Email Marketing Best Practices

This post is a modified excerpt from our resource Effective Email Marketing: How to Win Before Pressing Send which can be downloaded here for free. 

Whether you're reaching out to customers, congregants, or community members to communicate key information, or trying to improve your current email marketing performance, these principles are easy to implement and can generate results right away.

Add Value, Build Trust 

Successful organizations like yours develop relationships with their people. They’re known for creating lots of value by giving away valuable and timely information — so much so that when the organization asks for a response, a sale, or call-to-action of any kind, their audience responds positively and timely.

When you’re known to be open-handed and relational with helping your audience, you’ll find they’ll be generous with you by engaging, signing-up, buying, and telling others. Think about it this way: Your customers want to know you are thinking about them, and consistent email communications is how you do that.

Catchy Subject Lines

Keep 'em compelling and concise, around 50 characters or less. Otherwise, they'll get cut off in the email view, and nobody wants a cut-off subject line. If your contacts know what your email is about and it’s appealing to them, they are more likely to open it. 

The most effective email subject lines engage curiosity, include promotional offers, and are personalized to each recipient's interests.

CTA Placement

Always put your primary call to action (CTA) above the fold. Make it easy for your readers to see and act upon. Your contacts likely won’t scroll unless the trust you have developed with them is extremely high so make that action step you want them to take clear and visible. 

Note: To best understand other common email marketing abbreviations and lingo, checkout this resource on popular email marketing terms and definitions. 

The Blink Test 

Before hitting that send button, take a quick two-second look at your email. Can you spot the clear CTA in that short span? If not, time for some tweaks! Rework your copy to drive toward one main call to action.

Branding Matters

Slap your logo at the top of the email, so everyone knows it's from you. Show off that brand power and start the conversation with confidence that your reader knows who is talking to them.

From Personal to Powerful

No more info@, no-reply@ or catch-all email addresses. Send your emails from a personal and monitored account with a personal name attached. People want to hear from people, and that’s why they’re more likely to open an email from a person than from a generic business.

Recognizing a sender is the most important factor in deciding to open an email, followed by actually having the time to read an email.

Permission is Key

Only send emails to contacts who actually want to hear from you. Nurture the relationships you already have. Make sure your opt-in process is iron-clad by including a permission statement on the sign-up form.

Goals, Goals, Goals

Always define a specific and quantifiable objective for each email before pressing schedule or send. This will help eliminate the guesswork regarding whether your email performed well or not. 

Personal Touch

Use personal information in the preview text, body, and wherever possible. Show your recipients you know them because personalization matters: 

• 80% of consumers are most likely to purchase from you if you engage in personalized advertising or marketing.
• Personalization lower the cost of acquisition by up to 50%, improves marketing spending efficiency by 10-30%, and boosts revenues by 5-15%.; 
• Companies that invest in personalization earn 40% more money than their competitors.]

Measure Your Success

Keep an eye on every email's performance. Monitor and measure like a pro. Compare similar emails and make notes on what worked and what didn’t. Keep honing your messaging, your layout and tactics to get the right mix for optimum engagement.

Hyperlink Your Way to Success

Link all email images with your primary CTA. Boost that click-through rate (CTR) and watch your results soar.

Alt Text for the Win

Don't forget to add alt text to your CTAs and images. Sometimes they don't load quickly or at all, but alt text saves the day.

Double Device Duty

Preview your emails on both desktop and mobile before sending. This will help make sure your email is clear and compelling no matter what device your contact is using. 

Cleaning House

The health of your email list is a top priority, and accuracy is the cornerstone. Every detail matters, from the proper capitalization of names to the correct email addresses, business titles, and all other collected information. From stem to stern, your data needs to be clean and accurate. 

That means you need to regularly move contacts to appropriate segmentation lists such as unsubscribed, unengaged, bounced, etc. You can even use segmentation for demographics, or buyer stages to improve your message and personalize your offerings.

Segmentation is Key

We said this above about cleaning house, but it needs its own mention! Instead of blasting your whole list, segment it. Send the right message to the right person. Personalization rules!

Segmented email campaigns produce 30 percent more opens and 50 percent more click-throughs than non-targeted email campaigns.

Test, Test, Test

Variant testing or A/B testing allows you to predict how different variables of your email will perform to ensure optimal performance. Experimentation leads to greatness and any mass email going out should always have a variant test to ensure your best foot forward.

Need more than email marketing best practices?

Email Marketing is an art and a science but to do it well requires an always learning posture and a curious mind. If this is an area your organization would like assistance with, our team would love to help build your strategy or write your nurture campaigns, just click here to connect with our team and together we will take your email marketing to a new level!

P.S. What is another helpful tip to win with email marketing? Comment below!