Top 10 Email Marketing Recommendations

Venturing into email marketing means you are committed to boosting your company’s overall marketing efforts. You may even have a team that focuses on email marketing strategy to measure tracking, analytics, and optimize your campaigns, in turn, improving your overall results and increasing your ROI. Adhering to best practices at all times ensures overall success of your marketing campaigns and builds strong one-on-one relationships.

Let’s take a look at some best practices that work:

1. Permission and Privacy Make sure the person receiving your email has asked to receive it. Respect your readers by inserting privacy policy links on all of your emails to improve deliverability and ensure CAN-SPAM compliance.


2. Personalization Besides personalizing with clear descriptions in every email in the "From" memo, and in the “Subject Line,” employ dynamic content like the subscribers first name or city. By segmenting audiences you can gather content that is personalized with important information relevant to your campaign.


3. Welcome Message Your reader signed up for your email program and that’s great news! Add them to your list, send them a “welcome” email or a series of welcome emails to fine tune your new subscribers’ interests. Eventually, move subscribers in to a wider program according to how well they have responded to your initial “welcome” messages.


4. Proper Content Deliver the message you promised. Provide your reader with up-to-date content in every newsletter. You want your message to stand out and get noticed!


5. Easy Opt-Out.  For your promotional campaigns make sure you give the reader the opportunity to opt-in, and opt-out of your communications. When the reader unsubscribes, soon after they should be removed from the “active subscriber” list and added to the “do not mail” list.


6. Better Landing Pages Optimize your landing pages to grab your reader’s attention. To do this, match the look and feel of an email with the content you are targeting on the web page. Customize your efforts with branding, targeted offers, and preferential messaging.


7. Call to Action Engage your readers, tell them where to go, and create less guesswork in your email message. Provide a “click here” link to your website by using text or images. This link should express and reinforce your email and will vary with each message and its purpose.


8. Send Regularly If you send an offer or your reader opts-in to your email message, let them know when the next communication is coming. Make email an interactive experience by telling every subscriber exactly when to expect your newsletter.


9. Get Social Adding Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites to your email makes for a good connection. Some people prefer to communicate through Facebook rather than email. Don’t forget to provide links so that you will gain leads to email opt-in sites.  Including a social sharing option in an e-mail can increase click-through rates from an average of 7.2% to 8.7%, and including as many as three different sharing options boosts rates to 11.2% (eMarketer).


10. Test and Deliver Proactively manage your data and conduct tests with every campaign. Obtain daily deliverability and response metrics and reporting to improve your mailings. Doing this will ensure your maximum returns while minimizing risk.

So where do you stand on your next email marketing campaign? Following “best practices” with your marketing team ensures for email success, relationship building, and getting your message delivered.