This article has been contributed by EmailMonks director, Jaymin.
Email marketing is alive and well. With evolution in technology, email marketers are leaving no stone unturned to abide by the new age email best practices, but still there is a gap which in turn leads to delineation of open rates and click to open rates. So, how to identify your email pain points and deliver an inbox experience which is unparalleled?
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Well, in today’s post we will walk you through 7 such top email best practices marketers can count on and in turn boost their email bottom lines.
1. Be innovative with design, copy and code
Well, you start nowhere else than designing, writing and coding email templates. So, to kick start this in a brilliant way make sure you know how to write flawless email copy that is catchy and crisp. While designing and coding email templates, make sure you go with the mobile first approach keeping responsive design in mind, use white-space to let your readers skim through the copy quickly, place call to action in right fashion and mostly above the fold, consider finger targets and check the code’s compatibility using tools like Litmus or Email on Acid. While designing and coding in new age, you could also consider innovations like sending out emails with navigation, sliders, forms and more.
2. Timely list management
List management is crucial when it comes to email marketing. Maintaining the hygiene of the list will ensure that the emails reach out to recipients who are interested in receiving your emails. Failing to maintain list’s hygiene, there are chances that eventually it hurts the domain reputation or your email IP is black listed. Few best practices that you as a marketer can follow (a.) update the list regularly and remove those who have unsubscribed (b.) remove the recipients who choose not to engage with your brand’s email (c.) remove all the invalid or bad addresses (d.) do not buy or rent the email list and (e.) limit the frequency of sending emails to prevent unsubscribe. Having a person on the list for long is not too good either. According to one of the surveys, length of time on a list can increase the possibility of spam complaints. At 31 months, 43% of list was more likely to complain.
3. Cross check the deliverability checkpoints
Deliverability is the growing concern of most email marketers and to battle the issues related to deliverability, you ought to fix out multitude of things. A few best practices include (a.) Validating MIME headers in multipart emails (b.) Using dedicated IP compared to shared IPs (c.) Email throttling (d.) Using DKIM sign for outgoing communication (e.) Using recognizable from name (f.) Monitoring SMTP logs, blacklists and activity trends (g.) Providing physical address and option to unsubscribe (h.) Updating email delivery with the rules of ISPs
4. Identify the time and day of sending emails
Most email marketers fail to engage the recipients because of the time and day when they send the emails. Time and day of sending your emails vary from your industry to other. However, take a note of what works best for your industry and ensure you optimize your email sending time, frequency and day to make it best fit.
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5. Rule of 28 – Things to test before you hit SEND!
Email testing is mission critical. Conceive of a scenario wherein you send out email to your recipients without testing and the email doesn’t render in more than 65% email clients? Catastrophe! To prevent this test various aspects of email elements apart from the overall code compatibility. Test the from name, subject line, personalization tags, snippet text, spam compliance, social sharing buttons, links to landing pages, and so much more. You could find many detailed downloadable checklists to test it right!
6. Get personal
Personalization in email is a mandate with so many platforms offering real time emailing. Think beyond first name and subject line personalization. With advance in technology, you can even personalize emails based on the time of open. Utilize this with real time social feeds, live offer counters, weather updates, geo-targeting and there are just many other ways that you could induce personalization in emails.
7. Avoid myths and ask for feedback
A few days ago someone just asked me “Should I send shorter subject line? Is that reducing my ROI?” On that I replied him to check some myths about email and see what works best for him. As marketers we should not believe in email myths. Some popular myths are image text ratio, shorter vs. longer subject lines, informative vs. promotional content, email frequency and unsubscribe rate, etc. When in doubt, ask! Check with your recipients how they love hearing from you. Ask feedback about how engaging your emails are.
In Summary
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Wrapping it all up, email marketing is fun as its cost-effective way of grabbing a lion’s share of revenue, but at the same time it is quintessential to go the extra mile and put best efforts to make sure your brand emails are fun to read for recipients too! Could you think about other best practices you and I as email marketers must follow?
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Jaymin is the Director of Email Monks, Webby Monks and Commerce Monks. He loves to contribute on topics like email marketing, internet marketing, web development and e-commerce. He thrives to provide superior customer experience through his ventures (www.monks.in) and connect with like-minded individuals from the fast growing digital world.
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Sometimes having too much design made the email went into the spambox. I have tried before when I include images vs without images. Email with images went into mailbox… Have to be careful on that