Best Practices for Email Marketing

While email marketing may not get the recognition it deserves, it’s still a brilliant way for you to generate leads and convert for your business. A robust and strategic email campaign can really make a difference to your business and take your marketing strategy to new heights. 

Whether it’s a daily, weekly or fortnightly newsletter sharing industry news, a new product release or a sale announcement, we’ve compiled our top tips so you can see the best results from your email marketing:

1. Use Audience Segmentation 

It is easy to just send your emails out to as many people as possible, but sending your email to anyone without the correct targeting is pointless. The beauty of email marketing is that over time you will gather essential insights for future campaigns. Not only will these insights help you write better-targeted campaigns, but they will also help you in achieving better results. 

Knowing when your audience is most likely to read your emails and understanding the type of emails they resonate with will help you produce results-driven campaigns. 

Additionally, if your business has several target audiences (perhaps you sell products that are marketed to a wide range of people), use audience segmentation. This feature will allow you to target each email to specific audiences and categorise your contact list. Popular marketing automation platforms such as Mailchimp allow you to tag each contact so that you can segment them further down the line. 

Making your audience feel like they are opening a personalised email will appeal to their emotions and emotions convert and drive sales. If this is part of your marketing goals, consider personalising each email with your receiver’s name. Most marketing automation platforms allow you to edit the intro of your email. Doing this will automatically send the email with the name of the people on your contact list. This way, everyone is getting a personal version of the same message and you don’t need to edit 500 emails manually.  

2. First Impressions Count 

Firstly, people want something easy to read. The harder to read and less appealing your email is, the quicker someone is going to delete it or report it as spam. Ensure that your emails are easily skimmed over. More often than not, people will give up reading if the email’s purpose isn’t defined within the first few sentences or in the subject line.

Secondly, don’t make the email overly text-heavy. Huge paragraphs are going to deter your reader before they’ve even started the first sentence. Use images, headings and subheadings to make the email as readable as possible. 

Thirdly, you need to hook your reader in before they open the email. Using a stand-out title and a catchy subject line is what will improve your open rate from the get-go. Having a structured email is what will keep your readers’ attention and convert them into customers. However, if they don’t open the email to begin with, all the hard work you’ve put into the design, layout and copy of the email is pointless.

3. Experiment with Your Content

This tip is all about the long run. Typically, when you send an email, you probably just send the one and hope for the best. However, it is a really good practice to use A/B testing when sending out your email campaigns.  

A/B testing is when you send two variations of the email by making a slight change to one aspect of your email. Changing the heading, the subject line, the button colour, the font size and much more allows you to use the data you receive to create an email template that achieves high click rates, open rates and ultimately, conversions.

When using A/B testing, ensure you only change one element at a time. In doing so, you will be able to monitor which aspect of the email is the reason for its performance. If you begin to change several elements, it will be hard to tell which change was affecting its results. Doing this will help you analyse which email your audience resonates with the most.

Whilst A/B testing, ensure you have a significantly sized audience in each test. Additionally, make sure each audience size is as close to the other as possible so it is a fair test. 

Hopefully, we have helped you with some tips and tricks you can begin to implement into your email marketing strategy. Do you need help with your email marketing or have any further questions? Please contact our social team today and let’s discuss your needs.