According to statistics, there are over 4 billion active email users daily, and 306 billion emails are sent back and forth every day. This makes email marketing one of the most effective forms of lead generation.
The challenge of these campaigns is strategizing how your emails are sent. Several factors affect how a particular strategy plays out.
To help navigate these factors, we look to outreach email marketing best practices. These help us produce the best emails for our campaigns.
If you’re considering starting a new email marketing campaign, then this list is for you. In this article, we’ll explore:
- How email marketing best practices can boost revenue.
- Tested and proven email marketing best practices.
- How to improve deliverability.
- And how to close more deals during campaigns.
How Following Email Marketing Best Practices Can Seriously Boost ROI
You can always develop your own strategies to help increase ROI. But testing what works and what doesn’t can take hundreds of hours.
With the guidance of email marketing best practices, you get to follow tested and proven strategies that boost ROI such as:
- Email Segmentation
- Tracking and Optimization
- Including Video in Emails
- Personalization
- Scheduling Emails
Businesses that follow these can see as much as a 760% increase in revenue. So if you want to take your email campaigns to the next level fully, read on to learn what you can do.
15 Email Marketing Best Practices to Quickly Close More Deals
There are countless strategies you can use to optimize your marketing campaigns. Trying all of them out will surely be a grueling task.
To streamline the research process, we’ve curated a list of the best email marketing practices you can follow.
Warm Up Your Email for Optimal Deliverability
The success of any email marketing campaign depends on deliverability. This metric shows the percentage of messages sent that reached the intended recipients.
To increase this metric, marketers use “warm-up” strategies. A warmed-up email account means it has sent and received a good amount of emails.
Email service providers view these accounts as more legitimate and less likely to send spam. You can do warm-ups easily by making a new account and having a couple of email exchanges with your friends.
But this won’t be sustainable. Instead, marketers that want to save time and boost efficiency using AI-driven automation for their email warm-ups.
Use Double Opt-Ins
Every prospect email address that you get should be treated with respect. You wouldn’t want to burn any bridges.
If you receive an email, the subscriber trusts that you can provide them with quality content. You can help further by using double opt-ins.
Unlike single opt-in, double opt-in email sign-up lets you collect email addresses with a confirmation step to guarantee you have permission to communicate with them.
This approach avoids false sign-ups and ensures GDPR and anti-spam compliance. Here’s an example of double opt-ins in action:
- A potential client visits your website and signs up for your mailing list by filling out a form on a dedicated landing page.
- They receive a welcome email thanking them for signing up for the email list and asking for further confirmation.
- At the bottom, there is text saying if they didn’t sign up for the email list, they can choose to opt out.
Regularly Clean Your Email List
When conducting email marketing campaigns, you need to ensure not only the quality of your emails but also your recipients.
Some prospects might not even open your emails. Some could even send your emails to spam. Keeping these emails would just lower your open rates.
So before starting new campaigns, review your list and filter out those that don’t respond. Doing this also helps you strategize which emails need re-engagement or unsubscribing from your list.
Add Personalization
Email personalization can increase revenue and transaction by up to six times. Personalization should be the standard in every campaign.
But this goes beyond including the recipient’s name in the subject lines or email bodies. Personalization can come in many forms. It can be for product recommendations, discounts, and more.
Tailored emails mean that your business is sending out relevant content to prospects. According to studies, 80% of customers respond better to personalized emails.
When done effectively, personalization can reduce unsubscribe rates and improve open and click-through rates. It boosts customer satisfaction thanks to personalized recommendations.
To streamline the personalization process, you must incorporate good customer relationship management (CRM) tools and automation.
Avoid Spam Triggers
Over 347.73 billion emails are sent daily, with 62.46 billion being spam. This means only 15.14% of worldwide email traffic is authentic.
As a response to this, email service providers put up filters to block spam emails. If you’re wondering why your emails are going to spam, the cause might be a certain word or phrase that’s included in a list of spam triggers.
Among the most prevalent words included in spam filters across email service providers are:
- Free
- Now
- Hurry
- $$$
- No cost
- Not spam
- No startup fee
- Buy now
- ! or !!!...
But words and phrases aren’t the only things included in spam filters. The activity of your email accounts factors in as well.
Service providers may flag an account as spam if it suddenly sends a ton of emails. Short links and no opt-out options make email accounts look spammy.
ICYMI: Check out our comprehensive list of spam trigger words here:
The Ultimate List of 700+ Spam Trigger Words to Avoid
A/B Test and Optimize Your Subject Lines
Studies suggest that optimizing subject lines can lead to higher open rates. However, there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” subject line template.
To get the best results, A/B testing is needed to identify which subject lines work best for what type of lead. As a rule of thumb, subject lines need to be:
- Short: Most email applications chop off subject lines after a character restriction. Limit your topic line character count to say more with less.
- Straight to the point: Let your prospects know what to expect in your email.
- Have urgency: Tell readers in the subject line if a special price offer or internet sale is ending. Holidays and events can also motivate people to take action.
- Personalized: Personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to get opened. It shows prospects that you’ve done your research and ensures the email is relevant.
Test Your Emails Before Clicking Send
Testing a good email takes less than five seconds and is worth it. Mishaps are possible. Mobile devices may cut subject lines, find typos, etc.
Send yourself or a friend your control and variation emails to test. Check the headlines, body, and CTA. Clarify them.
Avoid broken links. Sending an email that excites a customer but redirects to a 404 page is bad. You lose conversions and brand credibility.
Does the email correctly render fonts, colors, sizes, and other font-related elements? Are any words hyperlinked incorrectly? These are important factors to ensure that your emails look presentable and authentic.
Keep Emails Short, Concise, and Easy to Skim
Nobody wants to read walls of text. You might think you’re providing value to your prospects by doing so. However, you should never do this except when absolutely necessary.
A more elegant approach to this is providing a link that redirects to your long-form articles. But within the email body, content should be kept short and concise.
The email should also be skimmable. You should provide value to readers immediately even if they skim through some details.
Studies suggest that most email readers have adopted an “F-shaped” reading pattern, scanning the top of a page before moving down the page vertically.
If they want to get a feel for what a newsletter is about, most readers will skim it for the key points. Assist your readers by using bulleted lists to summarize key information. You can also add CTA buttons or even eye-catching infographics.
Focus On Offering Value and Addressing Pain Points
Each customer is unique, with varying pain points. If you’ve integrated good CRM software, you should know what a customer’s pain points are.
Offering value by addressing pain points means an email is personalized. Finding out why people buy from you can help you solve their problems and make more purchases.
Aside from CRM tools, you can also directly understand what a customer needs through surveys and other pop-up forms.
A/B Your Email Body
The main body of your cold emails can contain plain texts with links, media like images and videos, or infographics containing main points. With this many factors to consider, you need to test which ones work best for what type of customer.
As a rule of thumb, you can A/B test the following on your email body.
Word Order: The way you organize the words in your sentence can drastically affect how it’s read. For example, your email body can include the following sentences:
Get 15% off your next purchase with this coupon code.
Use this coupon code to get 15% off your next purchase.
English speakers read left to right. Therefore, highlighting email discounts at the beginning may increase conversions.
- Call to Action (CTA): Make sure the initial portion of the email explains the core value proposition and includes a simple call-to-action without scrolling.
- Visuals: Your content body can include images, videos, or infographics. Send yourself a test email to confirm the mobile readability of the content before sending it.
- Tone: Each business has different types of customers. Identify if your customers are more formal or casual. Address the tone of your email accordingly.
Segment Your Email List
Email segmentation allows marketers to send tailored emails to targeted audiences. Studies suggest that adding segmentation to your email campaigns is more effective than campaigns without them.
Segmented email campaigns can have a 100.95% increase in clicks compared to non-segmented campaigns. The open rates for segmented campaigns are also 14.31% higher than traditional email marketing efforts.
Here’s how you can segment your audience:
- Demographic (Age, Gender, Location)
- Content Interest
- Email Engagement
- Website Activity
- Purchase History
Quickly Follow-up With Prospects
According to Yesware, if your first email goes unanswered, your second email has a 21% probability of being answered.
If your second email goes unanswered, keep emailing. There’s a 25% chance your customers will reply. But make sure you schedule emails.
Send custom follow-up emails for people who didn't open or click your initial email. Some subscribers may miss the first-touch email, which is why segmenting your mailing list helps with this issue.
According to studies, as much as 80% of deals require five touches before they close. As a response, the best marketers conduct email nurturing campaigns to ensure follow-ups at every stage of a customer’s purchasing journey.
Include CTAs that Make Taking Action Easy
You want your CTAs to be actionable. More than that, it needs to be convenient for your customer.
In the email's opening part, define the core value proposition and provide a clear call to action. Include CTA buttons in your emails to make it clear to the recipient what action is expected of them.
The wording should be brief around one to five words and to the point. Make sure that the CTA button itself should be visually distinct from the rest of the email.
Add a CTA in Your Email Signature
When you send an email, you have an opportunity to use your signature to your advantage and generate high-converting leads in the process.
Having a CTA in your email signatures include a clickable element such as a button, banner, link, video, and more in the footer of the email.
Your signature CTA's purpose should be to motivate readers to take some sort of action that helps you achieve your business objectives. Your CTA's efficacy may be measured by including a tracking code.
Include an Unsubscribe Button
Make sure you're unsubscribing people who want to, suppressing bounced emails, and not over-emailing any particular segment of your list.
Asking subscribers to double opt-in is considerate. In your emails, you can add phrases like “Subscribe by accident? We can fix that for you”. Unsubscribing a lead means you keep your email lists clean.
Having unengaged prospects won’t benefit your business. In fact, keeping them in and continuing to send emails can cause them to mark you as spam. You don’t want this happening.
Key Takeaways
Following marketing best practices ensures that you’re following tested and proven methods to drive sales and conversions.
Here are the main points you need to consider when conducting cold email campaigns:
- Warm-up new email accounts to ensure high deliverability.
- Use automation to streamline parts of the campaign, such as warm-up, personalization, and nurturing.
- Always A/B test your campaigns to see what works, what doesn’t, and what you can improve.
- Make your call-to-actions convenient for your audience by highlighting the CTA using buttons, highlights, and colors.
- Clean and segment your email list to improve the quality of your leads.
If you want to automate these best practices to streamline your email marketing campaigns, look no further than Instantly.ai. Start a free trial today and see how Instantly helps scale campaigns with powerful AI.