Just like the kids, there’s an alphabet for you to learn and remember for your next email marketing campaign.
All your hard effort in kindergarten paid off.
You were just a little kid. Yet you spent hours committed to learning the English alphabet.
Mastering those ABCs like a tiny boss.
Now you’re all grown up and looking to learn Email Marketing and its alphabet.
Can you replicate your kindergarten success?
Learning an alphabet isn’t just child’s play.
If you follow these 26 email marketing best practices tips, learning Email Marketing can be as easy as ABC!
Email Marketing Alphabet (26 email marketing best practices tips)
A is for Audience: Get to Know Them
A Target Audience is described as the group of individuals or for email marketing purposes the particular list or segment, at which a campaign is intended.
Your email marketing campaign and determining your target audience go hand-in-hand.
Serving the needs and interests of each subscriber is essential. A targeted audience means a segment of your list(s) filled with individuals who are happy with the emails they’re getting.
In 2018, nearly 80% of all email marketing ROI was a result of being sent to the correct target audience!
You need to get as much knowledge as you can about your audience including:
- Location – that will help in potential geographical marketing efforts or increasing your company
- Demographics – certain data points might be necessary for your product or service (gender, age, etc.)
- Interests – particular products or services, special offers, honor coupons, or general updates all signify what your user prefers.
You can use the knowledge you gather to organize mailing lists so that you can send targeted messages to a tinier audience. Remember that in email marketing bigger is not always better in this case. If you have thousands of names that all want to receive different types of information, then you risk increasing your unsubscribe and spam rate by repeatedly sending content that is irrelevant to peoples’ interests.
The moral here is to know your audience and make sure you deliver email marketing messages that meet their expectations.
B is for Be Mobile Responsive
According to Mail250, Email is first opened on a mobile device 51% of the time, and that number is growing.
Mobile is the future and each company that wants continued growth must understand heed. Emails will only become more comfortable to read and communicate with on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices over time, making mobile convenience no longer an option but a necessity.
To maximize your open and click-through rates, it’s critical that your email marketing campaigns look great in all environments, and the best way to do this is to leverage email templates that have already been built for mobile.
C is for Copywriting for Email
Email copywriting is the real copy — the messages — in your email subject copies and email body content. It’s how you communicate an idea to induce prospective customers to convert.
While you draft email text, you must begin with a particular goal. What do you need your subscribers to do after opening and viewing the email?
Email copywriting suggestions that will get your conversions to grow:
- Stay relatable to your users in all your email marketing copy
- Emphasize the advantages of your product in your email copy
- Make your email copywriting as brief as possible
- Have your paragraphs small – Enter one main idea within paragraph
- Be as personal as possible with your readers
- Tell a short story to engage your readers
- Compensate your users and get to the point quick
- Be lovable when appropriate
Later you draft an email for your subscribers, let it remain for 24 hours. Then go back and read it. You’ll come to the email with fresh eyes, which will allow you to be more critical of your own work.
Plus, you’ll be more fit to find those deceptive grammar and spelling errors that slip into even the best copywriters’ work.
D is for Design
Email marketing is a prime opportunity to sell your products or services and get tight with your audience. However, if your emails aren’t awesomely drafted, it’s the best chance to ultimately miss the point.
- Use a Clean and Organized Layout: Keep things clean and simple to avoid unnecessary distractions and hold your readers’ attention from beginning to the end.
- Embrace White Space: Effectively utilizing white space allows the brain to scan, interpret and break down elements into easily digestible pieces.
- Frame Content with Headers/Footers: The header, in particular, is your first opportunity to make a great impression. Email copy footers may not hold the most significant thing a user sees, but they should present a substantial viewed bookend to the header of an email body and improve frame the look and feel of the whole email marketing body.
- Use Stunning Images: When you have limited space to get a message across, a carefully chosen image can make a big statement.
- Embed Videos/Gifs: GIFs are being used more and more in emails and can make a significant impact if done properly.
- Build a compelling CTA: Email marketing campaign can build and strengthen brand recognition, but at the end of the day, yourself require the reader to take some kind of action. 70% of industry marketing emails do not have a CTA button. Make sure yours has a CTA that stands out.
E is for Experiment
We run tests like these every time we send an email to figure out what works best for our audience — get a glance at the ones you can run next time you’re gearing up for an email sent!
- Email Layout and Design Tests
– Plan Text vs. HTML
– Image Selection
– Image Placement - Email Timing and Frequency Tests
– Day of the Week
– Time of Day - Dynamic Content Email Tests
– First Name vs. No Name in Subject Line
– First Name vs. No Name in Email
– Company Name vs. No Company Name in Subject Line - Email Call-to-Action Tests
– Image CTA vs. Text CTA
– CTA Button Copy and Color
– Link Placement Within Text
– Text CTA in Body Copy vs. P.S. - Email Sender Tests
– Company Name vs. Personal Name as Sender
– Sales Contact as Sender
– Personal vs. Alias Email Address - Email Copy Tests
– Familiar vs. Professional Tone
– Longer vs. Shorter Emails
– Subject Line Copy Variations
F is for From name
Here are 5 from name tips to help increase your email open rates:
- Individual or Corporate From Names: Will your receiver immediately identify the individual’s name? If the response is yes, doing an individual’s name as the sender area is a personalization method that could increase your email open rates. If the personal name in your sender area is unrecognizable, personalization might not be your best approach.
- Keep Your From Name Conventional: Using the organization name as the sender field is the reliable option. This choice is a standard fixture seen in most inboxes for good reason; the organization name strengthens the brand.
- The Power of Exclusivity:
From Name: Sephora Beauty Insider
In the pattern above, Sephora carries the official business name plus a little more. Beauty Insider indicates this email is just sent to segments of their rewards club, provoking a sense of exclusivity. Offering exclusivity in your email marketing campaign can surely affect open rates. - The Power of Exclusivity:
From Name: Your friends at Oilstop
In the pattern above, Oilstop performed an excellent job of adding personalization in their sender area. Open on a holiday? These are my colleagues at Oilstop. - Combining Personal and Corporate Sender Names:
From Name:Edward Moreno, Sierra CL.
Using your company name beside a personal name helps your recipients remember the company while forming a personal connection with a representative from your business. - Avoid the no-reply address
The from name field is a great, frequently overlooked possibility to improve email open rates. The sender field will always be visible and most recipients scan the sender field first (and immediately decide whether or not to mark as spam!)
G is for GDPR
GDPR overlooked a lot of email marketing discussions in 2018, and this is assumed to remain completely 2019.
The new general data protection regulation (EU GDPR) has a direct impact on marketing practices, including email marketing. By GDPR active date on 25 May 2018, all email marketers concerned with GDPR require to change quickly how they seek, capture and save consent.
Email marketing under GDPR indeed indicates that, as an email marketing marketer, you require to collect easily given, particular, notified and unambiguous consent (Article 32). To complete compliance, you have to adopt new methods:
- New consumer opt-in permission rules;
- Proof of consent storing systems; and
- A system in which customers can ask their particular information removed.
Although GDPR concerns to the EU, following the law for everyone is excellent practice for email marketing in general.
H is for Holiday
Prepared or not, the vacations are right around the corner. It’s the happiest–and, unfortunately, spammiest–time of the year. Subscribers are already expecting doubled promotion and dealings leading up to the holiday season, but it’s still necessary to remain careful and gracious about your sending so you don’t end up overwhelming your users.
Focus on the client, not an offensive sales agenda. Marketers send more email marketing campaigns than usual during the holiday period, but it’s great to learn that there’s a real person at the other end of your email communication. The holidays are a busy, restless time for everyone (not just marketers!) and they probably won’t appreciate having their inbox flooded with hard-sell emails. Value their time, and utilize a helpful, customer-centric path.
I is for IP address
An IP address is a unique digital label allocated to each device attached to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.
While it befalls to your email marketing, your IP address behavior affects your sender reputation, and how ISPs find your sending patterns.
The more you know about email marketing the more you hear about having dedicated IP address. While you’re sending your email marketing campaign from a dedicated IP, you are the single sender and your IP reputation (and how it affects your email deliverability) is yours, and yours alone.
If you’re sending both transactional and marketing email, it’s a good idea to depart those two streams of email. Because transactional email is essential and demanded by your user, don’t risk that email delivery by linking it with the reputation of your marketing emails.
J is for Junk
Your email marketing campaigns can end up in the spam/junk folder if you don’t send important emails or it’s not what the subscriber demanded.
Don’t Sound Like a Spammer!
The more spam-like keywords and expressions your email uses, the less possible it is to end up in the inbox. There are a number of free software solutions to check the “spam score” of an email marketing campaign before you send it, but there are also basic rules.
- Avoid Spam Trigger Words in Your Email Marketing Content
- Don’t use ALL CAPS.
- Don’t use lots of colored fonts.
- Only use one exclamation point at a time!
- Stay away from keywords yourself see in spam folder: Viagra, drugs, porn, confirmed winners.
K is for Keep it simple
It’s simple to begin planning out an email marketing program that consists of a lot of moving pieces.
It’s too more comfortable to get carried away and overwhelmed.
But consider starting simple with all perspectives of your email marketing program: design, components, sending schedule and adding elements with each previous email marketing campaign.
L is for Landing page
Composing and drafting copy for your email campaigns will need a good part of your time. But also think where you are sending your recipients.
Send your receivers to landing pages that make sense based on your goals and email marketing copy and that gives a seamless transformation. For example, if you need to show them to a particular product, send them to the landing page for that product, not your homepage or product line home page.
M is for Metrics
Email is a marketing channel you definitely want to be tracking and optimizing to guarantee you get the best possible results.
There are many kinds of Metrics available in email marketing like Opens, clicks, bounce, and….so.
But how do you identify what data to track? And how do you use this data to optimize your email marketing campaigns and get better results?
Don’t get panic; it doesn’t have to be complicated. To discover what metrics are beneficial to monitor, first define the goal of your email. For example:
If you want receivers to read an essential update to your terms of service (and the content is right in your email), you will need to use a compelling subject line and measure your opens.
If you want to increase an offer or discount, clicks are your main metric to watch.
Nevertheless, you’ll want to not only track these metrics separately but practicing a method that compares them to the previous email sends. Be convinced to optimize both year-over-year, month-over-month and send-to-send email marketing campaign reporting to track email marketing action activity.
N is for Never
There are a few things you need to avoid in your next email marketing campaign.
- Email address or email marketing campaign from a name is – no reply
- Sending out event messages for your company through the individual email address
- Sending group emails about your business
- Adding people that did not sign up to your email marketing list
- Too many CTAs
- Sending attachments in a personal email
- Sending an email marketing campaign at the wrong time or sending too many emails
- Ignoring analytics
- Email Offers No Value to Customer
- Email Focuses on the Product, Not the Customer
O is for Opt-in
In email marketing, senders are required to get approval from their contacts before they can send promotional emails to them. Several countries throughout the world have laws that require permission, or consent before email marketing communications can be sent. CAN-SPAM in the United States and CASL in Canada are two examples of such laws, and there are many other international anti-spam laws worldwide.
Two methods are available in email marketing to add recipients to your email list: single opt-in and double opt-in.
Both remain simple, reliable ways to get new contact information and engage your audience.
Single Opt-In: It’s probably what you think of when you think of signing up to an email list. An email contact fills out your signup form, clicks submit, and their data is saved to a list.
Double Opt-In: The double opt-in process has a few extra levels, but it’s still simple to use. It’s just like a single opt-in, but it adds a confirmation step where the user receives a confirmation email and has to confirm their signup.
P is for Personalization
Email personalization is the ideal way to personally reach any of your unique subscribers. Personalized email marketing campaigns drive 18X more income than email marketing campaign without personalization.
Need to make personalization a reality for your brand? We’re sharing 6 ways to practice personalization in your next email marketing campaign.
- Personalize your email copy
- Personalize your imagery
- Personalize your offers
- Personalize your product recommendations
- Personalize cart abandonment emails
- Personalize based on behavior
Personalizing your email content is the ideal way to reach subscribers, keep messages appropriate, and double your growth rates. With the guidance of the best email service provider, you can personalize email copy using data, dynamic content, segmentation, and more.
Q is for Quality beats frequency
Your subscribers have opted into your email marketing list because they believe you can offer them something of value. As long as your email marketing content is appropriate, users will generally not mind a more prominent email sending frequency.
Recipients may unsubscribe if they feel your content is no more relevant or overwhelmed with your, or worse they may even decide to mark your email as spam.
R is for RSS-to-email
If you publish content to a website or blog, you can use your site’s RSS feed to convert the latest posts into email content.
S is for Segmentation
Segmentation in email marketing campaign offers the strength to break your main list(s) into different subgroups.
By dividing your email list into different subgroups, you can send more targeted email marketing campaigns that maximize the relevance of your marketing message for each subscriber.
The following are five highly effective email marketing segmentation methods:
- Segment by engagement
- Segment by persona
- Segment by where customers shop
- Segment by website behavior
- Segment cart and form abandoners
The more you feed your messages to your subscribers’ tastes, interests, activities, etc., the more likely you are to reach and resonate with your receivers.
T is for Timing
Timing is everything – right? Well, it may not be everything in the email marketing campaign, but it surely matters, particularly when it comes to getting subscribers to notice and open your emails.
To determine when your subscribers are most likely to engage with your email marketing campaigns, send the same to two different groups of contacts to test delivery date and time, or compare the click rates. These types of tests and research can help you narrow down the right time to send your email marketing campaigns for maximum engagement from your subscribers.
U is for Unsubscribes
In email marketing, to unsubscribe means to extract your email address from a company’s mailing list so as not to get any more emails or messages. Every email marketing campaign must insert an unsubscribe link to give subscribers an opportunity to remove themselves at any time.
CAN-SPAM demands that you offer the facility to unsubscribe from all scheduled emails from any main list or sub-list (referred to as a “universal unsubscribe”). Still, if you have multiple individual interest lists, you can usually protect your relationship with a subscriber by allowing them to merely opt-out of one type of list.
V is for Volume
If your sending volume is inconsistent, or erratic, you will probably encounter delivery issues in your email marketing campaigns.
Anytime your volume grows dramatically, you can look like a spammer, and mailbox providers will treat your email as such.
Consistent sending volumes are crucial for maintaining a good reputation with the ISPs.
Keep the following recommendations in mind as you create and maintain your email marketing program plan.
- Maintain a consistent sending volume
- Avoid pauses in sending activity
- Sending more is not better
W is for Warmup (IP & Domain)
In Email marketing, It’s important to warm up your IPs & domain so you can build a good sending reputation and increase your chances of getting your email into your subscribers’ inboxes. There’s no guarantee that you will not have some email deliverability challenges at first, but using these conventional practices will help set you up for long-term benefit.
X is X-headers
X-headers are email headers that are added into the email in addition to the standard email headers, such as the To, From, CC, BCC, and Subject, according to the particular requirements of the sender. Mailbox providers too add X-headers to email, for anything such as authentication results, spam filter report, and more.
Some Email Service Providers (ESPs) offer the capability to add, track, and report on data inserted in those customized email headers. Tracking and reporting on email marketing metrics like sent, opened, clicked, and bounces are primary for managing email delivery.
Y is for Yeses
Before getting to ultimate Yes, there are a series of smaller decision points. Each of these must have a micro-yes, to get to an ultimate Yes.
Each of these must have a micro-yes, to get to an ultimate Yes.
If at any point of your email marketing campaign your potential customer feels like no, you can’t get the sale from your that email marketing campaign.
For example, if your goal is to get someone to purchase a product via an email marketing campaign, the decision path to micro-yeses might look like this:
From Name -> Subject line -> Email header -> Email body copy -> Landing page call-to-action.
For every decision point, you are attempting to secure a micro yes. Think of them as nods in your next email marketing campaign.
Z is for Zero-in
Without zeroing in and recapitulated focus you cannot build a powerful email marketing campaign. You have to focus and examine what you want to offer customers through quality preparation.
To accomplish this, assure your email has just one foremost information, i.e., a particular thing that you would like the user to take a step on or to know. After completing writing your email, re-think and do editing to get up with more focused, energetic and effective campaigns.