Modern technologies bring on a host of exciting and powerful online marketing approaches to benefit businesses. One of them is email marketing that is taking the business world by storm as more consumers are using emails to communicate with one another around the globe at any time of the day or night.
Email marketing with its best practices can benefit a business in leaps and bounds without incurring much cost when handled rightly. Below are 7 email marketing best practices which a business can consider implementing to enjoy maximum success in its marketing campaign.
1) Definite Deliveries
As businesses wise up on manipulating emails as part of their online marketing campaign, thousands of emails are flying about in cyberspace every minute. Hence, the delivery of emails constitutes spamming the recipients’ inboxes to render a reduction of system speed and functionality that can cripple the system and frustrate users. Stringent ISP spam filters are implemented to reduce the number of emails regardless of status. Many legitimate business and personal emails that are labeled as spam mail do not get delivered. Many potential leads do not enjoy updates of business offerings which result in a high loss of potential income for the business.
Smart businesses consider manipulating their marketing emails in a clever way that these would not be construed as spam mail to be delivered to the targeted recipients. This begins with the wise choice of reliable email marketing vendors that are not blacklisted by ISPs. The business entity’s domain name must not be blacklisted to enjoy a definite delivery of all intended marketing emails that promote the company offerings.
2) CAN-SPAM Compliance
Every marketing email must be in a CAN-SPAM compliance status where double opt-in subscriptions are highly recommended. This ensures that valid subscribers would receive the intended business emails as the subscribers confirm their participation in email deliveries by the business. A double opt-in subscription action is better than a manual listing to ensure a definite delivery of all business mails to the targeted audience. The provision of unsubscribing from a business email listing projects professionalism on the business entity that augurs well with all consumers.
The current CAN-SPAM Law insists on several mandatory fields of information such as postal address and name. Subscribers would be more assured with an offline presence to confirm the legitimacy of the company in the marketplace.
3) Email presentation options
Different email recipients prefer different email presentation options depending on their electronic device and browser. Some prefer their email newsletter in plain text while others prefer HTML format. HTML newsletters enjoy more benefits with the myriad of powerful components to track emails sent out via image embedding. Moreover, HTML newsletters enjoy a higher click response from recipients for their likeness to real websites. Long URLs can be hidden subtly to generate a professional email delivery.
Plain text emails are preferred as email clients may not support HTML format. Unscrupulous email senders may embed malicious scripts in HTML newsletters that may be a cause for concern in terms of security such as phishing activities. Potential financial frauds can happen with HTML formatted emails.
4) Appealing From/Subject fields
Every email has a different chance of being opened or trashed without opening depending on the From/Subject fields. Consistent information must be presented in the From field to generate an identity for the recipient to choose to open the email. When the recipients can recognize the Sender of the email via the From field, they would be more inclined to open the mail from a familiar sender.
The Subject field is a very important field of information that can impact the email’s opening chances. A short but catchy Subject line tends to grab the recipient’s attention better to compel an opening than a long line. The right choice of words and format is crucial to an email being opened as no consumers like to be ‘shouted’ at with capitalized words in the Subject field.
5) Personalized emails
A personalized email gets a higher chance of being opened for reading and action when the recipient feels warm and friendly towards the sender who uses subscribers’ first names in the email. A soft welcome message encourages the recipient to read through the mail with proper segmentation.
This can be activated upon subscriber registration to identify their category in order to send out relevant emails at the right times without overflowing their inboxes; this would be appreciated by the recipients.
6) Send When Necessary
No consumer likes their inbox being spammed with loads of emails every day. Hence, the timing for sending out emails is crucial to generate a definite reading and positive response when the emails are sent only when relevant and pertinent to the recipient.
There are also particularly better days to send out marketing emails that would ensure a definite delivery and reading such as Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. These are considered slower days in a consumer’s life to have more time to read through emails. Mondays are very busy after a weekend of rest, while Fridays have consumers planning for their weekend escapades to take much note of emails.
The number of emails sent must not be excessive to avoid a backlash where the recipients are not keen to view further contents in later mails. Hence, a monthly update would warrant a higher chance of the mail being opened, read and action taken.
7) Monitor and Evaluate
Tracking the effectiveness of emails sent is another good email marketing practice for the business to confirm its efforts on email marketing. Different marketing campaigns may differ with different target audiences and product offerings. A simple monitoring of the emails sent with a thorough evaluation offers a host of relevant information to the business to continue with, discard or tweak its marketing campaign for better business outcomes.
Conclusion
When the best of email marketing practices is implemented by a business enterprise, the market visibility of the business company can be increased with a higher potential lead market generated to be transformed into loyal customers over a shorter period of time.
