Email Marketing Best Practices - 9 Tips To Jumpstart Your Engagement
Inboxes are crowded places since many emails go unnoticed, unopened, and unread. You have done great by acquiring subscribers, and your emails are landing successfully in their inboxes. That is amazing! But if your emails don't stand out, you have already lost the engagement battle against your competitors.
Engagement is a very critical component of successful email marketing. No Engagement means zero Conversions. Despite the fact that 99% of email users check their inboxes every day, 40% of consumers say they have at least 50 unread emails in their inbox.
So how to revive or jumpstart your email engagement?
Let's uncover the best practices to create highly engaging emails that convert more. Here in this article, we have listed the most effective 9 tips that you can easily apply to improve your email engagement score.
Table of Contents
Email Best Practices to Keep Your Business Alive and Kicking
To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts, we have listed down our 9 top email marketing best practices as “Must”, “Should” and “Could”.
These email marketing best practices will help you channelize your email marketing efforts and will make it simple for you to kickstart your email marketing, without feeling overwhelmed.
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Must: Build Your Own Lists
Starting at zero seems daunting, but, if you asked any email marketing expert “what are good email practices?”, we can guarantee that most will warn you against buying marketing lists. As tempting as it is, remember that most of the “subscribers” that you would get have no idea who you are, what your brand does, or why you’re contacting them.
Depending on where you live, it might even be illegal for you to email people who have not consented to being contacted (We’re looking at you EU & GDPR). GDPR compliant email marketing and CRM tool would take away most of your compliance headaches.
If you’re worried that people won’t subscribe to your newsletter, email campaign best practices suggest an easy solution - offer an enticing free giveaway. They are sometimes also called lead magnets, and you’ve definitely seen them before. If you’ve ever downloaded a free eBook, or signed up for a free webinar, you were quite literally drawn in by a lead magnet.
This works because, if a subscriber is interested enough in a subject to want to read an eBook or go to a webinar, they’ll probably be interested in the newsletter too. It’s a win-win. You get a warm lead and they get something free, and who doesn’t like something free.
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Must: Be Objective About Your Subject
All components of email are important, but you came here for email marketing best practices, so we won’t sugarcoat it, the subject line is the most important.
The sender and the subject are the two elements that you can be sure the recipient sees as all email clients will display them in a notification. Some will include a snippet from the email or the preheader text, but the subject line is key.
Key Things to Remember When Writing Yours
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Keep it Short
46% of email opens are taking place on mobile. Hubspot recommends using subject lines with fewer than 50 characters. It will ensure that people scanning through their inboxes will read your complete message.
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Be Descriptive
Avoid generic subject lines. Instead of “Summer is here”, try “Top 3 ways to keep cool according to our subscribers”
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Review it After you’ve Written Your Content
Things change, make sure your subject accurately represents what’s in the email, clickbait only works once
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Personalize it and Segment
Create a subject that lends itself to personalisation, the person’s name or location work best as they transform an email from something generic (for all subscribers) to something personal (for me or people in my city).
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Should: Personalise Your Emails
Personalization should not stop at the subject. Use whatever information you have available to make your email more conversational. Email is a personal medium, so, if we’re following email marketing best practices, you want your subscribers to feel like you’re talking to them, not just advertising to them.
It’s basic but important, use the customer’s name in the initial greeting. “Hi Gary” sounds much better than “Hi subscriber” or no greeting at all.
Keep in mind that you might not always have the right information to personalize.
Keep it Relevant & Updated
- Review your subscriber lists regularly to catch common errors like switched first and last names.
- Have a fallback option in case the customer didn’t provide the information when signing up.
Personalization doesn’t have to stop at adding their name in the email. If talking about email drip campaign best practices, you should always try to split subscribers at key points in the sequence.
If somebody didn’t open the first email in the drip, they probably won’t open the second one, so you should send them a different second email. Did someone click on a call to action, they should probably move to a different part of the pipeline.
If you’re using drip campaigns without segmentation and personalization, you’re really limiting their power.
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Could: Make the Landing Page Match
Designing and writing good copy, that reaches the email marketing best practices we talked about, will take time and effort. But if you’re a brand, your goals are slightly different. You’re doing this to drive a specific outcome, be it more sales, increased customer loyalty or just more awareness.
Then the question becomes - “What is the best practice for sending an email communication from a brand?”
The answer - “Keep it consistent”. Your website and your campaign need to be a team. There’s no point in writing engaging copy that makes your subscribers click on the call to action if that link takes them to a landing page that seems “wrong”, or worse, to your homepage. If you’re trying to get customers to buy a product from your new collection, make sure you have a new collection page on your website and the link takes them to that page.
Ask yourself this - “What would I expect to see if I click on this link based on what I read in the email alone?”. Your website has to have a page that is the answer to that question. If it doesn’t, you have to change your email or your website.
Five Quick Fire Tips
Did you enjoy the article? Click here to get our cheat sheet with five more quick-fire email marketing best practices. We’re only kidding, but you see how enticing a good subscriber magnet can be.
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Say No to “Noreply”
Make your emails personal, not clinical, always select a sender name and email that matches your brand and tone.
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Conduct a Pre-Flight Test
Have a quality assurance checklist before sending out a campaign.
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Consider Double Opt-in
More subscribers aren’t always better, double opt-in is a good way to remove non-engagers quickly.
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Send Welcome Emails
Get the conversation going asap by sending a welcome email. Use a tested format that has high open and engagement rates.
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Make your Email Skimmable
Remember that your email is one of many, don’t make your subscribers think when scanning each email.
Conclusion
Email is one of the oldest ways to do marketing online, and with time it only evolved as one of the most cost-effective and marketers' favorite direct-channel of choice for brand communication.
Test out one of the best email marketing solutions, which will give you more flexibility to create and manage your email marketing campaigns. Infuse wise decision making using real-time performance & engagement reports, and comprises related functionalities like auto-CRM updates, landing pages, forms, popups & more.
Follow these above-mentioned best practices to effectively execute your email marketing ideas and attain maximum engagement & higher conversion results. These tips will guarantee that your brand emails will stay on the good side of both your subscribers and their email providers.
Resulting your emails will be noticed more, read regularly, and your embedded-CTAs will be clicked more often.
