Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing is a great way to grow your business and connect with your audience. Even with social media, email marketing is still thriving. It can help drive conversions, or you can use it to keep your customers and clients up to date. Here are some email marketing best practices to get you started on your next campaigns.
Website Pop-Up
Adding a pop-up to your website that encourages people to sign up for your newsletter is a quick and easy way to build your audience list. We recommend using Privy, which allows you to create a free email sign-up for your site. After a few seconds of being on your site, a visitor will see the pop-up inviting them to sign up for emails.
The best way to encourage people to agree to sign up for the newsletter is by offering them something, whether that is a discount or a downloadable PDF of information that could be useful to them.
Adding a pop-up to your site is as simple as adding your logo, fields for customers to fill out to sign up, and adding a small piece of code to the header of your website.
Automations
Automation allows you to set up emails that trigger automatically when contacts fit certain criteria. As evident through Responsive Search Ads, automation is the way of the future for marketing. It allows you to let your campaigns run hands free so you can focus on both new campaigns and metrics from all your current email efforts.
There are a few types of automated emails that could benefit your business, as noted below: welcome series, customer win-back, repurchase, and abandoned cart.
Welcome Series
Instead of just a single “Thank You for Signing Up” email, creating an entire series of welcome emails will help your new contacts be fully introduced to your brand. Each email in a welcome series should offer new information about your brand, products/services, and clear call to action (CTA) to encourage them to engage with your business.
A contact’s initial introduction to your brand is a moment when they are most likely to engage, whether that’s by following your social media, purchasing your products, or using your services.
Customer Win-back
It never hurts to remind customers about your business if they haven’t engaged with it in a while. Customer win-back emails are triggered when a customer has not purchased your products or services beyond a set period of time.
Repurchase
Repurchase campaigns encourage contacts who have previously purchased your product to purchase again. This is also a great way of getting feedback from your customers about how much they enjoyed your products or services.
Repurchase campaigns can be scheduled to trigger a certain number of days, weeks, or months after their last purchase.
Abandoned Cart
Abandoned cart emails remind your customers they leave products in checkout but don’t follow through with the purchase. This can be more than just one email. Having an abandoned cart email series sends several reminders to potential customers about their forgotten cart, with each email sending a few days apart.
Why not just one email? Sending several gives your customer a few opportunities to reconsider their forgotten cart. This is an opportunity to remind customers about what they’re missing, ask them if they have any questions before purchasing, and give them a sense of urgency by providing a deadline of when their cart will expire.
Choosing Email Frequency
Each brand is different and requires a different amount of communication with their audience.
You don’t want to spam your contacts with the same content too frequently. On the other hand, you don’t want them to forget about you if you don’t email them enough.
Email frequency can be weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly. Some things to keep in mind when determining frequency are how many products you offer, how often you have company news that you want to share, how often your industry has news, how often you have discounts, and how active your audience is with each campaign (if you have already started email marketing).
Collect Reviews/Testimonials
Having reviews and testimonials in emails allows you to create a community amongst customers or potential customers. Utilizing the opinions of others is a great way of encouraging your audience to buy your products.
Reviews and testimonials can be a great way of avoiding forced language that feels too sales pitchy. Sharing the opinions that others have of your brand can help build a trust with your potential customers while showing them that their opinions matter.
Provide Timely/Relevant Information
Newsletters are a great way of keeping your audience up to speed on what’s new with your business, upcoming important holidays, or days your business will be closed, industry news, and new products or featured products. Providing timely and relevant information in your newsletters can make your audience feel like they are never left in the dark.
In fast-changing industries, like marketing, providing timely information is also a way to show your audience that you are aware of trends and your business is ready to adapt in any new environment.
Create Segments
Similar to different types of email automation, creating audience segments can help ensure that certain information gets sent only to relevant customers.
You can better target the unique needs of your entire audience by segmenting them into different groups. This creates a more personalized email experience for them.
For example, if a customer has previously bought a product, you can use phrase like “restock on ___.” That same messaging won’t apply to someone who has never purchased.
Some ways to segment your audience are:
- Customers who’ve clicked
- Customers who purchased
- Customers who opened specific campaigns
- Customers who haven’t been active in X amount of days
Provide an Option to Unsubscribe
This may seem counterproductive to your goal, but it’s actually crucial to each email you send. Having a clear option to unsubscribe helps you avoid ending up in the spam box.
Communicate Quickly
Your email should be something that your audience can read quickly and efficiently. There are plenty of ways to make emails “skimmable” to your contacts including:
- Using bullet points when possible
- Creating headlines that summarize the content
- Breaking up (or even replacing) text with images
- Using diagrams where applicable
- Segmenting information and highlighting the important part
When it comes to making an email easier to understand, layout is key.
Optimize for Mobile
In August 2021 alone, 41.6% of emails were opened using mobile devices. To make your email campaigns more effective, you want to ensure that your emails look just as nice on a mobile phone as they do on a desktop.
The best way to check mobile quality is by sending a test email and checking it on your own phone. You will be able to notice how clear the messaging is and if any images or parts of the layout need to be adjusted.
Test, Test, Test!
Always test emails before you send them to your audience. When you’re creating them, there’s too much to think about. You don’t want to hit send on an email that isn’t ready.
Check out our diagram to determine what to look for when testing emails:
- Working links: Do all of the links in your email work? Are they sending to the correct place?
- No Spelling Errors: Are there any grammatical or spelling errors?
- Works on Mobile: Is my email’s layout fit for mobile?
- Not Too Long: Does my email get cut off because it’s too long? Is there too much text vs. images?
- Correct Sender Info: Are my emails being sent from the correct email address and sender
- Subject & Preview Text: Does my email have a catchy and relevant subject & preview text? Is it too long?
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