You’ve likely received an email from a brand that you were excited to open. A special offer, alert about a new blog or other item of interest had been delivered directly to your inbox. Woohoo!
You’ve also likely received an email from a brand that you deleted immediately and didn’t even read the subject line all the way through. (Cue the sad trombone.)
It would be a shame to miss an opportunity as valuable as email marketing when connecting with your customer. Email marketing campaigns can provide incredible return on investment (ROI). In fact, for every $1 spent, brands receive an average ROI of $36.
The following email marketing best practices can help you to make the most out of campaign performance. These foundational methods will position your brand to hit important email marketing KPIs. You’ve already got the basics down? Kick it up a notch with our next-level email marketing tips to strengthen performance.
Keep reading to learn more!
Basic email marketing best practices
Segment your audience – This is a smart move as it allows for increased personalization. Segmenting your audience, or dividing it into groups based on demographics, behaviors or marketing preferences, will help your brand’s message connect with email recipients.
Clear and compelling subject line – The subject line is the first thing your customer will see, and it will either pique interest and prompt an open… or not. To get the best email marketing campaign performance, create clear and compelling subject lines.
Enhance email design and layout – Once your customer opens your email, you want them to stay engaged. Employ good design principles and leave white space around your copy and images so that your customer can easily understand and find important pieces of information.
Include a clear CTA – Speaking of design, be sure to include a clear call to action (CTA) that not only tells the customer what you want them to do but makes it obvious how they can accomplish the action. In email, this is often a button that takes the customer to your website, landing page, blog or product page.
Focus on delivering value – Just like all other forms of content, your email should provide value to your customers. This could mean sending special offers or updates on sales, educational content, interesting stories or other useful communication. Your emails should not always only be a prompt to purchase.
Advanced email marketing tips to boost results
Already embracing the email marketing best practices listed above? Take your email marketing campaigns to the next level with these tactics:
A/B testing – Get even more insight into your customers’ response to your email marketing campaigns by trying A/B testing with your email marketing campaigns. A/B testing involves creating two different versions of the same campaign and sending it out to two different audience groups at the same time to see which performs best.
Experiment with emojis – One way to boost open rate is to try using emojis in the subject line of your email. When done correctly, emojis increase open rates and perform better than the same subject line that was text-only.
Maintain your email list – By removing inactive subscribers, correcting invalid email addresses and managing unsubscribe requests, you can ensure that you are making the most of your emails. Plus, this will improve your click-through rate (CTR) and overall email marketing campaign performance as you’ll know that recipients are interested in getting communication from your brand.
Be mindful of different platforms – Your email recipients may be using different devices and viewing emails on desktop or mobile, and via a variety of platforms. Google is making changes with its 2024 security update which will affect how brands send email to users. Since this can impact user experience and overall performance, it’s vital that brands optimize email marketing campaigns for numerous platforms.
Check the time – Schedule delivery times by time zone. This way customers will receive communication at the best times to prompt an open. Email providers like MailChimp and Constant Contact provide features that let you send messages based on recipient time zones.
Embrace automation – To increase efficiency and enhance the customer experience, you might consider employing email marketing automation tools and strategies. There will be more on this in our next piece, Email Marketing Part 2: Automation Benefits and How to Get Started!
Open email marketing campaign performance
Get the most out of your email marketing campaign, boost ROI and ensure that your customers feel connected to your brand. These best practices and next-level tips can guide your company to creating an email marketing campaign that delivers results.
Be sure to check out part 2 of our email marketing blog series for more insights on email automation.
Email marketing can be an exceptional way to connect with your audience. Contact the team at Beyond Fifteen to learn how we can help you maximize email marketing campaign performance.
