Email Marketing Best Practices: Creating Effective Campaigns that Convert

Marketing is important for every brand out there, and what marketing they use truly depends on the budget and the expertise brands have. That’s the reason most of them reach out to the best branding and advertising agencies in the U.S., but you need your own research as well. 

Well, let us save you the trouble because we are talking about email marketing. Email marketing is considered one of the most cost-effective mediums for advertising and marketing your products and services. So, whether you want to increase your revenue, tap into the market, or optimize conversions, we are spilling all the beans. 

1. Focus On Your Target Audience

Many brands think that all they have to do is send out emails to random people, and they will start getting sales. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s not how things work. This is because you collect the email addresses and send the emails; you must have a clear understanding of your audience. That’s because the email marketing strategy should be focused on your audience’s shopping behavior and interests. You’ve to ask yourself the following questions;

• What is the unique thing about my target audience?

• How often should my audience receive content from me?

• What type of content do they resonate with?

• What design and tone of voice resonates with my audience?

These few questions will help you get the ground running. Keep in mind that you might have to do hard work to find answers to these questions, but it’s important for maximizing effectiveness. 

2. Launch a Signup Form

If you already have a contact list and want to create an email address list, it’s better to launch a signup form. To begin with, when your subscribers provide you with their email addresses through the signup form, you will be able to store their details in the email marketing tools, so you can use the email address for marketing purposes. 

Secondly, the signup forms are a reliable way of learning about your audience. Many brands just ask for the name and email address, but it’s time you ask them about the age, location, and services or products that they are interested in. This will help you customize the marketing materials. On top of everything, the signup forms help you collect information in a legal way, so you don’t have to worry about getting sued. 

3. Never Purchase the Contact Lists

Brands think that purchasing contact lists is the easy way out, but they don’t understand that it doesn’t always target their desired audience and has repeated. You’ve to understand that the success of email campaigns depends on the open rate. So, if you are contacting the people whose information you purchased rather than earning it from interacting with them, the performance will drop. 

On top of everything, you’ve to remember that the email recipients need to give consent before you can reach out to them. Having said that, the purchased contact lists and emails don’t have the consent you need. For this reason, it’s recommended that you interact with the audience/followers you currently have and ask them for their details. 

4. Ditch the No-Reply Emails

As a brand, you have to be careful about the CAN-SPAM because it’s one of the most important legislations impacting email marketers. With this legislation, you’ve to remember that you cannot use the word “no reply” or anything similar. This message has to be avoided because it prevents the recipients from replying back to the emails they receive. 

In fact, this means that recipients cannot even opt out of receiving your emails. On the other hand, you can opt for automated emails. That’s because the audience is highly likely to open the emails if they know human beings are behind the email rather than a robot. 

5. Keep the Typefaces in Check

If you want to increase email conversions, you’ve to ensure that the clutter is minimal. For this reason, you’ve to ensure that the emails don’t have any junk, and one way of doing it is to use two types of fonts and typefaces only. This is because using too many fonts can distract your readers and negatively impact the visual appeal of the emails. 

Also, while you’re on the quest to select the fonts, opt for web-safe fonts. In addition, the size should range from ten to twelve because it’s easy to read. Also, the font size will help ensure that readers can check the emails on different devices. 

6. Optimize the Preview Text

If you have been receiving newsletter emails from different companies, you must have seen “email not displaying correctly? Click here?” If yes, you’ve to ensure that you don’t make this mistake. It might be a great warning, but focusing on the preview text will help increase the opening rate of your emails. When it comes down to the preview text, make sure it aligns with the subject line.

 For this purpose, you’ve to add details, so you can capture the attention of your audience and encourage them to tap on the email and open it. This is important because the preview text usually focuses on the first few words of the email and displays it right after the subject line, so the recipient can have an idea. Another tip is to write a customized preheader that provides a teaser of what email offers to the readers. 

7. Incorporate an Email Signature

We understand that brands usually send out newsletters and emails on behalf of the company. However, if you want to increase the opening rate and conversion rate, you’ve to include someone’s signature in the email. That’s because signatures can help increase visibility and branding by 41%. In addition, it’s a great way of maintaining standards and aesthetics – keep it cohesive in every email. 

The best thing about using signatures is that signatures add a touch of personalization. In fact, the readers will be more inclined towards reading an email that comes from a human being rather than a marketing robot. In simpler words, email signatures are one of the best ways of capturing attention. 

8. Always Segment the Email List

The segmentation of the email list is another important tip, and we don’t mind saying that it can completely change the marketing game for you. Segmentation is all about grouping different contacts together on the basis of shared interests and traits. In most cases, the email lists are segmented on the basis of demographics, geographical, behavioral, and psychographic factors. 

The demographic factors include age, family status, and gender, while psychographic factors include interest topics, income level, and engagement/interaction with other brands. As far as behavioral factors are concerned, they include account signups, purchasing history, and website visits. Lastly, geographical facto is all about the living location of the contacts. 

9. Always Have a Landing Page

The simplest definition of the landing page is the page where your audience will land when you open your website, and it’s the easiest way of getting new visitors to sign up. Many brands make the mistake of adding signups on the homepage, but many people end up getting distracted and lost in the process, and brands don’t get the contact information. 

On the other hand, once you’ve the landing page, you can get more signups from the audience because the process will be easy and hassle-free. However, while designing the landing page, make sure there aren’t many bells and whistles there, and you’ve to keep everything brand-centric. In addition, a landing page should be designed in a way that visitors can instantly identify your brand. 

10. Clean the Email List

It’s common for brands to keep adding new people to the email list, but they don’t focus on cleaning the email list. This can have a negative influence on brand conversions. For this reason, it’s recommended that you clean the email lists because it’s about deleting inactive and uninterested contacts from the list. 

Many brands think that it’s counterproductive and their contact list will shorten. However, the inactive people who don’t respond to your emails aren’t good either. In fact, when they don’t respond to your emails, your emails will be flagged as spam – it can have a negative influence on your reputation. In addition, it will have a negative influence on email deliverability. For this reason, you’ve to clean the email list regularly. 

11. Focus on Sending Frequency

One of the most important factors is to know how often you can send your marketing emails to the audience. That’s because knowing the right frequency is important because you don’t want to overwhelm your readers by sending something new every day. On the other hand, the frequency shouldn’t be too less that the audience forgets about you. 

So, to save yourself the trouble, you have to ask the subscribers how often they are fine with receiving the campaigns – you can ask when they sign up with their email. However, if you cannot ask them for some reason, you can send out mass campaigns after every two to four weeks. 

While you are considering the frequency, you’ve to focus on the day and time of the day as well. To be sure, you should check the analytics and see which emails are usually opened or get clicked on. 

12. Send Only Personalized Email

Sending emails is one thing, but ensuring maximum engagement from the readers isn’t very easy. For this reason, we recommend that you personalize the content of your emails. The easiest option is to personalize the emails by adding the first name of your recipient because it shows that your brand puts effort into researching and greeting the customers. 

In case you have an eCommerce brand, it’s important that you connect the store to an email marketing tool because it can increase the chances of sales. It can help you send personalized discount codes to your customers and send cart abandonment emails. 

13. Focus on Automation

Email automation is a reliable way of saving time and increasing sales. That’s because it allows the brands to send out specific emails to particular people depending on what action they intend to take. For instance, you can try sending out personalized emails on your customers’ birthdays and anniversaries. We recommend that you begin with welcome emails when someone purchases from you for the first time. 

14. Track the Performance Metrics

Starting an email marketing campaign is one thing, but you’ve to focus on keeping track of performance as well. That’s because keeping an eye on the performance metrics will help improve the quality of marketing. Ideally, you should look at the click-through rates and open rates because they help you determine how well the marketing campaign is performing. 

In addition to this, you have to be careful about the bounce rate and unsubscribing rate. When it comes down to the bounce rate, there are hard as well as soft bounces available. The soft bouncing is temporary and usually happens when their mailbox is full, or the server is down. On the other hand, a hard bounce happens when the recipient's email doesn’t exist. 

You can also hire email marketing experts to help you track the performance of email campaigns. That’s because they know the KPIs as well as benchmarks. Last but not least, you have to focus on the conversion rate as well. 

15. Connect with Social Media

If you want to double the benefits of your email marketing campaign, it’s recommended that you link your social media profiles. For this purpose, it’s better to add icon buttons, so you can add a gentle reminder that your audience can use to access your social media pages. Another option is to run an engagement campaign on social media, with which you can increase your customer interactions and sales.

Overall, email marketing is a promising way of expanding your sales funnel, so hire an email marketing company that promises results!