6 Best Practices for Email Marketing
I’ve uncovered a truth about email marketing: It works! However, if you’re just joining the party you may have to adjust your marketing habits. Your focus will need to shift from quantity to quality. For example: Like it or not, the law states that you must get explicit permission prior to sending and email. Email marketers must demonstrate a certain level of agility in handling the opportunities that arise from this very interactive marketing channel. Here are 6 best practices to consider when developing an email marketing strategy: 1. Deliverability is Key To avoid being flagged as spam, and therefore go unseen by your subscribers, avoid using spam-trigger words like “sale”, “free” and “offer”, etc in both the subject line and the body of your email. 2. One-Click Unsubscribe – Make it Easy It’s actually mandated by law that your emails contain an unsubscribe link. The link should lead the recipient right to a page where they can immediately be removed from your list. 3. The Power of Personalization 4. Subject Line in Under a Second 5. Above the Scroll 6. Don’t Over Sell By following these best practices, doing some of your own homework, and obeying the spam laws, you’ll be on your way to a winning email marketing campaign. — What do you think? What else contributes to a successful email campaign?
Even if your customer has agreed to receive email from you, you may find it difficult for your email to get to their inbox. Most large ISPs now use thorough spam protection systems to filter any email it thinks may be unsolicited, before it gets into the customers’ inboxes.
It may sound counterintuitive, but if you want your email marketing campaign to succeed, you must have an easy way for customers to unsubscribe. If you make it difficult, you run the risk of the recipient marking your email as spam. That will make deliverability in the future even more difficult.
When it makes sense for your specific email creative, we suggest taking steps to personalize them. It’s as simple as starting your email with “Hi [first_name]“. By doing this, you increase both your reading and click-thru rates. Why? By addressing them by their first name, your subscribers feel like they already have a relationship with you.
You have less than a second to catch your recipient’s attention with your email’s subject line. In this very short amount of time they will either choose to read, delete, or simply ignore your email. As mentioned before, you should avoid “spam words” and consider using the customer’s first name. We suggest you avoid using promotional phrases, ALL CAPS, or punctuation in your subject lines. Make sure your subject line is straightforward.
Whenever possible, place the more interesting content at the top of your email. Once your recipient starts reading the email, they’ll continue reading and even take action, but only if they find it interesting. Some popular email clients show a preview of an email in the inbox, even before a user opens it.
The goal of an email creative is to get buyers to take action by clicking on a button, signifying that they want to know more. It is only once they’ve clicked and are directed to your website that they can begin the buying process. Therefore, don’t overload them with product information or market data in the email. Give them just the right amount of info that, with a strong call to action, they’re intrigued enough to click.
Email is Dead. Long Live Email.
Spammers have ruined it for everyone. Legit email marketers fight an ongoing battle for the inbox. Even though our email marketing is permission-based, some ISPs block us anyway.
A recent study as reported by MediaPost brought up some interesting stats (emphasis mine):
Successful deliverability to consumers’ inboxes varies by ISP. Gmail, Google’s email service, is the most stringent US-based ISP for permission-based marketers to reach, according to the report, as 23% of emails that marketers sent to Gmail addresses did not reach the inbox.
So what’s the solution? Do we all switch to RSS-based communication? RSS is virtually spam-free. It fits the definition of permission-based marketing to a T. Yes, it’s got its drawbacks, but nothing that a few years and a few genius engineers can’t solve. Right? It’s a topic for another time. As we all know, email’s not going anywhere.
The problem? Your email sucks! As CopyBlogger puts it: “Many people will just mark you as a spammer for the crime of being boring.”
To be honest, I’ve clicked “Mark as Spam” on a newsletter where I could have easily spent the extra few seconds to unsubscribe the proper way. Google realizes this and has just created an auto-unsubscribe feature in Gmail. But by doing so you must report it as spam.
Solution = Write Better Content.
The DMA still claims that the ROI on email still beats search and other marketing channels.
Call Gmail’s tactics extreme, but it should prompt us marketers to create a better email. Let’s be smarter about this. Let’s do our own R&D.
Keep reading this blog as we discuss how to improve email deliverability and learn to further expand our reach online.
