Email marketing is a cost effective solution that gives you the power to reach customers in a place most people visit every day – their inboxes. If done properly, email marketing can help improve visibility, brand awareness and loyalty. It can also help you establish credibility, grow your audience, improve communication, promote services and generate leads. Below are six email marketing best practices that will get your emails noticed.
- Email Subscriber List
Make It Easy to Subscribe: Post a sign-up form on your website homepage, blog, Facebook Page and wherever else your customers and fans are active.Tell Subscribers What To Expect: It is important to tell your readers what to expect and how often to expect it. Give them as much information as possible on your sign-up form so they can decide whether they want to be on the list or not.Build Relationships: When someone joins your email list, they are opting-in to learn more about your business. Don’t miss the opportunity to build these relationships the right way. For new customers, send emails with additional information about your business and the different products or services you have to offer. For long-time customers, focus on generating repeat sales and reward them with a special offer.Ask Permission: It is critical that you always ask for permission before adding a new contact to your email list. Permission-based email marketing is the best way to develop long-lasting customer relationships that drive repeat sales and valuable word-of-mouth for your business. These practices also keep you in compliance with legislation such as Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-Span) and the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislations (CASL). - Write Compelling Subject Lines
Leverage Localization & Personalization: Collecting and using location information can improve open rates by being personal and relevant.Ask Questions: Subject lines framed as questions perform better. Consider your audience’s needs and interests, or the types of questions your content might answer.Keep It Short & Sweet: Research tells us that longer subject lines have lower open and click-through rates compared to shorter ones. The general consensus from Mail Chimp is to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less. Emails with 28-39 characters in the subject line have the highest click-through rates. Keeping the subject line short is also important since 40% of emails are now being opened on mobile devices, and due to the small screen size, shorter subject lines perform better. - Send Valuable and Relevant Content
Send relevant content that has value to your recipients. When you provide content that’s helpful to your readers, you’ll have more people opening and acting on the content you send out.To find out what type of content your audience is interested in, look at your email reports. Within your email reports, you can see how many people are opening your emails and which pieces of content are generating the most clicks. - Mobile Friendly
Make sure your email design is mobile friendly and that you use a responsive design. If a campaign doesn’t show up on a mobile device, it is not going to perform well. According to a study, 63% of people either close or delete an email that’s not optimized for mobile. - Maximize Your Delivery Rate
Take the necessary steps to make sure your emails are being safely delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. Keep an eye on your bounce and spam reports to see which addresses are not delivering. If you consistently have a high number of spam reports, it may be time to review the content you’re sending. - Regularly Review Your Results
Open and click-through rates are the most effective metrics to determine how your emails are performing. These metrics can be influenced by the content you include, the frequency you send and whether or not people recognize your emails in their inboxes. Pay attention to bounces and unsubscribes. These metrics allow you to determine potential problem areas. If you are seeing a consistently large number or people unsubscribing each time you send, you may need to revisit your email marketing strategy and look for ways to improve.