Email Marketing Best Practices (Part 1)

by Rahimah Sultan

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Email is still one of the most successful ways to connect with your customers. Most marketers say they would rather give up social media than email marketing.

Some business owners don’t use email marketing best practices and that decreases their chances of success.

That’s what today’s article is about.

I’ll be discussing 28 email marketing best practices covering segmentation, personalized subject lines, setting goals, and more.

1.  Segmentation

As segmentation is one of the top email marketing best practices, you should segment your email campaigns. By doing so, and tailoring your content to your subscribers’ specific needs, you increase your email list and email relevancy and improve open and clickthrough rates.

Campaign segmentation means dividing your email list into groups or segments based on shared characteristics such as gender, location age group, or purchase history. Then you can send tailored content to each group, thus boosting engagement and conversions.

When segmenting your list, consider:

The problems your subscribers are trying to solve and what information they need to make a buying decision.

Decide how to segment your list.

Use tools like Mailchimp to set up groups within your email list.

Create relevant email content for each group.


2.  Personalize

Personalize your content because most consumers only want to participate with content designed for them.

Personalizing your email content allows you to connect with your contacts on a human level, and it’s as simple as a personalized token like “Dear [First Name].”

You can also customize the content of the email by including a sentence like, “If you want to learn about email marketing best practices, you’ll love this week’s article.


3.Optimize Text

Optimize your preview text

To make sure your customer opens your email, you must optimize the subject and preview text.

Subscribers check the preview text (the bit of text which shows your subject line) before deciding whether or not to open an email.

Most email clients will take the first few lines of your body copy as preview text if you don’t optimize, and often, this can result in irrelevant or low-quality preview text that stops customers from opening it.

Some things to consider when optimizing preview text:

Keep your preview text to between to 40 and 130 characters long.

Here are some other things to consider:

1. Provide value by considering what is most important to your subscriber and address that problem.

2. Make your subject line and preview text work together.

3. Use it to persuade your user to open the email.

4. Keep the text succinct, and include a call to action.

5. Test the text on mobile desktop email clients.


4.  Offers

Always focus on your subscribers’ interest and offer them something valuable or exclusive discounts on your product/service.

Make sure you understand their problems and what content they need to solve them. Then you can create email content that’s laser-focused on delivering value.


5.  Unsubscribing

Although your main goal in email marketing is probably to grow your list, you’ll lose some people along the way.

You need to make unsubscribing easy, because uninterested subscribers can lead to:

lower open rates

emails being reported as spam

bad deliverability

lower ROI

Buyers should be able to unsubscribe with one click. The unsubscribe link should also be visible in the email footer. If you’re using a hyperlink, be sure the link is large enough for people using mobile devices to click on it easily.


6.  Decisions

When creating a high-performing email campaign, the first step is to decide on frequency and goals.

Will you be emailing, weekly, monthly, quarterly? Decide what works best for you and your subscribers.

Your email campaign goals determine what you’re sending and how often to send it.


The main thing is to experiment and find what works best for you.


7.  Scheduling

Make a schedule for your email content that includes:

Dates you plan to send your email campaigns

A list of email marketing topics

Other content that needs to be included in your emails such as images, videos, etc.

You can use something like Moosend (https://moosend.com/blog/email-marketing-calendar/)
I do not receive any compensation from this.

Be flexible! Allow room in your email marketing strategy for trend changes and industry updates.


8.  Separate Emails


You need to create separate emails for each goal.

Always keep your goals in mind when creating your email marketing content.

Do you want to drive traffic to your website?

Are you trying to increase brand awareness?

Are you trying to make a sale?


Creating separate emails for each goal helps you create more targeted campaigns and ensure your list gets the most relevant information.

If you’re trying to get more traffic to your website, your emails should include links to lead magnets, recent blogs, and your latest products/services.


9.  Testing

Email A/B Testing: Timing is one of the most important email campaign best practices. Test different times such as the times of day and days of the week to see when you get the maximum engagement.

Remember, your subscribers may have different preferences depending on their location. If you have lots of subscribers in Australia, you’ll want to pay attention to the time difference and send your emails when it’s best for them.

By testing different strategies and email options you can make your messaging timely, relevant, and engaging.


10. Tracking

If you want to succeed, email marketing best practices need ongoing tracking and optimization. This is where you need email marketing platforms like Mailchimp(https://mailchimp.com/features/reports-and-analytics/).
I get no compensation for this.

To improve your email marketing campaign, you should occasionally review your email analytics and adapt them accordingly.

If your open rate is low, you might want to experiment with different send times or change the subject lines.


11. Relevant Content

Deliver relevant content to your subscribers. If you’re not sure what content your audience would prefer, conduct a market research survey.


12. Drip Campaigns

Build drip campaigns, which are a series of emails sent over time, to nurture leads and move prospects through your sales funnel.

A drip campaign is something like this:

Typically, the first email is a friendly introduction to you or your company.

The second might detail more about your product.

The third could be a free trial or an e-book link.


You can use email automation to create drip campaigns. If you’re using Mailchimp, Active Campaign, or something similar, you can set up automated email drip campaigns within the platform.


Follow these best practices when crafting an email drip campaign:

Separate your audience into lists of active customers, prospects, and past customers.

Design a welcome email for new subscribers.

Set up email automation rules to send additional emails based on subscriber engagement.

Create custom content for audience segments for each email in the drip campaign.

Be sure each email has a clear CTA.

Keep an eye on email analytics to check which drip campaigns are most successful.


13. Audience Segmentation

Segment Audiences by Interest Level.

Internet users are more likely to buy from brands that offer personalized content. So, segment email lists into different groups in order to send targeted messages to specific subscribers.

If a customer isn’t opening your usual marketing emails, you can tag them as uninterested. Then, you can send them a different email than the one for someone who frequently interacts with your content.

Most email marketing automation platforms have a tagging system. Mailchimp’s groups and segments feature lets you tag customers by interests, purchase history, and other data.


14. Deliverability

Be aware of deliverability.

You can improve your email deliverability by only collecting email addresses from people who have actually “opted in” to receive emails.

An opt-in email is an email that’s only sent to subscribers who willingly provided their email address to join your mailing list.

Opt-in emails are a form of inbound email marketing, which means you aren’t contacting random customers to drum up interest in your product/service.

Do consider the time of day and the day of the week you’re sending emails.


This article covers 14 email marketing best practices. I’ll cover the rest in my next article.


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