Email marketing is a tried and true way to generate leads and convert potential customers – it can generate huge ROI, is great for both B2B and B2C marketing and is relatively easy to get the hang of. However, email marketing can start to feel like a time waster if you’re not getting the results you want – we’ve compiled a list of our email marketing best practices to help you find email marketing success.
Keep the design simple and interactive
In ghosts of email marketing past, marketers have been drawn to huge, flashy graphics and bright colours to help their emails stand out from the rest of the receiver’s inbox. However, current email design best practice says to keep things simple with a pared-back colour palette and minimalistic design. Let the text do the talking and focus on interactivity to keep engagement rates high. Include multiple opportunities for the reader to click through to your landing page and encourage reader participation and feedback with a poll or survey.
Make your content relevant to your contacts
A common email marketing mistake is batching all your contacts together and sending them all of your marketing communications. This could lead to recipients unsubscribing from your emails when they receive content that isn’t relevant to them. Instead, make sure that you’re only sending relevant content to your recipients; pre-schedule emails to go out to specific contacts and target them carefully. Marketing automation tools make this process easy. Ensuring your recipients are only receiving specific emails will up engagement rates and keep your contacts interested.
Utilise personalisation
We cannot stress this enough – always, always, always personalise your emails. Make your customers feel like you’re talking to them personally (because you are!). Whenever possible, refer to recipients by their first name and include as much relevant personal information about them as possible – membership numbers, usernames, date of birth, etc. Automation tools will automatically pull this information for you and subscribers will respond positively to your email marketing. If possible, you can even consider adding personalisation to your email’s preview text to hook the recipient from the get-go.
Spring clean your mailing list
It’s important to regularly clean out your contacts. Despite what it may seem, it’s not best practice to blindly send email upon email to recipients who aren’t even opening them. This is going to throw off your open rate and provide you with an inaccurate view of the quality of your campaign. Go through your contacts list, check out who hasn’t opened your emails for a while and remove them from the subscriber list. If you don’t want to disregard them completely, move them to a separate workflow that will send them less regular emails.
Email marketing is one of the simplest, most effective marketing tactics. These few tips can save you from losing prospective customers and can reign in even more leads.
