting an email marketing campaign. Randomly sending emails to everyone on your email list won’t do you any good. Not to mention that spamming emails can cause a bad reputation on your part. When you spam emails, you’ll likely send them to people who never subscribed to your email list. 

Also, buying an email list just so you can spam your emails is a big no. If you think it’s acceptable to simply send your emails to random people, think again. You may even get banned by your email marketing provider if you insist on continuing this practice.  

2. Construct Your Emails Carefully

You already know that there’s a possibility for your emails to be flagged as spam. When your emails are flagged as spam, your recipients will never get to read them, unless they check their spam folders. 

To prevent this from happening, you need to construct your emails carefully. You need to ensure that your recipients have subscribed to your emails so they won’t be flagged as spam. Aside from that, you also need to avoid using all capital letters, hyperbolic phrases, and exclamation marks when writing your emails. You need to construct your emails as organized as possible. Here are some tips on how to construct your emails.

• Use short paragraphs and include relevant keywords and phrases.
• Insert one or two images that best illustrate the content of your email.
• Use bullet points to highlight the important parts of your email.

You also need to know how every spam filter works because they are different for various providers. Your email may be able to pass a spam filter but gets flagged by another. 

It’s also important to construct your emails with high-quality content. Content marketing is critical to successful email campaigns because of the many ways it can shape your brand and connect with your audience. Take the time to consider everything from your subject line to the graphics you use for your headlines. This is how you build your brand and maintain it in the long run.

Your messages need to provide adequate information about the products and services you have to offer, as well as tips and tricks on using them efficiently. Your emails also need to be eye-catching and include a call to action, such as registering for a free newsletter or buying your product.

Write your content around the interests of your target audience and add specific keywords to help capture their attention. Once you know who your audience is, you need to set specific goals for them. These goals should include what they need and want from your emails, as well as what they would be willing to pay for. 

For example, if you are a realtor, your goal would be to create a series of informative emails that answer common questions homeowners have about buying or selling a home. If you are an accountant, your goal would be to produce an interactive video for your customers that walks them through the process of buying and selling a home. Your email marketing content strategy should be focused on these goals and specific details.

Further Reading: A Comprehensive Guide on How to Build an Email Marketing Strategy

3. Respond To Your Customers

You need to make an effort in sending replies to recipients who responded to your emails. To keep things organized, you need to create a dedicated team that will be responsible for responding to emails and tracking all responses you get from your email marketing campaign.

Responding to emails will make your recipients feel extra connected and engaged to your brand, especially if they receive a well-written reply. Also, tracking the responses you get can give you an idea of how to improve your email marketing campaign. 

4. Choose A Good Email Service Provider

This email marketing practice is a no-brainer too. Your email marketing campaign won’t be successful if you don’t use a good email service provider. There are plenty of good email service providers to choose from. You should choose the one that works best with your marketing campaign and roadmap, just like when you’re choosing an online fax service for your business. Online fax services are also widely used among various kinds of businesses, especially for remote teams, due to their speed and security. 

With a good email service provider, you’ll be able to personalize your emails, schedule them to be sent at the right time, and segment your email list. Your provider will also give you access to some features that allow you to monitor the activity of your subscribers, track responses, and analyze results to help improve your email marketing campaigns further. 

5. Segment Your Email List

Email segmentation is an important strategy that many email marketers employ to send focused, highly targeted emails to specific audiences by separating their email lists into separate segments. 

By knowing the characteristics that distinguish each of these segments, you can tailor the content of each of your email marketing efforts accurately to each segment, and thus, significantly increase your response rates. 

When you segment your list based on attributes such as location, buying habits, purchasing frequency, and expertise in a subject matter, you can gain even more insight into your customers’ buying decisions—where they are, what they are interested in, and how they arrive at their decisions when purchasing. This allows you to tailor your email campaigns to benefit your customers better.

Further Reading: How to Use Email Segmentation to Boost Marketing Conversions

6. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly

When emails first became available on mobile devices, the general public’s reception of the concept was poor. The mobile devices we had before were not just powerful enough to connect to the internet and download emails. Thanks to advanced technology, reading emails on mobile devices is just as easy as reading them on desktop PCs. This is also the reason more and more people are now using their mobile devices to open and read their emails every day. 

So, it’s important to make your emails mobile-friendly if you want them to reach a wider target audience. If your emails are not mobile-friendly, your recipients will just ignore and delete them immediately. 

You need to learn how to optimize your emails for all types of mobile devices. Mobile-friendly emails are simpler and faster to view or download. Optimizing your emails to become mobile-friendly will also allow you to focus on creating a strong message without relying too much on images. 

7. Clean Your Email List

Just because you have so many people on your email list, doesn’t mean all of them are reading your emails. They may not have opt-out of your email marketing campaign, but it’s still useless since they are not opening your messages.

It may be tempting to send emails to as many people as possible for you to generate more leads. But in reality, sending to contacts who never open or reads your emails can actually hurt your marketing campaign. Those contacts who never open your emails can make your campaign look bad, since it will come off as an oversight on your part in terms of analyzing your audience. 

You need to analyze which of your contacts are not engaging with your emails over a certain period. By doing so, you’ll be able to target your emails to people who are actually interested in hearing from you.

Further Reading: How to Improve Your Email Open Rate 

8. Include A Call-To-Action In Your Emails

If you want your email marketing campaign to drive results, you need to be able to persuade your recipients to take action. However, you need to be careful with the kind of call-to-action you’re going to include in your email. You must also limit the choices accordingly. Give your recipients too many choices and they may end up doing the wrong action or unsubscribe from your email list. 

As such, it’s important to be very clear with what you want your recipients to do next. To make that possible, you need to include a call-to-action on your emails seamlessly. The design and placement of your call-to-action play an important role in helping you generate more leads. You also need to ensure that your calls-to-action are visible and can be viewed clearly on all types of mobile devices. 

9. Avoid Purchasing An Email List

One of the most important mistakes to avoid when you are starting an email marketing campaign is purchasing an email list. Sending emails to a list of people who didn’t give you permission to do so is considered spamming. 

When you purchase an email list, you are only hurting the success of your email marketing campaign. Since the contacts in a purchased email list didn’t choose to receive emails from you, they’ll mark your messages as spam and delete them immediately. This will affect the delivery rates of emails since they go straight to spam folders or are deleted immediately without them getting seen or open. 

10. Reward Your Subscribers

One of the best ways to keep your subscribers is to make them feel special and connected with your brand or product. 

Keep in mind that these people gave you permission to send messages to their private email inbox and have invested some time and money in your business. To make them feel even more valued, you may request them to provide feedback through email and make them answer some surveys. 

Once your subscribers finish answering surveys, give them some rewards like freebies, special discounts, or an exclusive preview of your latest offerings. This way, your subscribers will feel encouraged to continue following your business through your emails.

Final Thoughts on Email Marketing Best Practices

The best thing about email marketing is that it helps you determine your target audience and allow you to connect with them, as well as improve your sales conversion rates. If you want to generate traffic to your website and increase your online visibility, you should follow these best practices. 

Email marketing is not that complicated. Once you start following the above email marketing best practices, you are guaranteed to see improved results while growing your business. Email marketing is still one of the most reliable digital marketing tools you can use to ensure that you are getting the most out of your marketing campaigns. 

This is a post contributed from one of my marketing partners.

Hero photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash