Email marketing is a powerful tool that, when done correctly, can drive results. Here are 17 email marketing best practices you should take advantage of to get the most out of your campaigns.
The “email marketing best practices 2020” is a blog post that provides 17 email marketing best practices that actually drive results. The article provides information on how to write effective subject lines, what content to include in your emails, and more.
While email marketing may not get the same level of attention as some of the more recent marketing channels, it is still an excellent technique to produce leads and convert more prospects for your company.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer some email marketing best practices that you can utilize to increase your company’s lead generation.
Best Practices in Email Marketing
- Buying contact lists is a bad idea.
- If the sender’s email address contains the word ‘No-Reply,’ don’t use it.
- Limit yourself to no more than three fonts.
- Make the email’s preview text more appealing.
- Include a signature in your email.
- Clean up your email list on a regular basis.
- Above the fold, keep the key message and call-to-action.
- Make the email greeting unique.
- Keep the width of your email between 500 and 650 pixels.
- Different topic lines and calls to action were split tested.
- Include your company’s logo.
- In the subject line, write the name of the offer.
- Allow people to sign up for your newsletter.
- Create intriguing (yet succinct) topic lines.
- For opt-ins, use auto-responders.
- Make a strong link between your emails and your landing sites.
- Perform a 5-second test.
1. Never buy a contact list.
This first guideline should go without saying, but it’s worth emphasizing in light of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Email campaigns rely on a high open rate, and if you’re targeting individuals whose information you purchased rather than gained via a prior encounter, your emails’ effectiveness will swiftly deteriorate.
The GDPR also mandates that you get authorization from each European recipient before contacting them, and most bought email lists do not include this consent.
Consider using Versium Reach, a platform designed specifically for B2B marketers that enables you to own data on your target demographic across different marketing channels.
2. Use ‘No-Reply’ in the sender’s email address as a last resort.
Do you know what CAN-SPAM stands for? This long-standing law is a popular and crucial guideline for all email marketers in the United States.
Never use the phrases “no reply” or a similar phrase as your email sender’s name (for example, “noreply@yourcompany.com”), since this is a serious CAN-SPAM prohibition.
“No reply” in an email message disables recipients from replying or opting out of receiving future emails, which they have the right to do at any time under CAN-SPAM.
Instead, use a first name in your automated emails (for example, jamie@mycompany.com). Customers are considerably more likely to read emails if they know they were written by a person, and it helps you stay in compliance with email rules.
3. Limit yourself to no more than three fonts.
The less clutter in your email, the higher the conversion rate.
Avoid using more than two fonts or typefaces in your email, since this can distract readers and detract from its aesthetic attractiveness.
Additionally, you should utilize web-safe fonts in widths ranging from 10-point to 12-point. This guarantees that your email is readable across all platforms and devices.
4. Make the email’s preview text more appealing.
You’ve probably seen a notice like this at the top of your email if you subscribe to a newsletter: “Email not displaying correctly?” “Click on this link.”
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a nice reminder, but retaining it in your email’s preview text (also known as the preheader) may have a significant influence on your open rate.
To begin with, you’re informing recipients that “Hey, this email may not function.” Second, it gives no indication of the email’s subject matter.
To attract your audience’s interest and urge them to open, your preview text should add specifics to your subject line.
Before the user opens the email, preview text takes in the first few words of the email body and shows them next to the subject line.
The issue is that custom email templates often have conditional statements at the top banner, such as “Can’t see images?” or “Not showing correctly?” This allows it to slide directly into the preview when it’s sent out.
Always develop a bespoke preheader that teases what your email will give as a rule of thumb.
Users of HubSpot may resolve this issue by modifying the preview text in the backend of their email marketing newsletter.
5. Add a signature to your email.
Even if your newsletter is being issued on behalf of the firm rather than an individual, the signature of a particular person should be included in the email.
41% of marketers indicated they utilize email signatures for branding and exposure in a 2019 State of Business Email Marketing report. The second most common reason for using it was to maintain consistent sign-offs across all of their businesses.
Another reason to include your email signature is that it adds a personal touch to your message. People are more likely to read an email if they know it originated from a real person, rather than a marketing group. Your email signature is the key to catching their attention.
Do you need a simple approach to create a lovely email signature? Use the Email Signature Generator from HubSpot. We also offer an Out-of-Office Email Generator that will make responding to incoming messages as enjoyable as possible.
6. Keep your email list clean on a regular basis.
Even if some of your email contacts do not opt out of your email campaign, they will never open it.
It’s tempting to send emails to as many individuals as possible in order to reach more prospects, but maintaining your least-engaged subscribers on your mailing list might negatively impact your open rate. People who never read emails detract from the quality of your campaign since you aren’t comparing it to your most committed subscribers.
On a regular basis, review your list of subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in a particular amount of time and eliminate them. This provides you a more accurate email open rate and ensures that those who are no longer interested in hearing from you are removed from your email campaign.
You may also set up a routine that progressively moves them to a less frequent email list depending on their activities.
Let’s assume you publish a daily newsletter. You might set up a routine that moves subscribers to the weekly email if they don’t open your email for two weeks in a row. If such subscribers do not open four emails in a row, they may be switched to the monthly newsletter. And so on.
It maintains your list clean by preventing you from spamming your readers with emails they aren’t interested in.
7. Make sure the key message and call to action are visible above the fold.
The information exposed to the reader before they scroll down is referred to as “above the fold.”
Despite new studies suggesting that customers are scrolling more than they used to due to social media and vertical timelines, above-the-fold information continues to get the most attention.
According to Neilsen Norman Group eyetracking study, consumers spend 57 percent of their viewing time on material above the fold. This percentage drops dramatically to 17% of the second screenful and continues to drop as they scroll.
Place your message and CTA above the fold to take advantage of this. Because it’s the first thing your receivers see when they open your email, it’ll boost your conversion rate.
You may also do an A/B test to confirm the idea and check whether it is applicable to your emails.
8. Make the email greeting unique.
How frequently do you get emails with the subject line “Dear Member”?
You may categorize your email audiences based on the sort of client they are (member, subscriber, user, etc. ), but it shouldn’t be the first thing they see when they open your mails.
Using your contacts’ first names in the welcome of your emails immediately draws the reader’s attention. This is known as a customization token among HubSpot users, and generating one looks like this:
Then, by retrieving this customization token from the email’s HTML, the address line of your email would automatically create the contact’s first name, as seen below: Hello there!
Don’t worry: customizing the greeting line of an email with the names of 50 recipients doesn’t imply you’ll have to create and send 50 individual emails from now on.
Many email marketing platforms now enable you to customize your email campaign’s welcome so that it automatically sends with the names of the individuals on your contact list – ensuring that everyone receives a personalized version of the same message.
9. Keep your email’s width between 500 and 650 pixels.
If your email template is bigger than 650 pixels, it will not display properly and viewers will have to scroll horizontally to read the whole message.
This is inconvenient to say the least, and it will almost certainly impair your conversion rate.
Reading will be simpler, conversions will be better, and the user experience will be better overall if your template follows the standard structure.
10. Run split tests on your subject lines and CTAs.
If you can’t manage to get your email’s open and click-through rates to rise, there are a few things that may be wrong: You’re not sending emails to the proper folks (do you purchase your contact list?). The content has to be enhanced (see the first advice at the top of this blog article), or the design needs to be updated.
To begin, concentrate on the latter and run an A/B test.
You may utilize A/B testing to optimize practically any aspect of your digital marketing material. This test divides your email readers into two groups: Group A gets the usual newsletter, while Group B gets the newsletter with a particular modification.
This variation determines whether your audience is more or less inclined to take action as a result of that aspect.
Users of HubSpot Marketing Hub can run A/B testing on anything from the subject line to the call-to-action (CTA) inside an email.
Change the color of your CTA from red to green, for example, to see if your email’s clickthrough rate improves. If it does, the test shows that you should alter the CTA color in your emails to green going forward.
11. Include your company’s logo.
When it comes to emails, logos are a requirement.
According to a 2020 research by Red Sift and Entrust, logos have a beneficial influence on email engagement and brand memory.
When a logo was included in the email, brand memory improved by 18% following a five-second exposure. When logos were included in emails, the chance of making a purchase increased by 34%.
With this in mind, put your logo in your email design so it’s constantly visible.
12. Put the offer’s name in the subject line.
You may dramatically enhance your open rates by including an incentive in your subject line.
Good, incentive-focused subject lines include “Free shipping when you purchase $25 or more” and “Receive a free iPod with a demo.”
However, avoid inundating your subscribers with emails about discounts or new products.
Customer loyalty begins with casual industry knowledge, and offers should be introduced only after the customer has been nurtured. Here’s an email with a tantalizing subject line and a warm, welcome body copy:
13. Allow them to sign up for your newsletter.
“Wait, since they got the email in the first place, shouldn’t they have already subscribed?” you may wonder.
Yes, in most cases, and including a “Subscribe” button in your email won’t assist individuals who have already accepted to receive your emails. Great content, on the other hand, is shareable information, and if your existing subscribers are sending your emails to their friends and coworkers, you’ll want to make it easy for others to subscribe as well.
If an email reader receives this email from someone else, provide a short but obvious CTA that enables them to subscribe to the newsletter.
However, since your email should already be encouraging consumers to do another action, such as downloading an ebook or joining a community, make sure this “Subscribe” button doesn’t distract or confuse them, so undermining your primary campaign purpose.
14. Create intriguing (yet succinct) topic lines.
The length of a decent subject line, including spaces, should be between 30 and 50 characters. The reason for this is because email companies often chop off subject lines that are longer than this.
In addition to creating a feeling of urgency, your email subject line should also give readers some clue of what to anticipate after they open the email.
15. Use opt-in auto-responders.
Prepare for your subscribers to forget they signed up.
Set up an auto-responder to notify folks that they signed up for your email list. After the individual registers, the auto-responder should be sent one day, five days, and ten days afterwards.
Each auto-responder email should also offer extra content or bonus material to thank the reader for signing up for the newsletter– otherwise, your subscribers may not feel compelled to do so.
16. Create a strong link between emails and landing pages.
In terms of title, text, and substance, your landing page should mirror the email. Consistency in the appearance and feel of your landing page and email goes a long way toward gaining a customer’s confidence.
Simply use tracking tools to determine which emails and landing pages worked best so you can keep delivering what’s working.
17. Perform a 5-second test.
Make a copy of the email and send it to a friend or business contact. Is it easy for them to figure out what your call-to-action is? If that’s the case, you’re set. If that isn’t the case, keep working.
Marketers have a lot of new tools at their disposal these days, and they’re garnering a lot of attention. Email marketing, on the other hand, has survived the test of time in terms of its impact on your users. This time-tested, dependable, and dependable technology will help you get the most out of your marketing efforts.
Note from the editor: This piece was first published in June 2019 and has been updated for accuracy.
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B2B email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience. Here are 17 best practices from experts in the field that will help you drive results. Reference: b2b email marketing best practices.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are email marketing best practices?
A: Email marketing is a type of direct-marketing that uses electronic mail to send advertising messages. People use email marketing to gain subscribers, build customer relationships and promote their products or services.
What are some of the best practices to drive engagement with email marketing?
A: The best practices for email marketing are varied depending on what youre looking to accomplish. There is no one answer that fits all situations, so its important to understand the goals of your strategy before deciding which methods will work best.
What are the 3 main characteristics of an effective email marketing strategy?
A: 1. Make your email look professional 2. Include a call to action 3. Personalize your marketing
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