10 Email Marketing Best Practices

Email is one of the best methods to communicate. With the advent of smartphones the use of email has increased, now one can easily access his email anywhere or anytime.

The popularity and cost-effectiveness of the email alluded marketers to include it in their marketing strategy. Email Marketing is an effective and inexpensive form of marketing, however, its effectiveness depends on how you use it?

Here are 10 best email marketing practices that will improve your success rate.

Write An Eye-Catching Subject Line

People get several spam emails every day and their action depends on the subject line of an email. If it is interesting and generates curiosity they will open it or most times they just ignore or unsubscribe them. So the subject line of your email plays a crucial role in deciding the success of your email campaign.

You should also make sure that the content of the mail is relevant to the subject line. A good subject line increases the open rate of your email campaign, but the conversion rate would be low if you don’t keep the promises made in the subject line.

Keep It Short and Simple

In today’s fast-paced life, no one has the time to read long and complex emails. If the first few lines of your mail do not convey the main idea, you will lose many potential customers. The thumb rule of marketing is to be clear and concise. State the main point in the beginning as your customer might not read the entire mail. Avoid using jargons and flowery language, simple and short sentences work best.

Mobile Optimized Design

Everyone may not own a computer, but most people have mobiles. Mobiles are easy to carry and convenient to use anywhere. Their ease of use has led to the rise of mobile internet. A rapid increase in Mobile internet users clearly shows that it is the time to focus more on mobile rather than desktop. Your email design and images should be responsive so that they can be accessed from any device.

Generate a Sense of Urgency

A sense of urgency drives conversions in a short-term, it inspires a reader to take action immediately. Salespeople use these tactics effectively to generate quick leads, You may have heard of words like “hurry up”, “limited period offer” and more phrases in an advertisement that create a phenomenal effect on users. A sense of urgency clubbed by a good offer can increase your sales greatly.

Call To Action

Similar to a sense of urgency call to action is a technique to prompt your readers into action. It could be a simple watch a video request to buy a luxury car offer. Call to action phrases should be short and attractive like “buy now”, “subscribe to us” and more.

A call to action should be followed by the further instructions to complete the action. For example, if you have put a click here link then you should also explain its purpose and result.

You can use multiple calls to action phrases at different places in the email and make it stand out with bold colors, different fonts, and design.

Personalization

Giving a personal touch to your email creates a good impression on customers. You can improve the performance of your email campaign by adopting personalized email strategies. Studies show that personalized emails bring more conversions than formal ones.

Use of name in subject line increases the open rate as customers trust the source. The overuse of personalization also puts off readers so use it only where it is necessary.

Timing is important

Your email might go unnoticed if you choose to send them when customers are away or busy with other things. You should take care of time zones and send emails accordingly, daytime is obviously the best time as most of your customers are awake.

According to the Mail Chimp, Tuesday and Thursday are the best days to send emails. Weekends and holidays often provide less open rate because people spend this time with their families. Mondays are often hectic with lots of work and pending emails over weekends.

Show The Benefits

Instead of selling a product/service, if you just demonstrate its benefits to customers, you will get a good response from them. Sales and marketing emails are often considered as spam and most of the time they get caught in the email filters.

Luckily if it enters the inbox of the customer, he will most likely unsubscribe and delete. The main reason of this defamation is the sales content of the email.

Use Real Name while emailing

Use of real name gives a human touch to your email and adds credibility to the source. The from the field of your email is important because a trusted source gets better results than an unknown sender.

Many IP addresses and email ids get banned because of spam activities. Use of a reputed server makes sure that your email lands in the inbox of customers.

Offer An Incentive

This is a surefire thing that works in almost every situation. People like freebies. By offering an incentive such as free e-books, gifts, subscriptions you can increase the open and click-through rate of your email campaign.

Free is the most commonly used word in the subject line in this tactics. It creates curiosity and temptation and the user opens the email. This is a once in a while tactic and you should not entirely depend on it.

Email marketing is a widely used marketing technique. It is the only resort for small businesses which can not afford big marketing costs. They can use free Email software to send bulk emails. It is cost effective and an efficient method of reaching customers. If used properly email marketing can multiply the revenue of your company, but it has certain limitation too.

The open rate in email marketing is generally between 10% to 25% which means that most of your emails do not get attention from the customer. However, this problem can be dealt with by developing a genuine and relevant email database.

Article Updates

Article Updated on Jan 2018: Minor fixes and links updated.

With a degree in IT, Kathleen Collins has worked with the top hosting companies for over a decade. Currently, she works with Hosting Reviewed, providing an in-depth evaluation of the various hosting companies listed. You can follow her @Twitter.