Emailing a few times is easy, however, developing a long lasting email strategy that will help grow your business requires using best practices for email marketing. There are many things to consider, from the right way to get new subscribers on your list, to the best ways to let readers unsubscribe. It’s important to learn the rules of email marketing.
By focusing on email best practices, you’ll connect with your customers and grow your business by turning subscribers into sales.
If you don’t know the email guidelines, you might end up with emails that look good on desktop but not on mobile, or a large but uninterested mailing list. Focus on email best practices to connect with customers and increase sales.
This article will provide you with tips to improve your email marketing skills, including how to write emails that are more effective and how to develop a long-term email marketing strategy.
How to Make Your Emails More Relevant and Effective
1. Use double opt-in email sign-up
Sending information and offers through email is a form of permission marketing. Permission marketing is a term coined by Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers. The basic idea of permission marketing is that businesses should get customers to opt into marketing and decide when, where, and how they’re advertised to. Godin argues that this is the most effective (and respectful) way to turn onlookers into customers. When a website visitor, prospective customer, or previous buyer signs up for your mailing list, they’re giving you permission to communicate with them.
Double opt-in email sign-up requires an additional confirmation step to ensure that the person signing up truly wants to receive emails from you. This helps to prevent fake sign-ups and also ensures compliance with anti-spam regulations and laws like GDPR.
Here’s what double opt-in email sign-up looks like in action:
- A website visitor fills out a sign-up form on a landing page on your website.
- They receive an email confirming their sign-up for your mailing list.
- After confirmation, they are officially a subscriber who has opted in to receive emails.
2. Send a welcome email
Welcome your new email subscribers with a welcome email! This is a great way to establish an early connection and prepare them for what’s to come. Welcome emails generally have an excellent open rate, so this is a valuable opportunity to use. Most email marketing services let you send an automated welcome email after a new subscriber joins your mailing list. Make sure your welcome email is always relevant to newcomers.
Here are a few different ways to make your first email to a subscriber count:
- Introduce yourself and your business. A welcome email is a good opportunity to build brand affinity for your company and strike an emotional chord with a subscriber. Tell a new reader a bit about yourself and why you started your company, bringing them behind the scenes of the journey from idea to launch. Add personal touches like a photo of your team and a handwritten signature at the bottom of the email.
- Send a curated list of your best content. If part of your email marketing strategy is sharing useful information and tips, new subscribers will miss out on the rich backlog of your previous content. Use your first email to a new reader to curate a handful of your most popular articles or sendouts.
- Provide a discount or promotional offer. Often, businesses incentivise website visitors to sign up for an email mailing list by providing a promotional discount, like 10% off their first order. In this case, use your welcome email to follow through on that promise, providing subscribers with a discount code and even curating a selection of products they can splurge on. Alternatively, use the element of surprise and provide newcomers to your email list with an unexpected discount to spark delight.
Choose a purpose for your welcome email that will help you achieve your business goals.
3. Avoid using a no-reply email address
Email marketing provides an opportunity to build a relationship with readers by sending messages directly to their inbox. The email address you use can impact the strength of this relationship. It is best to use an email address that allows recipients to reply, rather than a no-reply email address. Here’s the difference between the two:
- No-reply email address. This type of email address is not set up to receive incoming emails. They are often structured as no*****@co*****.com. This is a good option for transactional emails (e.g., buying or shipping confirmations, password resets, etc), but avoid them for regular emails to subscribers.
- Valid email address. This type of email address is set up to receive incoming emails. They are often stylized with aliases, such as le****@co*****.com or he***@co*****.com. This is a good option for regular emails to subscribers.
It is important to keep an eye on your business’ email inbox and to respond to messages in a timely fashion. If your company starts to get a lot of email, you may want to set up filters to separate out messages that are automatically generated, like “out of office” messages, and messages that come from subscribers. Personalized messages are more likely to get a response from recipients, which can be helpful in informing your business decisions and improve your chances of getting emails delivered successfully.
4. Personalize your emails
You can connect with subscribers and give them a lot of value by making your emails more personal. An easy way to do this is to address subscribers by name, using merge tags on email marketing platforms. With these tags, your emails will automatically include personalized information. This is just one of many ways you can make your emails more personal.
Opt for an email marketing platform with robust automation features that allow you to create an email experience that feels tailored to each subscriber:
- Website browsing emails. With an email marketing platform that integrates with your website, if a website visitor becomes a subscriber and also opts in to website cookies, you can send them emails based on their browsing history on your website. For instance, in the case of an online store, an automated email can send them a few of the items they clicked on but didn’t buy.
- Abandoned cart emails. Sometimes customers get to checkout but don’t make a final purchase. Automated abandoned cart emails can send a reminder to their inbox, prompting them to buy.
- Birthday offer emails. Collect birthdays on email subscription forms to send offer codes on a subscriber’s birthday as a celebratory gift.
- Product purchase education emails. When someone makes a specific purchase, send them emails that help them make the most of their latest buy.
When you personalize your emails, you are creating a custom experience for your subscribers. This allows you to send “just in time” emails that are tailored to their needs and interests.
5. Write clear and clickable subject lines.
The best way to make your marketing emails stand out is to write subject lines that are so compelling that recipients can’t help but click on them.
To entice readers to click, be sure your subject lines:
- Are super clear and understandable.
- Are fewer than 50 characters so they don’t get cut off, particularly by mobile devices.
- Use language and messaging that your target buyer persona is familiar with and excited about.
- Include verbs and action-oriented language to create a sense of urgency and excitement.
- Include an exclusive value proposition (like 20% off an item or a free ebook) so people know what they’re getting.
- Avoid spam triggers like “Cash,” “Quote,” and “Save.”
- Are timely, if applicable. (One of my favorite subject lines came from Warby Parker and read: “Uh-oh, your prescription is expiring”.)
- Include their first names sometimes (it could increase clickthrough rates), or even add something about their specific location. (You’ll want to do this sparingly, like for your most important offers, rather than over-doing it and being repetitive or intrusive.)
6. Keep your emails concise.
It is generally better to send concise emails as opposed to long emails because concise emails have a clear purpose. Additionally, when people are scanning through their emails quickly, they are more likely to understand the main point of the email before taking any action.
If your emails are too long, they might get flagged as spam.
Keep your emails short and to the point. Write them as if you were speaking to someone in person. If your email is long, break it into paragraphs to make it easier to read.
7. Add social sharing buttons.
Social sharing buttons will increase the number of people who see your link and click on it.
Email tools that come with templates usually have social sharing buttons included. If your email tool doesn’t have this capability, you can create your own social sharing buttons.
If you want people to click on your links, you should add sharing buttons rather than follow buttons. This will allow the people who receive your emails to share the offer URL with their own followers. Follow buttons will only prompt the recipient to like, follow, or add your company’s social media channels.
8. Clean up the plain-text version of your emails.
Not everyone who receives an email will be able to see the HTML, rich-text version of the email. Some email clients do not support HTML-rich emails, and other times, a person may choose to only view messages in plain text.
You can improve your email’s chances of being seen by eliminating extra text, replacing long URLs with shorter ones, and keeping the body simple. Taking a few extra minutes to optimize the plain-text version of your email could help you reach more of your target segment and avoid the spam folder.
When you are cleaning up your emails, do not make too many changes as this could cause it to be marked as spam.
9. Preview and test your emails before sending them.
Before sending your email, double check to make sure it looks the way you want it too. Some email marketing tools allow you to see how your email will look on different devices which is helpful if you know your audience uses a specific type of device.
Before sending your email to your entire list, send a test version to a few people to make sure it is working properly. Include these steps as part of your email review process.
10. Don’t be afraid to ‘clean up’ your contact list.
It is important to clean your email list so that it only includes people who want to read your emails. This way, you can get more accurate data on what is and is not working in your emails.
A good email list cleaning service removes email addresses that pose a risk to your inbox placement, such as “invalid, abuse, and temporary emails,” which can affect your sender reputation. As CEO of ZeroBounce, Liviu Tanase advises email marketers to focus on connecting with people who care about your brand, rather than expanding your list at all costs.
11. Monitor each email’s performance.
You need to regularly check your email campaign’s analytics to see what is working and what needs to be improved.
If you find that 10 out of 20 emails are getting double the engagement, analyze what you did differently in the higher performers. Did you use different imagery? Did you have a different subject line? Maybe you have more than one audience segment and one of them is just more interested in your current email content.
You can use your email performance data to conduct A/B tests to see what your email recipients want from your newsletters, and then use that information to improve your email campaigns.
Email marketing can be difficult at times, but by sending compelling offers to the right target segments and paying attention to the little details that go into an email, you can increase the opens and clicks in your emails and generate more leads and sales.
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