Email Marketing Best Practices

With the turn of the year, many people tend to take on new initiatives to meet their marketing objectives. I would say one of the more popular “resolutions” for marketers in the New Year is to be more consistent with email marketing.

Email marketing, which may seem very simple to learn, is one of the more nuanced sub-fields within marketing. In an effort to help the knowledge hungry email marketer, I have put together a few tips and tricks of email best practices to help with those New Year marketing campaigns.

For starters, email marketing has evolved over the years similarly to how people interact with websites. Subscribers no longer like to be inundated with multiple links and calls-to-action.

Rather emails should be simplistic, straightforward, and exist to achieve a very specific purpose. You should establish what the KPI (key performance indicator) is of your email marketing campaigns. If you include a series of blurbs or chunks of competing information, the attention of your recipients will most likely be spread across these blurbs of information as opposed to staying focused on a certain element.

Of course, you can address this by prioritizing the most important information at the top of the newsletter and include a clear call-to-action after/alongside each block of text. Here is a cool article with some relevant points for the increasing your email shares: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-through-leads-ht

This blog post is part of "Your Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing" blog series.

Improving Subject Lines

Subject lines are something that should be tested and improved upon over time. There are “best practices” in email marketing strategy to an extent, but every industry is different based upon their target personas. It may be worthwhile exploring some of the tools available for some inspiration.

Image/HTML/Text Ratio

There is a fine balance between using too much visual driven content in comparison to text. This could be one contributing factor as to why you are having issues with email deliverability. Some of the best email engagement rates can be achieved by making it seem like it is coming from a real person, with little to no design. Always be cautious of using emails that are almost entirely visually driven.

Want to take your email marketing to the next level with a lead generation campaign? Get your free Introduction to Lead Gen Guide now.

Email Appending/Cleaning Services

In the past, some of my clients have expressed interest in exploring email cleaning or appending services. In regard to cleaning, most email platforms have algorithms in place to ensure email lists are being properly cleaned and will improve over time. We would not recommend seeking out another paid service to accomplish similar tasks if you are currently engaged with a reputable marketing email platform. An alternative to this might be to reach out in a very personal email directly to some of the “soft bounces” or less engaged individuals directly. You might be able to gain better intelligence of how to segment your lists through that process.

Soft & Hard Bounces

Soft bounces are the result of a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, and most email platforms automatically resend your email message to soft bounces. Hard bounces are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered. Therefore they are usually automatically removed from your system and part of natural contact churn.

Did I miss any email marketing campaign best practices? Let us know in the comments below what should be added to this list! As always, if you would like to receive mind stimulating content like this directly to your inbox opt in to our email communications by clicking the 'Subscribe by Email' or 'Subscribe by RSS' buttons.

And check out part II in the future for more good email marketing practices.

Want to take your email marketing to the next level with a lead generation campaign? Get your free Introduction to Lead Gen Guide now.