Email Marketing Best Practices

Email marketing remains a powerful tool for business. Over one-third of customers say that they visited a site because they received an email from a particular brand. Moreover, a similar percentage report that they purchased from a company after receiving an email from it. That is the power of email marketing!

For marketers doubting that email marketing is an excellent strategy, when done well, every $1 that goes into the process yields $32, which translates to a 3,200% return on investment. This why email marketing is a widespread practice. The only question that remains is: how can a company optimize email marketing efforts?

On that note, here is a curated list of email marketing best practices guaranteed to boost click and open rates, minimize churn, and increase the overall lifetime value of a subscriber.

Build Your Sender Reputation

A good IP address reputation is essential for any brand that uses email to reach goals like boosting website traffic, increasing revenue, enhancing customer retention and satisfaction, building brand awareness, and communicating transaction details. With a good sender reputation, a business will have higher inbox placement rates. For this purpose, follow the tips below:

• сhoose a reliable email service provider;
• collect high-quality mailing lists;
• remove inactive recipients from email lists;
• use double opt-in subscription;
• check DNS-based blacklists to ensure a business’s IP is not included;
• send emails from a dedicated IP address to be fully responsible for your sender reputation;
• set up SPF and DKIM records to vouch for your emails and reduce the chances of being treated as spam.

Below is the way to authenticate your email with SPF and DKIM records in SendPulse. Here you may also add your domain for tracking opens and click-throughs. Follow this guide to set up it.

Create Branded Subscription Forms

Subscription forms allow you to gather contact information from your customers. You can use them to ask for an email address, name, phone number, gender, etc. This information will help you send relevant and targeted campaigns. SendPulse allows marketers to create branded subscription forms, set display options, add fields absolutely for free. You can create a subscription form for your website in 10 minutes using SendPule's form builder.

To create your one, follow the guide!

Use Welcome Emails to Build Great Relationships

One of the most effective emails marketers can send is a welcome email. Apart from providing impressive click-through and open rates, welcome emails also enable marketers to maintain clean lists and increase deliverability. If a user provides an incorrect email address, any email that you send to an incorrect address will hard bounce.

Moreover, welcome emails assist in reassuring new subscribers that their sign up was successful. Also, they help brands connect with new customers and offer incentives that can result in higher click-through rates. Below is an example of a welcome email.

National Geographic thanks subscribers by offering a 10% discount and suggests exploring the website.

Send Emails at the Right Time

By sending emails at the right time, businesses boost their conversion rates. Generally, the best average CTRs and open rates are realized when emails are received between 9 to 11 am and 3 to 5 pm. Any weekday is ideal for sending emails. No one wants to receive an email on the weekend. But, with this said, it is essential to appreciate the fact that every business’s audience responds differently to email campaigns. As such, marketers must understand consumer trends, customer preferences, and the market at large to ensure they send emails that yield higher engagement.

SendPulse did some research on this issue and shared the results on the blog — check out!

With the SendPulse's Automation 360 feature, marketers set up automated emails in advance to be sent according to subscriber actions. Follow this step-by-step guide to create an automated email flow!

Send Emails with the Right Frequency

Marketers need to get the frequency of sending emails right. Typically, sending one email per week is considered to be the best practice, given that it generates the highest click-through and open rates. Do not send too infrequently because it leads to lower lifetime value, missed revenue opportunities, an inconsistent or poor sender reputation, lack of inbox presence, and an inability to maintain a clean email list.

On the other hand, sending many emails within a short time can lead to increased opt-outs, reduced subscriber visibility, and decreased engagement. The best practice is to let the users choose how often they would like to hear from you. Check out the example below. 

Place the CTA and Main Message Above the Fold

Ensure that the central message and CTA are above the fold for the recipient to see it. Apart from that, try to stick to one CTA button in one email, if possible. That will help not to distract your subscribers’ attention. Make sure that a CTA is unambiguous and easy to tap.

Banana Republic has the main message and the CTA in their email above the fold to make sure subscribers click through immediately. Besides, they’ve managed to provide segmented offers to the whole audience placing three buttons.

Segment an Email List

To ensure that a business sends relevant content, marketers need to segment the audience. After a user creates an account, let them fill the form for future segmentation or provide each email with a link to manage their email content preferences. That will help you benefit from a significant increase in revenue.

Look how Banana Republic allows its users to select their preferences with a link in the email footer.

Case in point, if a brand deals with sports equipment, marketers can gather information on what the customers enjoy. After that, they can go ahead to create email campaigns based on segments such as football, tennis, golf, and so forth. With SendPulse, brands can segment and send personalized emails to customers based on variables such as interests, behaviors within past campaigns, location, gender, and so forth.

This guide explains how to send email campaigns in SendPulse using segmentation.

Test Different Subject Lines and CTAs

A/B testing is essential for improving your email marketing strategy. With A/B testing, Marketers divide their recipients into two groups, A and B. Then, they send each group an email campaign with a different subject line or a CTA. After that, the business identifies which variation yields the best results, and thus adapts it.

Below is an A/B test created in SendPulse, the aim of which to find out which subject line variant outperforms.

Provide Incentives

A nice incentive motivates users to join your brand and stimulates them to take action. The type of incentive that you use, naturally, varies from industry to industry. The incentive may be a discount, free shipping, a time-limited offer, an ebook, etc. Besides, such freebie helps re-engage sleepy clients.

An email from True Citrus offering a 35% discount on all the items.

Combine Email Marketing with Social Media Marketing

Increase your audience on socials with the help of email marketing. Let users check out your profiles and join the community on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Don’t duplicate content — make it unique to increase value.

Bath&Body Works put social media buttons into every email template.

Follow this step-by-step guide to insert social media buttons in your email campaign.

Automate Your Email Marketing

You no longer need to create all of your email campaigns from scratch since email services automate all these routing and time-consuming tasks such as creating an email template, sending triggered messages, etc. This way, marketers save time and ensure a highly personalized approach to every client.

SendPulse Automation 360 allows sending emails triggered by subscribers’ actions. Send different emails depending on variables, keep track of conversions, and monitor each client’s path in the flow.
You can create abandoned cart emails in Automation 360. Users receive an email reminding them about the item left in the cart. If they buy, they receive a thank-you email. If not, they are offered a 10% discount.

Find details on creating an abandoned cart campaign in our blog article.

To conclude, these are the best practices that can help optimize your email campaigns. By using SendPulse, marketers avoid a lot of hassle given that the service effectively handles issues such as email list segmentation, sending timed emails, avoiding spam, and so forth.

Last Updated: 11.04.2024