20 email marketing tips and best practices

E-mail marketing is a powerful and effective communication and relationship channel for any company, regardless of segment and size.

Although it is not as glamorous as some newer channels, such as social networks and Whatsapp, for example, thousands of emails are sent and received every day.

Email is an effective tool for creating your own contact base, generating engagement with the brand and increasing sales. Now let’s review when you should use email marketing and some benefits and statistics that reinforce the role and importance of email marketing for your business.

When to use email marketing

• Build relationships : Create connections through personalized engagement.
• Increase Brand Awareness : Keep your company and services top of mind at a time when your potential customers are ready to engage.
• Convert leads: Encourage subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset they find valuable.
• Build customer loyalty: Delight your customers with content that can help them succeed in their goals.

Tips and best practices for you to be successful with email marketing

Don’t buy lists or use cold lists to send emails:

This tip is not new, but with data protection law (GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation) it is worth reinforcing.

Campaigns rely on good open rates, and if you’re reaching out to people who don’t know or have interacted with your brand, your results will suffer.

Avoid using “do not reply” as a sender:

Have you ever heard of CAN-SPAM? This is a guideline for all email marketers. Among the CAN-SPAM rules, it is worth noting to use “do not reply” as the sender of your email.
Example: “[email protected]”

Setting the sender to “do not reply” prevents users from responding to or opting out of receiving emails from your company.

Use few fonts:

The less polluted it is, the more conversions you will achieve in your email campaigns.

Use a maximum of three different font types in the email.

Always optimize with the “preview” of the message:

By default, preview text uses the first few words of the email body and displays next to the subject line before the person opens it.

The problem is that custom email templates often use conditional statements like “can’t see images?” or “isn’t displaying correctly? allowing it to go directly into preview when exiting.

Main message and Call to Action:

Keep the email’s main message and Call to Action above the first reading fold

Always personalize the opening of the email

You can segment your audience by customer type (leads, subscriber, user, etc.), but it shouldn’t be the first thing recipients see in messages. Personalizing your email greeting with your contacts’ first name catches each reader’s attention immediately and generates a better read rate.

Keep emails between 500 and 650 pixels:

If your email template is larger than 650 pixels, you are asking users to scroll horizontally to read your entire message. This is even more complicated for a recipient who is on their mobile device. The pixel width of your email is a critical component.

A/B test titles

If you’re unable to increase your email’s open and click rates, perform an A/B test. A/B testing in emails allows for variation in headlines and images to see if your target audience is more or less prone to taking action when interacting with email.

Fewer emails represent a higher engagement rate

Sending just one email has better results within a campaign. Keep in mind that while sending more emails may lower the conversion rate per individual message, the total number of conversions would likely be higher if you increase your email frequency based on audience engagement. Do not continue to insist on sending if the contact does not open your emails

Whenever possible, use Storytelling

Storytelling is one of the oldest principles in sales. Storytelling is an effective way to provoke feelings in your recipients and convince them to buy your product without actually being interested in them.

Be careful with the sending frequency

Statistics show that most people unsubscribe from emails because brands send a lot of emails with a high frequency. Test the list to see who is involved and who is not. After all, involvement is essential for good delivery capacity.

To gauge how often users will open your emails, consider adding a section in the footer of your email allowing subscribers to choose how often they want to receive emails.

Send the email at the right time

When should you send your emails? The data says that two time frames tend to get the best average email open rates and CTRs:  9am to 11am and 3pm to 5pm (according to GetResponse).

Create a modern design that meets the characteristics of the personas

• Avoid using stock images
• Worry about the mobile experience first
• Test the experience on all email readers
• Always keep the logo in the header
• Content size should be a maximum of 2 scrolls on mobile

Worry about delivering relevant content

Minimum of 2 pieces of content relevant to the audience (little promotional content)

• Always test exploring content for each type of persona
• Use creative titles (that attract attention)
• Use only one prominent CTA

Analyze the numbers and adapt the content to your audience’s behavior

Evaluate the results of at least 10 emails to define a behavior pattern ( Day, Time, Content, Devices, etc.)

The importance of accepting all contacts

With the data privacy law, it becomes mandatory to have “optin” for all contacts, without exception. Avoid sending emails to contacts that you do not have a legitimate optin for in your CRM and email sending tool.

Contact base hygiene

We know that approximately 20% of the contact/email base becomes obsolete within a year, people change companies, are fired or even change their email addresses. So, continually clean your email database and be very careful with types of bounce errors.

Unengaged contacts

What do you do when a contact doesn’t open your emails? Deleted from the base? Should not. Adopt an engagement strategy for non-engaged people (30, 60 and 90 days, for example).

Email Suppression List

Create contact suppression lists within your database and use them as criteria for not sending emails in your campaigns.

 Sunset Email Policy (Opt-Out)

Adopt an email list segmentation strategy to ensure you don’t send emails to unengaged people, this will improve your engagement rates and email deliverability.