OVERVIEW OF EMAIL MARKETING BEST PRACTICES

 

Email marketing is one of the most effective and beneficial tools in digital marketing. Latest statistics have demonstrated that for every 1$ spent in email marketing, the return of investment is up to 42$ average (Kirsh, 2022), which is incredible higher than most of the other marketing tools’ ROI.  

However, like every other marketing tool, email marketing is not easy and there are several things you need to look at before sending your email to a list of subscribers.

First thing first, who are you sending the email to? Before pressing the send button, you’ve got to figure out who’s your audience, what do they need and what do they want to know from you. One of the top reasons why your audience might want to unsubscribe from your email list is they think your content is irrelevant to them (Hott, 2022). Best practise is to look deeply into your list of subscribers, and analyse their tendencies, to understand what content is worth proposing them.

If your list of subscribers is wide, you might need to start thinking about segmentation. Segmenting your list into smaller group will give you the chance to be more specific and strategic with your content.  

If you’re wondering, how can you divide and segment your audience into smaller groups, email marketing servers such as Mail Chimp can be connected to your analytics, providing reports on your subscriber’s location, demographic, generic interests, and tendencies with email marketing.

Once you’ve gone over the first step and have segmented your email list, you can start working on your email content and layout.

 

TYPES OF EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing is a vast territory. You can use email marketing for one-off promotional and campaigning messages, but also for repetitive and automated emails such as welcome emails, “thank you” emails, or abandon card emails, sent as a reminder to complete a left-out purchase.

Automated emails need to be part of your email marketing strategy. They help to build a relationship with your consumer from the moment they decide to welcome you to their inbox, and they can help driving up traffic, retention, and sales, being cost effective and time saving at the same time. 

Both with automated and one-off emails, personalization is key. Research from Statista (2020) revealed that 90% of consumers find personalised content somewhat very appealing. Ways to personalise your email marketing could be including your subscriber’s name to the email, adding a location tag to recommend your consumer a store or event nearby, sending relevant content with a familiar tone of voice.

After having established your email content and tone of voice, it’s about time to dive deeper into the work, choosing your subject line, text, imaginary, and colours.

 

HOW TO WRITE A PERFECT SUBJECT LINE

Subject lines are the first thing consumers will notice when they open their inbox. According to latest research, office workers receive around 121 emails per day in average (Review.com, 2022). Within this email overflow, it’s needless to say that your subject line needs to be great at capturing your subscriber attention at the first glance.

If the email is about a newsletter, your subject line should inspire a sense of curiosity adding value to the subscriber knowledge. In this occasion, questions marks are a great tool to stimulate that emotion. If the email is about a flash sale, the subject line should inspire a sense of urgency and possibly include a call to action in it.

Emojis and punctuation can be included, but you should not exaggerate to avoid bringing up the feeling of a spammy content.

After all, subject lines should give your subscribers a short and concise description of what they will find in your email. 46% of emails are being opened via a mobile device (Allen, n.d.), therefore the subject line should contain a max of 5-6 words to fit into the small device format.

You should also include a preview text below the subject line, giving out more valuable information about the content of your email. Including personalisation in the subject line and in the preview text is also welcomed.

 

HOW TO DESIGN YOUR EMAIL

Marketers often feel lots of pressure in writing the best subject line, which is essential, however the attention and the hard work should not decrease for the layout and text of your email.

Having a good percentage of open rate is great, however the aim of your campaign should be to create actionable content, that either brings up more traffic, sales, or retention. Therefore, it is important to include links to your website/social media and clear Calls to Action. Best practise is to include no more than 2 CTA per email and create a button visible enough to be spotted by your rushed subscriber.

The email text should be kept short and tidy. It should be scannable and, if the email contains more than a paragraph or different content, it should be broken up by headings and divided into sections with lines or imaginary to separate it.

The colours and font, along with the tone of voice, should reflect and be aligned with your brand guidelines. Mail Chimp (n.d.) recommendskeeping your font size within 14x-16x and using no more than two colours peremail.

At the end of your email an important factor to not forget is to include a paragraph giving your subscriber the chance to unsubscribe or change preferences on what email to receive from you.

 

EMAIL MARKETING WORST MISTAKES TO AVOID

With email marketing is unfortunately very easy to make small but substantial mistakes that might affect the effectiveness of your campaign.

Being the most used device in 2022, forgetting to optimise the email design to a mobile user experience is something that could cause you a great loss. Before sending the email, it’s worth going through some A/B testing to check if your email layout, links, and call to actions work and are actionable within the small space of a mobile device.

Another common mistake is sending email from a generic sender address, or even worse, from a no reply address. This will make customers feel like you’re not keen to take feedbacks and opinions on board, and could eventually bring down your deliverable rates (Couwenbergh, 2020).

Another important reminder for a mistake to avoid is to choose carefully the words included into your email. There is a numerous group of 202 words that are effectively spam triggers (Margo, 2020). Some of these words are more common that you might think, for example “click here”, “order now”, “limited time” and can get your email straight to the spam folder, losing visibility and chances to achieve your marketing goals.

 

SUMMARY

In conclusion, email marketing is far from dying, as some people currently think. It is still the most powerful tool marketers own to get straight into consumers daily routine. There are several tips and tricks that you can use as guidelines, however at the end of the day, it is also important to look at what works best for you.

Analysing the metrics after you’ve sent out your first emails will help suggesting which subject line, imaginary or font works best for you and your audience. Keep monitoring metrics is key, and if something works, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel in your next campaign.