Email Marketing Best Practices That Actually Drive Results

Email marketing serves as a primary component of customer acquisition programs for companies across all industries.

We’ve put together some of the best email marketing tips to help you improve the performance of your campaigns.

Clean your mailing list regularly.

Some of your email contacts might not opt-out of your email campaign, but will still never open your emails.
It’s tempting to email as many people as possible to reach more prospects, but keeping your least-engaged recipients on your mailing list can kill your open rate. People who never open emails make your campaign look worse since you’re not analyzing the campaign’s quality against your most loyal recipients.
Review your list of subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails over a certain period of time, and remove them on a regular basis. This gives you a more accurate email open rate and keeps your email campaign clean of the people who are no longer interested in hearing from you.

Keep the main message and call-to-action above the fold.

Consumers spend 57% of their viewing time on above-the-fold content. That number drastically goes down to 17% of the second screenful and gradually decreases as they scroll.

With this in mind, place your message and CTA above the fold. It’s the first thing your recipients will see once they open your email, therefore increasing your conversion rate.

You can also run an A/B test first to validate the hypothesis and see if it works for your emails.

Personalize the email greeting.

How often do you read emails that begin, “Dear Member”?
You might segment your email audiences by the type of customer they are (member, subscriber, user, etc.), but it shouldn’t be the first thing recipients see in your company messages.
Personalizing the greeting of your emails with your contacts’ first names grabs the attention of each reader right away.

Keep your email around 500 to 650 pixels wide.

If your email template is wider than 650 pixels, your email won’t show up correctly and will require users to scroll horizontally to read the full email.
This is a pain, to say the least, and will likely affect your conversion.
Having your template fit within the standard format will make for easier readability, better conversions, and an overall better user experience.

A/B test your email campaigns

Crafting effective email campaigns is of the utmost importance and the only way to achieve that is through testing, and more specifically A/B testing!

Running an A/B test is a relatively easy process and it helps you improve every part of an email campaign. In short, what you do is send a different variation of the same campaign to two different groups of recipients.

Depending on your goals, you can test:

• subject lines
• preheader text (keep in mind your mobile device users)
• content of your email: images and copy
• CTA boxes (colors, copy, placement)
• your email campaign tone and length

Whatever you choose to test, don’t forget to check your metrics. Your open rates are essential if you’re checking variations of your subject lines. Similarly, monitoring your click rates when you come up with different email content is crucial.

Finally, the winning combo is the one that will give you the best conversion rate.

Use high-quality visuals

As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, so your emails need to incorporate stunning and eye-pleasing visuals. It goes without saying that your visuals must be high-quality and aligned with your brand (in terms of colors, style).

The main aim of visuals is to “reinforce” your email copy and create an emotional connection with your subscribers. GIFs are also an option to be considered, however, be extra cautious as they tend to impact the tone of your email and they aren’t always relevant.

Finally, be sure to include ALT text in your images since it not only helps people with visual impairments, but it can also be life-saving in case the HTML does not render. Relevant text will be in the place of the blocked images and this might encourage subscribers to enable them and engage with the email as originally intended.

Avoid a ‘no-reply’ sender address and increase legitimacy

What’s the point in personalizing your email message or subject line if they look like they were sent by a bot? Or leave a blank BIMI record (brand logo)? It’s a little ironic.

Steer clear of a “no-reply@” sender address. You need to build trust with your audience, not the opposite. Moreover, they’re more likely to open your emails if they believe they are composed by a real human!

You may even choose to encourage your subscribers to reply, since collecting feedback is essential for your entire marketing plan.

Of course, there is also the CAN-SPAM Act that companies have to comply with. One of its rules dictates that you shouldn’t use the words “no reply” or anything similar as your sender’s name.

It’s advisable to increase the legitimacy of your emails by setting up DMARC, which then allows you to use your brand logo on supporting email clients as part of BIMI. This is an additional layer of authenticity to your email messages, which establishes trust with your audience.

Closely tie emails to landing pages.

Your landing page should match the email in terms of headline, copy, and content. The look and feel of your landing page should also match the email as consistency goes a long way toward a customer’s trust.

Just make sure you’re using tracking tools to see which emails and landing pages performed the best so you can keep sending what’s working.