10 Email Marketing Secrets & Best Practices For Success

Boost lead generation efforts and secure better conversions by following these email marketing hacks and best practices that drive results for your business.

Email marketing remains a powerful tool for businesses to engage with their target audience, nurture customer relationships, and drive revenue. But merely sending emails without understanding and implementing essential email marketing secrets is not enough to yield meaningful results.

Crafting compelling subject lines, personalizing content, and leveraging automation are techniques that make an email campaign successful. Following these best practices enables businesses to optimize open and click-through rates, build trust with subscribers, and generate sales. Here are the best email marketing practices to help you attract new customers, improve brand awareness, and promote products.

10 Email Marketing Best Practices You Should Implement

Use short, engaging subject lines.

Create a preheader text.

Make the email greeting personal.

Place the message and CTA above the fold.

Keep emails consistent with landing pages.

Set up autoresponders for opt-ins.

Optimize your email signature.

Never use a no-reply email address.

Maintain regularly updated organic contact lists.

Conduct an A/B test.

Use short, engaging subject lines without spam trigger words.

Keeping the subject lines concise and compelling helps convey the message and pique the recipient’s curiosity. Engaging subject lines also promises value and creates a sense of urgency, giving recipients more reasons to click and open the email.

Adding offers and incentives to the subject line also helps make it more engaging and significantly increases open rates. But ensure you avoid using spam trigger words. Free, buy, and discount are examples of spam words that email clients, such as MS Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail, flag as fraudulent, directly affecting email deliverability.

Equally important in creating winning subject lines is keeping them 30 to 50 characters long, with spaces included. Anything over 50 characters is discouraged as email clients will no longer display the entire subject line, regardless of the device recipients use.

Create a preheader.

The preheader is the preview text that appears next to or below the subject line in the recipient’s inbox. Its role is to give an idea of what the email is about and assist the subject line in compelling the recipient to open it.

Not setting a preheader forces the email provider to display the first few words of the email body. While leaving it blank is not the end of the world, optimizing the preview text and using it to your email’s advantage is ideal. Doing so also helps prevent custom email templates from showing default conditional statements, such as “Not displaying correctly? View in a web browser.”

Make the email greeting personal.

Quit starting your emails with the generic greeting, “Hi Member.” Instead, personalize your email greeting by including the recipient’s name. This practice immediately establishes a connection and makes them feel valued, which increases the likelihood of user engagement and conversion.

Adding a personal touch to email greetings may also strengthen brand loyalty and result in positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Email marketing tools get this task done quickly through merge tags, so implementing this in your next email marketing campaign should not be a problem.

Place the message and CTA above the fold.

Research has shown that email recipients spend most of their time and attention on above-the-fold content, which is the information displayed on the screen before readers scroll down. This discovery makes the area above the fold a premium spot for the main message and call to action.

With this strategic placement, readers are less likely to miss the message and CTA and are more likely to click on the link and be redirected to a relevant landing page.

Keep emails consistent with landing pages.

Not only should you include correct and appropriate landing pages, but you should also ensure their content and design tie in with the email. Maintaining a cohesive look and feel between the landing page and email content creates a seamless user experience. This practice builds trust and credibility and improves conversion rates.

Set up autoresponders for opt-ins.

Setting up autoresponders for opt-ins enables companies to instantly acknowledge and engage with new subscribers. In doing so, companies create a positive impression and set expectations for future communication.

Autoresponders also ensure recipients receive pre-planned follow-up emails carefully curated with relevant content, exclusive offers, and more resources. Utilizing autoresponders well helps companies create healthy relationships with their customers.

Optimize your email signature.

A marketing email signature, which increases a company’s visibility and branding, commonly comprises a business logo, contact details, and website link. But more than gaining attention and brand recognition, an email signature also helps readers feel valued, especially when the email is sent by a specific person rather than on behalf of a company.

Never use a no-reply email address.

Sending an email using a no-reply email address increases the chances of getting the email tagged as spam and blocked by email providers. Worse, a no-reply address ignores two-way communication, stripping recipients of the right to reply and opt out, which violates CAN-SPAM and GDPR. Instead, create email addresses designated for automated and transactional emails.

Maintain regularly updated organic contact lists.

Purchasing contact lists may seem the quickest and easiest way to kick off an email marketing campaign, but doing it is a no-no. Not only does it go against GDPR, but it also has negative effects on email deliverability, CTR, and conversion rates.

Regularly cleaning your contact lists also helps improve your email marketing statistics, as removing the least-engaged recipients improves the open rate. Moving subscribers who less frequently open weekly emails to a list that will receive bi-weekly emails instead should also help.

Conduct an A/B test.

When you think you have followed all the email marketing secrets and best practices but still have difficulties improving open and click-through rates, check if you have done an A/B test.

A/B testing involves splitting your recipients into two groups that receive different email versions. The variations depend on your goal; they can be the subject line and preheader, the image used, the order of elements in the email, or the color of the CTA button. Based on the results, implement the variation that tested well with the audience.

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