Email Marketing Best Practices

Email isn’t the newest marketing communication channel—yet 72 percent of U.S. consumers say that email marketing is the number one way they’d prefer to receive permission-based promotions from businesses. Consumers prefer email marketing because they are in control and they trust brands to respect their preferences. According to McKinsey consulting firm, email marketing is nearly 40x more effective for acquiring customers than Twitter and Facebook combined. Take these email best practices into consideration when developing your emails:   Subject Lines: 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. Include your CTA in the subject line or first few lines of your email – test different subject line types like questions, facts, etc. Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long have an open rate of 58%. However, the standard subject line length is 40 – 50 characters.   Image Width: 600px for a banner image and 530px for a regular email newsletter image.   Personalization / Email Segments: Adding personalized content is an ideal way to send emails your readers will love. Product recommendation emails can increase sales by 15 – 25 percent! Segment your email lists by different criteria like products they’ve purchased, number of purchases, gender, etc. Utilize these email segments by sending content that’s relevant to their purchase behavior and interests.   Promotions: According to Experian’s analysis, there is a 64% increase in average revenue per email that contains a coupon versus standard emails.   Content: Content should be short and to the point – use bullet points when you can. Include content hierarchy so readers can easily decipher the main CTA from the secondary and tertiary.   Call-To-Actions: Have one main call-to-action in your email — it should be very clear what you want your reader to do through CTA button styling (size, color, verbiage).   Image / Content Balance: Balance text and images (including one large image can result in spam, but only having text is less likely to get read – have a healthy balance). Continue to test your email templates to understand what increases clicks.   Mobile Friendly: A growing number of people are viewing emails through mobile instead of desktop (53% of mobile email opens in 2015). Keep this in mind as you design your email and make sure it is mobile-compatible.   Encourage sharing via email subscriptions as well as social. Email referrals can have better responses because of the thoughtful and personal nature as opposed to a tweet broadcasted to hundreds.   Don’ts:

  • Don’t flood people’s inboxes. They will unsubscribe en masse.
  • Avoid the spam filter by using subject lines other than “Click Here For a Prize” or “WIN A FREE CRUISE!”
  • Don’t forget to A/B test! Testing and measuring everything from subject lines and send times can mean the difference in substantial increases across email KPIs. For example: timing can be everything to an email campaign. Figure out what days of the week and times of day have the highest CTR for your subscribers and send emails during those times.
  Tactics for Growing Subscriber Lists:
  • Have a general email sign-up on website.
  • Make sign-up requests specific to different sections of website.
  • Email capture from Facebook.
  • Capture emails during inbound sales calls.
  • Acquire email for loyalty program registration in-store.
  • Sales associate requests email during check-out process.
  • Email acquisitions tied to emailed receipt or ticket delivery.
  • Require email to create an account on website.
  • Drive online loyalty program registration with email address sign-up.
  • Promote content via social media that requires email registration to access.
  • Option to opt into email when viewing mobile app content.
  • Require email to register mobile app.
Read this article for more tips to grow your email list.   To learn more about email best practices, explore these short information videos from ExactTarget.com.   Looking for more tips? We’d be happy to chat! Simply schedule a free demo and our team will connect with you shortly.    ]]>