Email Marketing Best Practices and Strategies for Success

Are you wondering if now is the right time to pour more resources into email marketing? Or maybe you're concerned with improving your current email marketing strategy and learning best practices to get better results. This article walks you through all you need to know, answering:

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing and communication strategy of sending emails to a group of people, usually prospects and customers, to update them on company news or sell a product or service.

Your email marketing strategy and campaigns should include value and sales emails to enable you to establish authentic connections with your customers while marketing your business.

Value emails focus on the customers and provide relevant, helpful information, while sales emails focus on your company's products, updates, and sales. Apply the 80/20 rule for optimal email marketing engagement: 80% value emails and 20% sales emails over each period.

Is an email marketing campaign right for my business?

One of the most significant effects of COVID-19 on businesses is the acceleration of digitalization. It’s crucial to own at least one digital channel to listen and respond to your customers.

Email comes top of this list as it's one of the most powerful owned marketing channels for businesses. It is also cost -effective and personal. Over 83% of business-to-business organizations send email campaigns as part of their digital marketing strategy .

If you're wondering whether email marketing campaigns are suitable for your business, here are some steps to take before making a decision.

There's no particular set of rules for deciding whether to implement email marketing campaigns as part of your business marketing strategy. The surest way to know if it's right for your business is to try it. To minimize mistakes when you begin, segment your audience and test with small groups — like a pilot phase launch of your email marketing.

Email marketing best practices

The advantages of email marketing cannot be overstated. It's important to follow email marketing best practices to get good, long-term results.

Collect emails transparently

Blackhat marketers may gather emails from various channels into their email list — Linkedin followers, event attendees, subscribers from other lists, and sometimes personal contacts. This is a bad email marketing practice that can lead to recipients sending your emails straight into the trash. It can also lead to problems with data privacy rules like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the CAN-SPAM act. Your email marketing recipients must agree to receive emails from you before you begin any email marketing campaigns.

Make it easy to unsubscribe

After getting subscribers to sign up for your email lists, it is your responsibility to allow them to opt-out if your content or business no longer serves their needs. Email marketing best practices advise keeping an unsubscribe button or link in a conspicuous place to enable recipients to unsubscribe easily. If you hold subscribers hostage and continue sending email campaigns after trying to unsubscribe, your emails will likely end up in the spam folder.

Respect subscribers' privacy

When prospects and customers sign up to receive your newsletters, they trust you with their email addresses and, sometimes, other personal information. It's bad practice to share or sell these emails to third parties without their consent.

Segment your email lists

As you build your email list, ensure that you segment each new customer or subscriber into appropriate groups. You can divide them based on location, interests, or other criteria relevant to your business and customers. If you don't segment your list correctly, you may send irrelevant emails to your subscribers, reducing your email marketing campaign's success rate.

Send a welcome email

When a new subscriber signs up for your email newsletters, engage them right away with a welcome email. Welcome emails help customers get familiar with your business — its colors, tone, messaging, personality, and value. In your welcome email, share what future emails will be about, the expected frequency, an offer to answer any questions, or a relevant and useful resource.

Re-engage or remove inactive subscribers

Over time, some subscribers become inactive. They may have changed email addresses or simply do not need your product or service anymore. To keep your list up to date with engaged recipients, remove inactive subscribers from your email lists periodically. Doing this helps you maintain high open, click-through, and email deliverability rates. However, before purging your list of inactive subscribers, try to re-engage them one last time by sending a targeted email campaign asking if they're still interested in hearing from you.

Optimize for mobile

Most emails are viewed on mobile devices. If you fail to optimize your email marketing campaigns for mobile, you miss out on a huge opportunity. Your email campaigns must keep mobile users top of mind. Ensure your campaigns are mobile-responsive with easy-to-load images. If you add videos to your email campaigns, upload them to a platform like Youtube or Vimeo and share the uploaded video links. Other tips to optimize your marketing campaigns for mobile include:

Preview on all device sizes

Always keep in mind that your customers read your emails using different types of devices and browsers. Test the appearance and functionality of your email marketing campaigns to make sure they display as expected. You can send a test email to yourself and see how it looks on several devices and browsers — if you don't, you may later realize your email campaign includes dead links or large images.

Don't buy email lists

Buying an email list may sound like a good idea to jumpstart your email marketing, but it's not. When it comes to email marketing campaigns, you want to send emails only to people who have shown interest in receiving them. Ensure that you get permission from prospects and customers before you hit send. You can get them to sign up via opt-in forms on your website or through other lead generation tactics.

How to plan out a solid email campaign strategy

Now you know email marketing best practices, it's time to develop a solid email campaign strategy. To do so, keep these tips in mind.

Organize your email list

Segment subscribers according to relevant criteria and send different versions of your email campaign to these groups. Regardless of how you organize your list, this is a crucial step. Your campaign's success rests on emailing the right people about relevant information that they signed up to receive.

Use a good email service provider

There are lots of good, affordable email service providers available. Depending on your organization and email list size, you can choose the best option that works for your marketing team and product roadmap .

A good email service provider enables you to segment your list, personalize email messages, and distribute your campaigns at the right time. You can also monitor subscriber activity and analyze results to improve future email marketing campaigns. A good email service provider would also integrate with other marketing and collaborative tools and enable email marketing automation to help you achieve more faster and consistently.

Perfect your timing

Timing is a critical element in any email campaign strategy and can have a significant effect on whether your subscribers read your emails or not. It is advisable to send out email marketing campaigns based on your recipients' time zones, not your own. Most email service providers allow you the option to do this. When you send out a morning email campaign, for example, you want all your subscribers to receive it in the morning in their respective time zones.

If your subscribers are all in one time zone, experiment with your timing to see what gives you the best results. You can review your website and opt-in form analytics to find out when your subscribers are active and send your campaigns at that time. Test and monitor the results to find out the best time to engage with your subscribers.

Personalize intelligently

In this day and age, most email subscribers know that email newsletters and campaigns are automated. This makes it more important that your email campaigns carry a personal touch. Give your subscribers a feel of your brand personality and voice in every newsletter. Show that you care by putting in the time to personalize your email campaigns. A few ways to do this include:

The most important note when personalizing is that you do so meaningfully and sparingly. Just like it takes some time to warm up to strangers in real life, it takes time for subscribers to become comfortable and familiar with your emails in their inbox.

Cater to your audience's needs

While creating an email marketing campaign, you may get lost in the process and focus more on your company's needs than the audience you serve. This is not a good approach. Remember to create your email campaigns to address your audience's needs. Offer value to them by informing them of insightful content and personalized product recommendations. Don't always email to sell something. Offer resources like free templates, tools, advice, or even discount codes for your product. Ask yourself, what are your subscribers' most significant pain points, and how can you help solve them with each email?

Split test your emails

Split testing your email campaigns means testing the performance of various versions of your email with slight changes in a specific element. Split-testing helps you make data-driven decisions about your email marketing campaigns instead of relying on instinct and personal preference. Most email service providers have split-testing features to help you test parts of your email, including:

Track and improve

Planning a solid email marketing campaign is an art, not a science. This means that you have to consistently monitor and improve your email marketing efforts to get the best results. Although email campaigns are mostly automated, this does not mean that you create them and then forget all about them. Assess and identify the areas of your marketing campaigns that need improvement. Some critical metrics to pay attention to include:

How can I improve my current email marketing strategy?

We have covered a lot in this article to help you develop an email marketing plan using email marketing best practices. However, if you're a marketer who already runs email marketing campaigns and needs to breathe life into your current email marketing strategy, here are some tips.

Create lead magnets

You need to attract prospects and customers with a compelling, relevant offer. You can achieve this with a lead magnet. What is a lead magnet, you may ask? A lead magnet is something of value you give for free to prospects at the top of your funnel in exchange for their email address. Most lead magnets are easily downloadable digital products like PDFs, audio files, or video courses. Some common lead magnet examples are:

Provide value through your content

Email marketing can bring in lots of revenue if done right. The most important thing for you to remember is to provide value in every email. Make it clear what subscribers gain or learn from each communication. Make your call-to-action actionable. Keep your content easily consumable, relevant, and timely. When you combine copywriting skills with email marketing, you can bring your relationship with your audience to a new level.

Write exciting subject lines

Your subject line is the first contact subscribers have with your email. If your subject line doesn't catch or hold subscribers' attention, they won't open it. Improving your subject line can significantly improve the overall quality of your emails, as well as your open and click-through rates. A great email subject line piques curiosity and is highly relevant to the organization and the recipient. Here are a few tips for writing better subject lines:

Stick to a schedule

Once you begin sending out emails, you must stick to a consistent schedule. This helps improve your overall campaign success as your subscribers become familiar with your schedule and may even miss receiving your emails. It also improves your email deliverability rate as internet service providers note consistency and are less likely to flag your email as spam.

Automate your campaigns

Automating your email marketing campaigns helps you achieve consistency, making your work as an email marketer or project manager a lot easier. Use automated email campaigns to nurture, onboard, provide value and resources, and communicate with your audience. Most email service providers have automation tools that help you create and send out email campaigns. All you have to do is create the content and set the flow into action.

Email marketing strategy template

Start with UDN Task Manager 's marketing campaign template to create a stellar email marketing strategy. A template helps you organize your campaign, divide it into actionable tasks, assign delivery dates, and track your progress.

Using an email marketing strategy template lays the foundation for you to draft an outline for your campaign sequence. This should include the subject and purpose of each email and its call-to-action. It will also cover how long the campaign will run, when you’ll send out emails, and how many emails you'll send throughout the campaign.

What is an automated email marketing strategy?

An automated email marketing strategy enables email marketers to send timed or triggered emails to their subscribers without manual effort. With an automated email marketing strategy, your emails are sent on a timed schedule or when prospects and customers take specific actions.

Automated email marketing campaigns are convenient because once created, they work on autopilot, bringing in new prospects and nurturing your existing customer base. Automated emails help build and engage your email list consistently, nurture leads through the customer journey, and convert prospects into customers.

How to plan your email marketing campaign with UDN Task Manager

Planning an email marketing campaign can be stressful, time-consuming, and disorganized, especially when working with cross-functional or outsourced teams. UDN Task Manager provides a powerful marketing project management software that offers visibility into every moving part of your campaign, enabling real-time collaboration between teams.

UDN Task Manager also supplies marketing performance insights by syncing with your email service provider and other applications , maximizing your chances of success. Are you ready to plan a successful email marketing campaign with less stress? Get started with a two-week free trial of UDN Task Manager marketing management software today.