Four Email Marketing Best Practices

In last week’s post, we broke down how to interpret the various email marketing metrics available to marketers, ultimately identifying the single most important email marketing metric (hint: it’s not open or click rates). So now that you know how to evaluate your email marketing campaigns, let’s talk about how to keep improving your email marketing efforts. This week, we’re going to address four email marketing best practices.

Email marketing remains the best outreach tool marketers have.

1. Use Email Marketing to Segment Your Customer and Prospect Lists

When discussing email marketing best practices, it can be easy to jump right into conversations about design and personalization and overlook one of the key benefits that email campaigns provide: the ability to segment your audience. Each time your prospects and customers receive one of your messages, they take an action (even if that action is to ignore your email). And that action allows you to sort your audience into various buckets based on their behavior.

To capitalize on an email campaign’s use as a segmentation tool, begin by reviewing your email open and click rates, tracking your list’s email and web activity at the individual level in order to sort contacts who responded to your emails into buckets such as the example below.

Notice that we’ve highlighted the individuals who always open or click your campaign. If you’re a B2B email marketer, you may want to prioritize these individuals for sales contact. If you’re a B2C company, this segment might turn out to be your evangelists who are primed to respond to new product releases or loyalty offers. The key is to separate your campaign responders and nurture them appropriately. The number of email marketing permutations you can use to speak to different segments of your email lists is limited only by your creativity, so as you build out your email campaigns remember that an email marketing best practice is to do so with the goal of segmenting your audience in order to filter out those most likely to purchase.

Email #marketing can be a great tool for getting an early read on lead source performance

Want another email marketing tip? If you’re working with lists of prospects, email campaigns can be a great tool to use as an early indicator of a lead source’s viability. If you’ve just run an ad campaign that has brought in hundreds of names, but none of them responds to your email, there’s a good chance your ads aren’t reaching the right audience. Conversely, if you’re seeing record open rates, you’ll know you’ve found a great source of potential customers.

2. Improve Your Email Marketing with Personalized Content that Drives Action

Your customers are smart. They know you, and they expect your business to know them in return. Email is an ideal medium to provide your audience with the level of personalization expected by today’s customer, and an email best practice is to speak to your audience as individuals. Most marketers fail to personalize their email campaigns, yet personalized emails are proven to have higher open and click rates. Experian Marketing determined that personalized promotional emails had 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates. Personalization can be as easy as adding a name to the subject line. According to HubSpot, click rates are higher when the recipient’s first name is used in the subject line, so it’s high time you started with these easy wins.

But email marketing best practices go deeper. Personalization also means including relevant content for the recipient that compels them to act. You should be tracking your audience’s clicks, browses, purchases, and other indications of interest from your customers in a database that you can access to segment and target these individuals. Prospects interested in webinars, for example, will be ideal fits for a targeted campaign driving them toward a learning event about your new product. Every email you send should be compelling them to take action.

3. Mobile Optimization for Email Marketing is a Must, but It’s Not Quite What You Think

According to the latest research conducted by Litmus, 55% of emails are opened on a mobile device. If your emails are not optimized for mobile devices, they may end up going directly to the trash. What’s significant for a best practice email marketing campaign is the battle between media-rich emails and image blockers on mobile devices (and email in general).

Research conducted by the Relevancy Group has determined that marketers who use digital media such as videos in their email campaigns note a 40 percent rise in revenue. HubSpot also noted that 65 percent of people prefer emails that contain mostly images rather than mostly text. And yet, the first thing your mobile readers will see is likely text, along with a question about whether they want to load your images at all.

Nearly every email marketing software on the market will automatically format your messages for mobile devices. Your challenge is handling your audience’s first impression on mobile. Best practice email marketing works well in both text-only and graphical formats by using styled text more heavily than large graphics and by incorporating image ALT tags that entice the reader (for example “Click for Fall 2016 deals” instead of a random hash of letters and numbers).

4. Email Marketing is Ideal for A/B Testing

Have you ever gotten into a debate with other staff members about which elements of an email marketing campaign work best? These types of discussions about email marketing best practices aren’t uncommon when every percentage point increase is key. The good news is that A/B testing will help you improve your email marketing strategy by testing multiple versions of an email campaign and settling the argument once and for all.

A number of email marketing tools let you conduct automatic A/B testing on a variety of areas such as those below:

• Subject lines
• Sent from name/address
• Copy
• Images
• Send times

The more advanced email marketing software suites allow automated testing that will evaluate open and click-through rates on a small sample of two lists to identify the email most likely to drive response and then send that email to your audience. For example, a retail marketer may want to test its content in order to determine if a coupon elicits a purchase. One email could read “We haven’t seen you in a while. Come back and see us!”. The other email with the coupon may say “Take 20% off your next purchase if you visit us within the next five days”. And rather than debate how either will perform, you can let the software do the work to determine your best offer and format.

Testing email #marketing? Let your software evaluate the As and Bs for you!

So that’s it! Pretty easy right? These four simple (but often ignored) email marketing best practices should put your email campaigns in top shape. If you still need help with your email marketing strategy, feel free to contact Young Marketing Consulting.