25 Best Practices for Successful Email Marketing
Do you want to improve your email marketing campaigns? Here’s 25 best practices you can start applying right away:
- Create the most compelling subject lines you can.
- Use a recognizable company name in the “from” box.
- Add clear calls to action.
- Add contact information and/or a unique 800 number
- Ensure that you will get the best email delivery rates.
- Create a series of emails that all push (through links) to great content that show off how much you know and love your business niche.
- Use social sharing links in all your emails (i.e., show a link to your Twitter feed, or social media icon that acts as a live link to your page on Facebook or Pinterest).
- Track everything, including which emails get opened, which get clicks, and so on.
- Keep rewriting your subject lines and content copy to improve your effectiveness over time. Test effectiveness by sending Version A to a sample of 10% of your email and sending Version B to another 10% to determine the winner before mailing to your whole list.
- Minimize the use of images in your email newsletter, since they are unlikely to be displayed in many or even most emails, and spam filters are also wary of them. Instead,use HTML and inline CSS (fonts, text, and background colors and layout) to make the emails attractive
- Be sure that your email newsletter template isn’t more than 600 pixels wide so it displays correctly.
- Put your value proposition and at least one link into the first 100 pixels of height near the top of the newsletter.
- Keep your text short and easy to scan.
- Regularly purge the email list of old contacts and/or those who do not engage.
- Make sure that everyone on the list has agreed to receive your emails.
- Make it clear that the customers’contact information won’t be shared.
- Make it easy to opt out of the mailing list.
- Don’t overdo it, but know that unique and relevant content trumps worrying too obsessively about frequency.
- Provide HTML and text versions to ensure people who don’t receive HTML emails can read your emails.
- Put an image of the look and feel of your email newsletter (or the cover of PDF reports they can download from it)alongside the “subscribe” call to action.
- Make the email newsletter’s value proposition clear near the “subscribe” call to action. If you have thousands of other subscribers, say so, since that kind of social proof is persuasive.
- Include an assurance near the “subscribe” call to action about how you won’t sell their information to spammers.
- Make sure your emails display well on phones and smartphones! Why? Two reasons. First, if all US mobile time online were represented by one hour, 25 minutes of that hour would be used for email.Second, mobile Internet usage is projected to overtake desktop Internet usage by 2014, according to Return Path. In addition, according to digital marketing agency Knotice, mobile email opens are now at 41% and are on pace to surpass PC’s by the end of 2013.
- Set and maintain a consistent email schedule.
- Send out a test email to yourself and/or your team before sending it to your main list to be sure the content is displaying correctly and that links are working. That way, if something isn’t right, you can fix it before sending the email out to the full list.
Successful email marketing focuses on the customer, and offers something they will benefit from directly, not just information about your company or a boring sales pitch.
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