The 8 Best Practices for Better Email Marketing
If you want to boost your open rates, we advise following these best practices.
1. OPTIMIZE YOUR SEND TIME
If you send your emails while everyone’s sleeping, there’s a good chance they’ll get buried under tons of other messages before your audience gets a chance to open yours.
To optimize your send time, check the location of the majority of your audience, and schedule your emails accordingly. You also want to avoid sending emails first thing in the morning. For the majority of people, this is when all their relevant emails for the day start rolling in so late morning and early afternoon are usually better times. By then, people have cleared their inboxes and are settling into their lunch.
Of course, there’s no ideal time that suits absolutely everyone. So you’ll have to test different times to see what works for the majority of your subscribers. If you use an ESP like Klaviyo, for instance, they’ll measure your optimal send time and deliver your emails to your audience at the time that best suits them.
2. SEND A WARM WELCOME
First impressions are crucial and, in some cases, they set the tone for the entire relationship with your audience members. When you send welcome emails to new subscribers, it shows that you value them. Be warm, friendly, and personable, and above all, provide value — yes, even (and especially!) in your first-ever email to them.
You need to demonstrate to your new subscribers what they can expect from you in the future. You can also go as far as to outline the sort of content they’ll receive from you as well as when you plan on sending out your emails. This is an easy way to build trust and a positive rapport with your email list subscribers.
In short, your first email to a new subscriber should be a sincere welcome and not a sales pitch. Overselling when you’ve just converted a subscriber is a surefire way to turn them off of your brand.
3. OPTIMIZE YOUR GMAIL PREVIEWS
Gmail displays your name, subject line, and an excerpt from your email. So, make use of this design by ensuring that your preview is enticing. It should draw your subscribers into reading your email. Make sure to send test emails to yourself to see how your emails look both in Gmail and other email clients!
4. AVOID SPAMMING
You don’t need us to tell you that aggressive marketing is off-putting. Imagine a salesman at your door every day, knocking and pitching the same old stuff you already turned down the day before. Annoying, right?
So, make sure you only send a newsletter when you actually have something to say, promote, or teach. As we’ve said time and again, you need to ensure that the focus of the email is providing value to your subscribers, rather than just advertising your brand.
Emails are just another form of online content so if your newsletters lack substance, purpose, quality, or are evidently nothing but a sales pitch, you may quickly lose subscribers.
5. BE TECHNICALLY PROFESSIONAL
If you’re sending images in your email newsletters, make sure you include an alt-description in your HTML setup. This ensures that a description of the image will appear should the image fail to load for any reason and it also ensures that the image can be described to your audience if any of them use accessibility tools. Covering little details like this makes your brand all the more credible.
6. A/B TESTING
As with any online marketing campaign, you should A/B test your work to improve your strategy, and sure enough, email marketing isn’t any different.
The best way to do this is to send two different email campaigns with one controllable variable, to find out which resonated more.
Most merchants typically split test the following:
- Subject lines
- Email introductions
- Template designs
- Sending time
This is one of the only ways to see what works for your audience and consequently, enjoy the highest possible return on your investment.
7. SEGMENT YOUR MAILING LIST
We’ve hinted at the importance of this already but for the uninitiated, email segmentation means sending emails to customers based on their recent online behaviors. That way, you can tailor your emails specifically to meet their needs and interests.
If your email marketing software boasts segmentation tools, use them. For example, if a customer has recently shopped for a specific product, you can hone in on that by drawing their attention to products that complement what they’ve just bought.
8. TEST EMAIL RENDERING
Make sure you preview and test the rendering of your emails before sending them out. The last thing you want is for an email to display incorrectly, or for images not to load. Rendering issues can seriously affect your reader’s engagement, so nip this in the bud before it has the potential to become a problem.
Why Email Deliverability is So Important? Read the article below to learn more.
Enjoy and hope you pick up something useful to apply in your business.
