Email marketing best practices

As social media marketing becomes more mainstream and fleshed out, it can be easy to forget about email marketing. It remains a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their audiences and promote themselves. However, as people get more emails by the day, and platforms such as Gmail and Outlook strengthen their spam filtering, it can be difficult to stand out and engage your audience. If you’re thinking about running an email marketing campaign, here are some best practices for you to implement for your campaign to be successful.

First, it’s always important to nail down your target audience. You may have an idea of them in your head, but it is still important to get a pen to a page and write it down to ensure that there’s no gaps or contradictions between who your audience is in your head and who they really are. Segment your audience based on demographics, purchasing behavior, and engagement level. This allows you to tailor your messages to meet the specific interests of your target market, as well as allows you to personalize different campaigns if they are towards separate audience segments.

Personalizing your outreach is another great way to increase engagement. It’s more than just having <first-name>, it involves tailoring the content to meet their interests, past interactions, and behavior. Your automation platform should have these metrics, or you will be able to upload the customer data by a CSV file. Having this personalized information within your email makes it seem less automated and more human, which engages audiences by making them feel valued and understood.

The subject line of an email is the first impression, and by extension, may be the most important part of a successful campaign. It determines whether your email gets opened or ignored. Keep the subject lines concise and clear, using action-oriented language, questions, or teasers to pique curiosity without showing your hand.

Design the body of your email for all devices. Statistics show most Internet users operate mostly from their smartphones, so the importance of designing mobile-friendly emails has never been more important. Use responsive and easy-to-read designs, keep the layout simple, use large fonts, and ensure your call-to-action is easy to tap on any device.

Providing value is always important, no matter what you are doing on social media. It is the quintessential way to get audiences to pay attention, because if the content has value, they will inherently be interested in it. Every email you send should have value, whether it’s informative content, a special offer, or an exclusive members-only updates, your emails should be relevant and beneficial to your audience. Providing consistent value helps build trust and keeps your audience engaged over time, because they know that your emails won’t be a waste of time. Providing value also improves your brand image.

Remember to respect privacy and comply with regulations. Adhering to laws such as the GDPR and CAN-SPAM ensures that you aren’t doing anything wrong by contacting your customer base. Ensure that you have permission to email your contacts, provide an easy way to unsubscribe, and respect the privacy of your audience. Doing so also improves your delivery rates as email services tend to screen for automated emails that ignore these important regulations. Keeping your email list clean by removing inactive subscribers and invalid email addresses also improves your delivery rates and overall performance.

Finally, find the right balance in your email frequency. Too many emails can lead to unsubscribes, while too few can make your audience forget about you. Monitor your engagement rates to find the optimal frequency for your audience. This can be different depending on the industry and the nature of your campaign but exercise your best judgment to know where the sweet spot is for emailing your target audience.

By following these best practices, you can create effective email marketing campaigns that engage and convert your audience. Email marketing is still a powerful tool but requires different strategies than something like paid advertising. Make sure to monitor your performance to make any tweaks along the way.

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