The fall of email marketing has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, when it comes to receiving permission-based promotional messages, 77% of people would rather get them through email. This is opposed to other channels like SMS, phone, direct mail or even social media.
All that remains is to get it right. Building a beautiful and responsive website, selecting one of best hosting providers and getting people to subscribe to your mailing list is half the battle. What you need to do next is get people to engage with your brand through your emails.
However, this is easier said than done. Many brands have tried sending emails only to get no results. This is because the efforts that they are putting into the campaign are lackluster. Furthermore, people receive tons of emails from other brands fighting for their attention. One can easily see why getting right is essential.
To get better open rates and stay ahead of the curve, follow these six email marketing best practices.
1.Make Sure the Email Content is Relevant
The easiest way to lose an audience you have worked so hard to get is to send them irrelevant content. Remember, every email client these days has a spam filter. Do not think for one moment that your readers will not click the spam button once they sense an irrelevant email.
So how do you make sure that you are sending your readers content they will find relevant? Follow this quick tips:
- Curate the content – Locate or create content that you believe will be relevant and engaging to your audience and put it in the email.
- Make it personal – That way, the email has personality and is more relatable.
- Make it useful – As an expert in your niche, you can engage your audience more and maintain your email list by providing your audience with helpful and actionable content.
- Watch your competition – Subscribe to your competitor’s email list and find out what they are sending their subscribers. If their content is useful and relevant, you can learn a lot from it.
2. Write an Effective Welcome Email
The best email marketing campaign is one that focuses on building and sustaining relationships with new and existing customers. That is why a welcome email is important since that is what sets the tone for the relationship.
As soon as someone signs up, send them an email. You might want to do this right away because your business will still be fresh in the person’s mind. All that remains is to make sure the welcome emails is effective.
Here is how you do it:
- Make it personal – Make sure it contains the person’s name.
- Introduce yourself – Briefly describe to the recipient what you are all about.
- Avoid no-reply emails – Give the subscriber a chance to respond to the email.
- Tell them what to expect – Tell them what content you will be sending them and the frequency of your emails. This is your chance to meet their expectations, which is very important.
3. Track Open Rates and Clicks
Who is engaging with your emails and who isn’t? These are important metrics to know, making this tip one of the email marketing best practices to try. If you don’t measure the performance of your campaign, you basically won’t know if it is succeeding or failing.
For example, by tracking open rates and clicks, you can know which type of content your recipients respond to the most. This way, if you are doing some right, you can keep it up. And if you are doing something wrong, you can take the necessary action to increase the open rates and clicks.
4. Don’t Send Too Many Emails
Sending your recipients irrelevant emails isn’t the only way to force them to use their spam filter or unsubscribe from the mailing list. Sometimes, sending them too many emails can be considered spammy behavior. You can come off as an annoyance, which they would want to get rid of right away.
You want to engage people, not annoy them.
These days, you can let your subscribers pick how often they want to receive emails. (Bombarding them with emails is far from the best way to ensure engagement). By doing so, you will be able to better engage with your recipients instead of getting blocked or unsubscribe.
5. Test the Content of the Email
Don’t just send out an email the moment you finish typing it. Make sure you preview it first to make sure that everything is working. Make sure things like all the images are showing and that all links are working properly (no broken links).
If you are using email marketing tools like MailChimp, for example, one of the best email marketing practices is to send one to yourself. After you confirm everything is in order, send the email to your recipients.
6. Find out Who Still Wants to Receive Emails from You
Sure, the person has subscribed to your email list, but that still doesn’t mean that you can’t confirm if they are still interested in receiving emails. So before you send them any email that markets your products or services, send them one asking if they are still interested.
This is one of the email best practices because it helps you build a clean list (list of people wanting and willing to engage with your content). Provide them with a link that will allow them to unsubscribe in case they are no longer interested. Place it somewhere in the footer of your email.
Learn from Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing is one of the best ways to engage with potential customers. But many people don’t do it right and end up not seeing good results. This is because they are not following the email marketing best practices that lead to high email open rates.
Considering that email yields a higher return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing channels, you need to do it right. So be sure to try to the email marketing best practices mentioned above. Particularly, making sure the content is relevant and that your are not spamming your audience.
By following these best practices, you can rest assured knowing that you know how to do email marketing properly.
About the author:
Rick has been a part of the content marketing industry for 10 years since 2009. Working with many clients Rick has built up his experience in website hosting and website builder niches. With this experience, he is trying to convey clear information to the world on these topics. His articles tend to be data-driven and researched thoroughly to give a strong and unique point of view on every subject. He believes that using real-world examples is one of the best ways to catch readers attention. A writer by day and gamer by night, Rick likes to involve himself with the e-sports scene.
Tom Padraig says
I’ve not used the email feature in jarvee yet. I stay clear of email platforms like mailchimp, mailerlite these days, and came across a plugin for gmail business called gmass and it kinda dodges the promotions folder on a lot of the stuff I send out. Your right email is still a very effective tool and still allowed under GDPR guidelines in europe under the legitimate interest clause. With a google business account you can send out just under 2000 e-mails a day. It’s important however to assure its not a new google business account and that it’s an aged one when using plugins like gmass. Must look at the jarvee mail feature to see what it does.
Bruce says
Jarvee’s Email feature is made so you can publish posts on your blogs, on platforms that support posting via email (wp, blogger). It’s not really for mass emailing.
Spencer says
Hey Rick, thank you for sharing. I want to start with email marketing, but I don’t have experience and just started reading about it. I’m not that good at content writing that’s why I was avoiding to use it. Hope these tips will help.
Kareem says
I really didn’t know that the email marketing holds so high place on marketing strategies scale. I’m not the fan of emails, but after reading this article I’ll consider implementing this marketing strategy into my existing portfolio. I liked this article a lot, thanks for not letting me sleep tonight 🙂
Jesse Brewer says
I get so many annoying emails daily, they should read your article to learn how to do it better I agree that email marketing is not dead, but if you do it, you should know to do it properly.
Kamila says
Measuring performance is very important, this way you know if you are doing the right thing or you subscribers are just feeling spammed with annoying content. We had to work on this since we didn’t have enough knowledge about it, but we are still learning. Thank you for sharing!
Sammy says
This is a very good and helpful strategy because You don’t have to take care of different limitations, about sharing links, number of images and videos. Emails are great and we all use them.
Zion says
I can compare this strategy with flour and most expensive croissant sale because everyone needs flour for making lot’s of different products, among them, are croissants, it’s same with email addresses, we all need them to create any kind of social profiles, so we all have an email address, but we don’t have Instagram or Facebook account.
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