Whether you wish to improve ROI or increase engagement, designing and creating compelling email marketing campaigns can be challenging. However, email marketing best practices can help you create campaigns that stand out and generate results with minimum effort and pain.

This article discusses the comprehensive list of email marketing best practices, from crafting captivating subject lines to designing emails that drive sales.

Email Marketing Best Practices for Subject Lines

Add Personalization

Adding personalization is among the best practices in email marketing that significantly improve open rates. A personalized subject line includes details related to the recipient, such as name, location, occupation, birth date, or purchase information.

The most effective way to add personalization is to use the recipient’s name in the subject line. Similarly, you can send a birthday deal to your recipient, wishing them a happy birthday in the subject line. Or, you can send a post-purchase follow-up email, mentioning the recipient’s recent purchase in the subject line.

Be Careful with Emojis

Emojis are compact graphic icons used to express emotions. They can effectively communicate by adding emphasis and clear intent. For example, in subject lines, emojis can add emphasis and appeal to audiences with fewer characters.

However, you should carefully place emojis in the subject lines. When relevant to the emails, emojis can increase open and click-through rates. On the contrary, they can make emails look spammy if not used properly, leading to a higher unsubscribe rate.

It is an email marketing best practice to consider the following when using emojis in the subject lines:

• Ensure emojis render correctly across various browsers, devices, and screens.
• Do not overuse emojis. Ideally, use only one emoji, as multiple emojis can make your email look spammy.
• A/B test placement of emojis to determine what works best for your audience. Generally, emojis placed at the end of the subject lines tend to perform better.

Use Numbers

Using numbers in the subject line can significantly increase the open rate. However, you can only achieve the desired result using the numbers cautiously. For example, if you refer to steps of a process or guide, use a lower number. However, if you are offering value, use a high number.

You can also use numbers to highlight time savings, like “5 Minute Guide to XYZ.” Since it is a common perception that guides take a long time to read, mentioning time to read can improve the open rate.

Similarly, you can add numbers to make your offer tempting and appealing, like “Earn 2,000 bonus points”.

A/B Test Subject Lines

To make the best of email marketing, see what your target market responds to and continue doing more. You can only ensure what works best once you do real-world testing.

The following are the five steps of A/B testing subject lines:

• Choose a random portion of your email list and divide it into two equal groups.
• Create two different subject lines for the same email. One subject line can include a question, while the other can be a statement.
• Send the email with the subject line A to one group and the email with the subject line B to the other group.
• Set a criterion for choosing the winning subject line. For example, you can compare the open or click-through rates. Compare the results and select the winning subject line.
• Use the winning subject line for the remaining contacts in the email list.

Email Marketing Best Practices for Campaigns

Run Campaigns Using a Professional Platform

Email marketing platforms make designing, sending, and optimizing email campaigns easy and smooth. They offer features like design templates, list segmentation, email automation, analytics, and A/B testing.

Therefore, among the top email marketing best practices is to run campaigns using a professional platform. A professional platform enables you to save time by quickly building emails using a drag-and-drop builder, and email automation allows you to send campaigns automatically in response to an event.

Most importantly, core metrics such as open and click rates help you track, analyze, and optimize campaigns.

Popular email marketing platforms include ActiveCampaign, Getresponse, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), ConvertKit, AWeber, and Constant Contact.

Segment Your Campaigns

Email campaign segmentation is essential for improving open rates and reducing unsubscribe rates. It allows sending targeted, personalized campaigns for better engagement and conversion. It ensures your subscribers receive only relevant campaigns containing information they are interested in. Consequently, you generate more revenue.

Segmentation involves dividing your subscribers list into smaller groups based on common features like interests, demographics, or buying behavior. For instance, segmenting subscribers based on geographical location can help send relevant deals or promotions in their area.

Similarly, segmenting subscribers based on their purchase history allows you to tailor offers and deals to reward loyal customers.

In short, segmentation is an email marketing best practice that ensures each campaign yields maximum ROI.

Decide on Frequency

Deciding on email frequency is next on the list of email marketing best practices. One way to decide on frequency is to learn how often other companies in your industry email their clients.

Unfortunately, the industry standard may not always benefit you. Sometimes, what works best for others may not work for you. Therefore, experiment with different frequencies to choose what works best for you.

However, set expectations early and ensure your subscribers know what they are signing up for. Similarly, regardless of how often you send campaigns, be consistent. Consistent emails keep you in subscribers’ minds and help build stronger relationships. Additionally, your subscribers know when to expect to hear from you.

On the contrary, users may forget about you or mark your emails as spam if you do not consistently send campaigns.

Send Campaigns at the Right Time

Sending emails at the right time can increase the open and engagement rates. However, you must A/B test emails to determine the right time. In other words, send emails on different days and times to check when your recipients engage the most.

Remember to take into account subscribers’ different time zones.

Follow Up

Send follow-up emails when necessary. For example, if someone has downloaded your content, you might ask if they found it helpful.

Remember, if prospects do not engage, it does not mean they are not interested in your product or service. There can be many reasons why they failed to engage, such as forgetting to respond due to a busy schedule. A follow-up email aims to remind the prospect about your product or service.

Instead of avoiding further contact amid fear of annoying prospects, send follow-up emails to increase conversion rates. But carefully decide when to follow up with customers.

Give the recipients enough time to respond. If they do not answer, you should follow up with an email only then. However, you should wait a few days before sending a follow-up.

Track Email Campaigns with the Right Metrics

Another critical email marketing best practice for campaigns is to track their performance. You can only improve a campaign if you measure its performance. In other words, to improve and improvise, you must first know where things went wrong. Therefore, email tracking is essential to measure results and refine your marketing campaigns.

Businesses run email campaigns with objectives that may vary across campaigns. As a result, choosing the right metrics to measure performance is critical. 

For example, tracking conversion rate is the right metric for pitching a product or service. Similarly, if you are announcing a new outlet, you should track the open rate to assess the campaign’s success.

Email Marketing Best Practices for CTAs

Include a Clear CTA

Businesses send email campaigns to achieve a goal, for which they must include a clear CTA. What you expect your recipient to do should be apparent. Do you want them to register for a webinar? Or do you want them to download a guide? Whatever the purpose, make it clear to the recipients with a clear CTA.

Direct and clear CTAs make it easier for customers to take action, saving them time. They also lead to better engagement and conversion rates.

Decide the Placement of CTAs

When you place CTAs above the fold, the recipients can see them instantly after opening the email. On the contrary, if CTAs are placed below the fold, the recipients may miss them if they do not scroll down. Therefore, in scenarios where the audience is familiar with your product or service, place CTAs above the fold to immediately draw their attention.

However, when the audience is unaware of your product or service, placing CTAs below the fold may be more appropriate. In such cases, recipients are not yet ready to take action and need further information before they proceed.

Email Marketing Best Practices for Design

Align Design with Brand

The most crucial email marketing best practice for design is to make the design consistent with your brand. In other words, your emails’ layout, colors, and overall design should reflect your brand identity.

For example, the logo must appear in the same position in every email, and the color scheme should align with the brand colors.

Be Consistent with Design

Ensuring consistent design across campaigns is as crucial as aligning design with the brand. For example, if the unsubscribe button appears in the footer of one campaign, do not place it in the header of another campaign. Similarly, if the header includes a link to the website in one campaign, ensure it appears in the exact location in all other campaigns.

Consistent design is critical because most recipients scan emails rather than reading them. A consistent design makes it easy for recipients to locate relevant information and CTAs and ensures they know how to take the next step.

Use Responsive Design

Another critical email marketing best practice is to ensure responsive design. A responsive design renders correctly on all devices of varying screen sizes.

In today’s world, most people view their emails on their mobile phones. Therefore, designing emails to adjust the content’s size across different devices is essential. A responsive design lets recipients use and read your emails without any trouble. As a result, engagement rates increase, and unsubscribe rates decrease.

The following are a few tips to ensure responsive design:

• Use a single-column layout.
• Place important CTAs above the fold.
• Use a bigger text font that is readable on small screens.
• Preview emails to ensure they look good on both desktop and mobile devices.

Design for Accessibility

Designing for accessibility is among the most neglected best practices in email marketing. Neglecting the needs of a diverse audience and failing to provide a comfortable user experience for all groups of recipients negatively impacts engagement rates.

Your recipients may include people with visual impairments, varying education levels, and special needs. Therefore, ensure the email design is accessible for these groups of people with differing needs.

Following are a few tips to ensure your design is accessible for all groups of recipients:

• Use an appropriate font size and color.
• Avoid complex words, jargon, and abbreviations to cater to recipients.
• Use enough white spaces.
• Avoid bright colors.
• Avoid animations and flashy images.

Include Custom Email Signature

Including a custom email signature is among the email marketing best practices that most marketers underestimate and ignore.

Using a custom email signature offers benefits such as building trust and creating a professional image, boosting brand awareness, and enhancing marketing efforts. Therefore, creating an email signature that automatically gets added to all your emails is an email marketing best practice that can help boost your marketing campaigns.

General Email Marketing Best Practices

Do Not Purchase Lists

Since the main objective of email marketing is to acquire customers, it is critical to grow your email list organically. Although it may take time, you will experience high open and engagement rates.

Conversely, purchasing an email list results in a low engagement rate and increases the risk of alerting spam filters. In the worst case, the email service provider may close your account.

Therefore, ensuring contacts on your email list are only added after consent is crucial.

Use a Human Sender’s Name

Using a human sender name is next on the email marketing best practices list. A recognizable and memorable human sender name leaves a positive impression and persuades recipients to open emails, leading to better open rates.

On the other hand, recipients are likely to ignore emails that do not use human sender names as they appear spammy and automated.

Avoid Using No-Reply Email

A no-reply email address means you cannot receive your audience’s feedback, replies, or opinions. It harms business growth and gives the impression that you don’t care about your audience.

Making it easier for the customers to contact you positively impacts email campaigns. On the contrary, making it hard for the audience to give feedback or opinions will only frustrate them. Therefore, email marketing’s best practice is to avoid using a no-reply email address.

Optimize Preview Text

Next on the list of email marketing best practices is optimizing preview text. Preview text, also known as “preheader text” is a summary of the email that appears below or next to the subject line in the inbox.

A preview text catches the recipient’s attention by providing insight into the email’s contents. It aims to provide users with the main points of an email.

If you don’t specify a preview text, the email client may use the first few lines of your email as the default preview text. Depending on the email template, this text may be useful or irrelevant text which does not correctly reflect the email’s content.

Therefore, optimize your preview text to include the most enticing content. However, choose concise and powerful phrases and limit the character count to 50 words.

Make it Easy to Unsubscribe

Email marketing is only effective if your audience actively engages with the content. Therefore, filtering out inactive subscribers is critical to keeping your mailing list clean.

Inactive subscribers can significantly impact your open and engagement rates. Additionally, sending campaigns to inactive subscribers can increase spam rates.

One way to naturally filter out your email list is to provide your audience with an unsubscribe option. However, ensure it is easy and painless to unsubscribe. Otherwise, users will likely mark your emails as spam.

Providing recipients with an unsubscribe option improves deliverability rates and enhances reputation. It also prevents emails from being flagged as spam.

Avoid Spam Filters

Spam filters have become sophisticated with time. They use extensive criteria to decide whether to place an email in the spam folder. Moreover, they keep learning what spam looks like by observing what email recipients mark as spam. Therefore, a small mistake can land your email in the recipient’s spam folder instead of the inbox.

The following are a few best practices to avoid spam filters:

Maintain open rate: If you have a low open rate or many of your emails are marked as spam by recipients, your future campaigns will likely land in a spam folder. Therefore, it is essential to maintain a reputation.

Comply with the spam laws. Many countries have anti-spam laws you must abide by when sending email campaigns. For example, the CAN-SPAM Act requires senders to provide a physical address and include an unsubscribe link in every email.

Send emails to only those who consented to receive campaigns from you.

Avoid using spam-trigger words in the subject line, such as “Free”, “Guarantee”, “Urgent”, and “Buy”.

Conclusion

Email marketing requires extensive planning and effort to make campaigns stand out and reach the right audience. A solid strategy is essential to target the right audience and evoke their interest in your products. Therefore, follow the email marketing best practices to help boost your marketing efforts and achieve your desired goals.