Email marketing is one of the best marketing tools available today. However, so many companies do not understand email marketing best practices.  The proof of this lies in our email accounts. The next time you log into your email, check your “promotions/spam” tab. You’ll be amazed at how many of them are hidden there!

While being at the receiving end of these emails can be annoying (which you want to avoid as marketers). The bigger challenge is that as a marketer, email marketing can be a powerful tool to market your products/services as long as your emails hit home and do not end up in people’s spam folders.

If you want to get better results for your email marketing, then check out the following best practices. The infographic at the beginning provides an overview. Then we follow this up with a description of these practices and the best tools for your email marketing.

7 Email Marketing Best Practices

Before we dive any deeper into the email marketing, realize one thing: that it’s integral to realize the full potential of email marketing. When done right, every $1 that you spend, could generate up to $38 in income. Furthermore, it’s still considered to be the most effective digital marketing techniques out there by many companies.

And this is exactly why the right set of strategies matter. Here are a few pointers:

1. Personalize Your Message

Customize your emails based on your target audience. Make sure you send only the most relevant emails to the correct group of people.

You need to tailor your subject, email body, and media to fit with your audience’s characteristics. This way, you get the biggest bang for your buck, since only the ones who are already attracted to what you’re offering will hopefully be checking your emails.

On the flip side, don’t send a general email to an even more general subscriber group. It only wastes your time and money. For example, if you own a beef restaurant, would you send info about it to a random list of people. What if there were vegetarians on your list? That is why it is vital to sort out your customer base first into targeted segments.

2. Be Interactive

Provide incentives for your audience to interact with your email. Humans have a short attention span online. By interacting with your readers, you have the chance to make them pay more attention to your emails. You can create anything from an online quiz to a video, or even a simple poll.

Remember to add these interactive elements like links, and do not embed them into your email. Also, do not under any circumstances add them as an attachment. People are naturally suspicious of email attachments.

One thing you should not do is:

• Ramble on for paragraph after paragraph about nothing
• Beating around the bush
• Write about a boring subject. Worse yet, a boring subject in a boring way.

3. Be Mobile-Friendly

Ensure your email is formatted to fit mobile screens. As of October 2018, more and more people open emails on their mobile devices. If you own a salon or spa, it is possible to see the open rate reaching above 50% in some cases!

Don’t ignore this fact. Consider the time people spend on their mobile devices. This should count as something towards your email marketing strategy.

4. A/B Test

An A/B Test is done by making two versions of something to test its effectiveness. In this case, you can try experimenting with your emails and see which one performs better. Create an “A” and “B” version, analyze the results, and adjust your email marketing strategy accordingly.

5.Copywriting

If you haven’t already, employ a copywriter to write engaging copy that sells. A copywriter is important because he/she should specialize in writing everything by considering your users’ point of view. Here’s a quick tip: consider avoiding copywriters who use too many “I” or “we” in their writings.

6. Email Marketing Design

Like all good products out there, the right design is important. Whatever you’re selling, you don’t want your email to end up on some worst designs list. You or your customers might have all the money in the world, but without the right design, your email will not fit your prospects needs. Your email needs a good design to encourage “love at first sight” in your customers’ hearts.

7. Report

Whatever ways you’ve chosen won’t matter much if you have no way to see & measure the effectiveness of each. During your email marketing campaign, make sure that you have ways to gather statistics. You can measure these statistics and analyze them, so you know just how effective your email marketing has been. Some tools in the next section can help.

3 Email Marketing Tools

Here are a few tools that could be beneficial for you:

• AWeber- A popular tool for email marketers. With AWeber, you can have autoresponders, various reports, and analytical tools, plus create sign up forms.
• Constant Contact-You also get built-in social media sharing tools. If you’re an online store that sells your products through Shopify, they’re also offering eCommerce integration.
• ActiveCampaign- With over 60,000 organizations using their service, they offer good customer support response time. You can also sign up for a 14-day free trial to measure this tool’s effectiveness.

Final Thoughts

All in all, email marketing can still be a real force in marketing your products. All kinds of businesses can benefit from this strategy – after all, what’s a good product without a good marketing strategy to build awareness to your audience? By following the email best practices in this article, you get one step closer to making this a reality.