Use these pro tips to make the most of your email marketing efforts in 2020, and learn how to boost your email open- and clickrates.
Email marketing is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to get interested customers back to your website and drive conversion. So the better your email marketing, the easier you will generate traffic and sales. In my 21 years of working in online marketing I have seen a lot go right, and I have advised companies in what they could do better. Here are some best practices you should follow and some bad habits you should avoid:
Do check and proofread your email campaigns
This might sound like a no-brainer, but always doublecheck your email campaigns before you send them out to your customers. Most email marketing providers like Mailchimp allow you to send a test mail to yourself. Check your mailing on a desktop and on your mobile device. Yes, you can use F12 to mimic mobile devices on your desktop, but take those extra two minutes to use your phone as well. Proofread your copy, don’t scan read it, actually read it, even if you used a spell checker, it never hurts to proofread your content yourself. Doublecheck the look and feel across devices. Also it doesn’t hurt to do a final check on how your subject line and preheader interact, taking us to my next do.
Do include a preheader text to boost your open rates
A preheader is a short summary text that follows the subject line when viewing an email from the inbox. From an email marketing perspective, this means you can use this extra space to your advantage. The preheader can mean the difference between someone opening your email and ignoring it. A well written preheader interacts with the subject line and gets your customers curious enough to open your email message. Some email marketing services like Mailchimp offer a preheader setting. If you don’t have such a setting available, you can place your preheader above your email content. Make sure that this is the first line of content in your email to guarantee it will be displayed as your preheader. There are ways to visually hide your preheader, but I tend to stick with keeping it visible in my campaigns (why hide a good call to action right?!).
Do get personal with your customers
Personalization matters. Not only do costumers prefer a personalized experience, getting personal makes your brand come across more personal too. So let’s not think of customers as “customers,” but as people with wants, needs, hopes, and desires, and address their needs in a personal way. Depending on what your normal tone of voice is, use your customer’s first name, last name or both. Use Dear (name) or Hello (name), both are accepted. I tend to stick with only using names in the copy of my email or the preheader, and not in the subject line.
Do split-test your campaigns
Never assume you know the best way to activate your audience just by what you have done in your past. And no matter what the internet says, your adience might not respond the same to tried and proven examples of good email marketing. Always leave room to split-test your campaigns on your adience. A/B test your subject lines. Do small batch alternative time and/or day testing to find good alternative moments to send your campaigns. Test different call to action links. Test longer copy versus shorter copy. Do test with certain moderation, ideally you don’t want to test a million different things at once. It is easier to analyze your data if you only test minor variations per mailing.
Do check and analyze your campaign reports
Make it a regular task to look at what works and what doesn’t in your campaigns. Your campaign reports hold vital information about the performance of your campaigns. By analyzing the data of your past campaigns, you can learn what areas leave room for improvement in the future. Analyze behavior (open rates, click rates, what links customers clicked on, unsubscribes) and outcome (conversion). Compare the performance with other recent campaigns and try to answer why your campaign is doing significantly better or worse than other recent campaigns. When you are comparing with older campaigns, do keep in mind that in general, campaigns can and will still be opened up to days after your campaign has been sent.
Do setup DKIM, SPF and DMARC
DKIM, SPF and DMARC are ways to authenticate your mail server and prove to ISPs, mail services and other receiving mail servers that your email marketing service is authorized to send emails on your behalf. When properly set up, all three prove that the sender is legitimate, that their identity has not been compromised and that they are not sending email on behalf of someone else. Email services like Gmail and Office 365 are getting more and more strict in the types of email they will accept. Having all three checks configured ensures that email gets delivered and isn’t rejected or delayed.
Don’t SPAM your customers with the same message
Not only will sending the same message over and over risk your messages to end up in SPAM folders, it is also not very creative marketing. Surely, with a little creativity, you can manage to think of different words and content to get your message across. In general think of the frequency in which you want to email a customer with marketing content, once a week is a good maximum, once a month the minimum (unless you have nothing to share). If you have email automation in place, make sure your manual campaigns are different enough from your automated content.
Don’t create/send image only mailings
A lot of email services automatically block images by default, so if a big portion of your email content is made out of images, you risk the chance that customers will not see what you are trying to get across. It is ok to use images to illustrate your message, but make sure your message is just as clear if images would not load.
Don’t send mailings at random times of the day
Email your customers at moments when they are more likely to be able to read your message. In order to do this, you might want to segment your customers. This is particularly important when you have a userbase that spans across states, countries or timezones. In that case, if you can, segment your customers into regions, countries or timezones. As an extra result of segmenting you will learn more about each marketing segment, and it will give you a chance to further optimize your campaigns within your segmented audiences.
Don’t buy mailinglists
If your company has just started out, it might be tempting to buy mailinglists. Don’t do it. There is no way to get guarantees of what you’re buying, it is a shady way of acquiring customer data, and no one appreciates unsolicited emails. Depending on where you live in the world, keep the following in mind:
Europe
GDPR states that, to contact an individual, you need explicit consent from them. Most of the time, individuals whose email addresses are on a bought data list have not explicitly agreed for companies such as yours to contact them, therefore you would be breaking GDPR regulations by doing so.
America
The CAN-SPAM Act is a United States law that regulates commercial email. While it doesn’t actually prohibit someone from buying and selling email addresses, it does prohibit sending bulk unsolicited emails. And if you’re sending to a purchased email list, that is exactly what you are doing.
If you really want traffic fast look into affiliate marketing. Most affiliate networks house publishers who are willing to work within a payment model that suits your budget or strategy (pay per click, per mille, per lead, or per sale).
Don’t use words that can trigger SPAM filters
SPAM trigger words are words and phrases email providers view as red flags (often resulting in your message reaching the SPAM folder instead of the primary inbox). These words can be grouped into the following categories:
- Far-fetched: statements that are too good to be true
- Shady: ethically or legally questionable behavior
- Manipulative: unnecessary urgency or pressure
- Needy: desperate sounding or exaggerated claims
- Sleazy: being too pushy
- Cheap: no pre-qualifications, everybody wins
In my experience, Gmail uses the most strict filters. Since Gmail is free, it is easy to test send a campaign to your Gmail address to get an idea of where your campaign will likely land (in order to keep test this do not add the campaign email address to the receiving contactlist).
Don’t use a no-reply email address
So you want to reach your customers, but you don’t want them to be able to reach you? I will give you a moment to think about how that comes across. Not very userfriendly is it? If you marketing is aimed at customers in a GDPR country (the European Union) it is even forbidden to use a no-reply email address. Regardless of your resources available to handle customer replies, always make sure your customers can reach you (and yes, do answer your customers, you lazy git).
DON’T USE ALL CAPS!!!
Using all caps might display a sense of urgency, but it also feels like being yelled at. No one likes to get yelled at, and there are different, better ways to get your message across.
Need help with your email marketing?
Feel free to contact me. Whether you want to optimize your flows and funnels, or you want some genuine, professional feedback about your email marketing efforts, I am here to help you.