Email Marketing Best Practices to Improve Results Now

Email Marketing Best Practices

Here are some of the top ways you can make sure that your email marketing campaign is the most effective.

1. Send the Email to Yourself First

Firstly, make sure that the email is perfect and that everything works! To do this, send the email to your own email address before sending anything out to your entire mailing list.

You can give it a final proofread to make sure that it is completely error-free. Also, check that the pictures are displayed properly and that all the links work and take you to the correct landing pages.

2. Get Your Timing Right

It’s important that you send your email at the right time of day to ensure that it gets the proper attention. Depending on who your customers are, this could vary, so it’s worth testing different days and times to see which gets the best response. A business email may work better in the morning or afternoon, while an email to encourage shopping might do well around lunchtime or in the evening when a customer has time to shop between work, school, and kids.

3. Frequency Options

Offer your customers a choice of how often they would like to hear from you. If you email them too much, then they may just get annoyed with hearing from you altogether and unsubscribe. Thus, try offering them an option of frequency and types of emails they would like to receive such as newsletters and special offers.

4. Have a Consistent Voice

Try to make sure that your emails have a consistent voice so that the customer feels more engaged with the content. Your email “voice” should match the style used on your website and in your Facebook posts.

5. The Importance of Subject Lines

A good subject line will make the difference between your email being opened and read, and deleted without a glance.

6. Personalize Your Email

Many different software programs allow you to personalize your emails to include the receiver's name. This makes the email seem more personal and targeted to the reader, and they are more likely to read it.

You should also have the email coming from a person, for example, abbie@yourbusiness, rather than noreply@, or newsletter@. The more you can do to add that personal touch to your email, the better.

7. Make It Relevant

If you have a large or varied customer base, then you should consider sending several different email marketing campaigns each week that are more targeted to a specific group of customers. You can split your email database into groups depending on their sign up information or their previous purchases.

8. Analyze Results and Effect Change

Never stop testing and comparing results. You can test subject lines, times of day, days of the week, images, layout, and calls-to-action. Which is working the best? Find out quickly and template it for future use.

Tips on Widening Your Reach

In order to get an email marketing campaign off the ground, the first thing you need to do is collect as many email addresses as possible. If you already have a database of email addresses, then here are some ways in which you can collect even more to widen your reach:

• Offer your newsletter subscription via your website and make sure it is clearly visible at the top of the page
• Use your social media to encourage sign ups
• Offer an incentive to sign up, such as a discount off their first purchase or the allure of special subscriber offers
• Assure your customers that you have a no spam policy, and stick to it
• You can also assure your customers that you will treat their information, including their email address, confidentially
• Encourage sharing and offer incentives for friends signing up, to both parties

Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns Now!

Email marketing is really effective and can offer an excellent return on investment when done right. The first thing to remember is to always look for new ways to widen your audience reach. Make each email you send as personal and as relevant as possible, and don’t spam your customers as you will only end up scaring them away.

If you put in the time to make sure that your content is really good, then also make sure you put in the time to analyze the results of each campaign. This will ensure that you are sending out the right emails to the right people at the right time. Likewise, before you even click that send button, make sure that you’ve tested it yourself personally to make sure that it works the way you want it to.