Email best practices

Mastering Email Best Practices: Proven Email Strategies

The Further Team
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Mar 18, 2024

Businesses can connect with their buyers and make more sales through email. However, because of too much spam and crowded inboxes, it's important to follow best practices to make sure your emails get read. We'll talk about six important email best practices that every business should follow in this piece.

Why Are Email Best Practices Important?

A study by the Direct Marketing Association shows that email is still a very useful way for businesses to communicate and sell themselves. This study showed that email has a very high average ROI of 3800%. This means that for every dollar spent on email marketing, companies can expect to get $38 back.

Still, the average person gets 121 emails every day, so it's important for businesses to follow best practices to make sure their emails get read and don't get lost in the pile of messages. Businesses can improve the success of their email marketing and the number of people who open and click on their emails by following these best practices. Businesses can get more out of their email marketing and build better relationships with their target audience by making their emails stand out and interesting to people who receive them.

Transactional Email Best Practices

Transactional emails are important for any email marketing plan because they are automatically sent after a certain action or event, like confirming a purchase or resetting a password. Multiple studies have shown that people open these kinds of emails, which makes them a great way to get to know your customers better. By following some best practices for business emails, you can make these messages even more useful.

Email best practices broken down on a sample email

Personalization

Personalization is one of the most important best practices for transactional emails. You can make the person feel special by including their name and any other relevant information in the email. This gives the impression of personalized care. This unique touch not only makes the experience better for the customer as a whole, but it also helps you connect with them in a deeper way. 

Clear Subject Lines

Also, you should pay close attention to the subject line of your business emails. A short and clear subject line can make a big difference in how many people open your emails because it gives them a quick idea of what the email is about. This makes it easy for the person to understand what the email is about and makes them want to read it more.

Timely Delivery

Making sure that business emails are delivered on time is another important best practice. Please make sure that these emails are sent right away after the action or event that caused them. This way, the information will reach the receiver at the best time for them. In this fast-paced digital world, where most people check their emails on their phones all the time, it is also important to make sure that your business emails are easy to read on phones. 

Making sure that your emails are mobile-friendly can make the experience smoother and easier for people who read them on their phones or computers. This will help make your transactional email marketing more effective in the long run.

Clear Call to Action

Transactional emails are an important way for businesses to stay in touch with their customers because they send useful information and encourage actions that can improve the customer experience as a whole. Because of this, it is very important for these emails to have a clear call to action that tells people what to do next. This "call to action" can be a button to change your password, a link to track your package, or anything else that fits with the idea behind the email. 

Businesses can speed up the customer process, get them more involved, and get the results they want by including a clear call to action. Adopting these best practices for transactional emails is important if you want to get the most out of them and build better relationships with customers.

Marketing Email Best Practices

Promotional emails sent to a group of subscribers are called marketing emails. They are a great way for businesses to connect with their audience. These emails can be newsletters, sales promotions, or information on products, and they can be used to keep customers interested and to get them to buy again. If you want your marketing emails to work as well as possible, you should follow some best practices.

Segmenting & Personalization

Segmenting your email list is a very effective strategy that is generally seen as a best practice in email marketing. Creating smaller, more targeted parts of your list will help you send more relevant and personalized emails to each group of subscribers based on their individual likes, dislikes, behaviors, and traits. This level of customization lets you send more relevant messages that are more likely to catch your audience's attention, which will eventually greatly increase engagement rates. 

Along with segmentation, personalization is another important part of email marketing that works well. Adding personalized touches to your marketing emails, like calling subscribers by their first name or suggesting goods based on what they've bought before, can make the experience more personal and close for them. This personal touch not only improves how people think of your brand as a whole, but it also builds a better relationship with your subscribers, making it more likely that they will continue to engage with and interact with your email campaigns.

A/B Testing

The practice of A/B testing is a key strategy that is highly suggested for making marketing emails that work. To do this, you have to test different parts of the email, like the subject lines, overall design, and calls to action, to see which ones get the best reaction from the intended audience. By looking at the results of these tests, marketers can figure out how to make their email efforts more effective and get people to interact with them more. 

A-B Testing Example How it Works

Clear Subject Lines

Along with A/B testing, it's important to make sure that the subject lines of marketing emails are clear and to the point. It is the subject line that really gets people's attention and makes them want to open the email and read what's inside. It should be both interesting and useful, giving the person a strong reason to interact with the message.

Optimize for Mobile

It is more important than ever to make sure that your email marketing plan is mobile-friendly in this digital age where almost everyone has a smartphone or tablet. Mobile devices have become the preferred way for many people to check their emails, so it's important to make sure that your marketing emails are easy to read and get to on these smaller screens. You can make your email campaigns more effective and reach more people by using responsive design techniques and making sure that your information is laid out and formatted correctly for mobile devices.

Easy-to-Find Unsubscribe

Making sure there is an easy-to-find unsubscribe choice in all of your marketing emails is also important if you want to keep a good relationship with your audience. This shows that you care about your subscribers' choices and makes it easy for them to stop getting emails in the future if they want to. By following these best practices, you can make your marketing emails more effective and interesting, which will eventually lead to better results for your business.

Email Subject Line Best Practices

The subject line of an email is very important because it can tell you if someone will open it or not. The subject line is the first thing that the reader sees and can either make them click or not click. Because of this, it is important to carefully write an interesting subject line that fits with the email's content.

Short Email Subject Lines

Keeping the subject line of your email short and sweet is a good way to make it work. This means that the topic line should be less than 50 characters so that it fits on all screens, especially phones that don't have a lot of room. Another tip is to make the subject line more personal by adding the name of the receiver or some other useful information. This personal touch can make the person receiving the email feel more linked to it, which can make them more likely to open it.

Use Action Words

For the same effect, using action words in the subject line can also help get their attention. Action words make people feel rushed or excited, which makes them want to move right away. Phrases like "limited time offer" or "don't miss out" can make someone want to open the email right away to see what they might be missing.

Watch Out for Spam Triggers

Also, keep an eye out for spam trigger words that could send your email to the recipient's junk folder by accident. Words like "free," "guarantee," and "urgent" can cause spam blockers to stop your email from getting to the right people. You can make it more likely that your email gets to the right person's inbox by skipping these words.

A/B Testing

To make your email subject lines even more effective, you might want to use A/B testing to compare different versions. With this method, you can see how different subject lines do and figure out which ones your readers respond to the most. You can get more people to open your emails and interact with you by trying out different subject lines.

Email Delivery Best Practices

Sending emails to people's inboxes is called email delivery, and it's an important part of email marketing. To make sure your emails get delivered, you must follow these best practices:

Use a Reputable Email Service Provider

Being careful to choose and work with a reputable email service provider is an important part of running successful email marketing efforts. If you choose a provider that has a good reputation for sending emails safely and regularly, you can make it much more likely that your messages get to the right person's inbox. 

This is important because emails that end up in someone's trash folder are much less likely to be opened and read. This means that your campaigns will have lower engagement and conversion rates. If you use a reliable email service provider, your messages will get to the right people and have the best chance of being seen and acted upon by those you want to reach.

Clean Email List

Keeping your email list clean is very important if you want your emails to get to the right people. It is very important to regularly clean up your email list by getting rid of any invalid or dead addresses. This will not only increase the chances that your emails get to the right people, but it will also lower the chance that email service providers will mark them as spam. Keeping your email list correct and up to date is a must if you want to improve your email response rates and avoid delivery problems.

Monitor Your Email Reputation

Keeping an eye on your email's reputation is an important part of keeping your email marketing plan working. Your email reputation shows how reliable and trustworthy internet service companies and people who receive your emails think they are. By keeping a close eye on this reputation score on a daily basis, you can avoid any problems before they happen and take steps to improve your email's reputation as needed. 

To get a full picture of how your emails are being accepted by your target audience, you should keep a close eye on metrics like email deliverability rates, open rates, click-through rates, and spam complaints. By keeping an eye on your email reputation, you can make sure that your emails always end up in the inbox and not the spam folder. This will increase interest and lead to more sales.

Avoid Spam Trigger Words

Also, you need to avoid spam trigger words if you want your emails to get past spam blockers. These filters can be set off by certain words and sentences, marking your emails as spam. Don't use these kinds of words in your email subject lines or body to lower this risk.

Double Opt-In

You can improve your email service even more by using a double opt-in process. With a double opt-in process, people who want to join your email list have to confirm their email address first. This step not only makes sure the email address is correct, but it also lowers the chance that your emails will be marked as spam.

Conclusion

Businesses must follow best practices for emails to make sure their messages are read and understood. When you personalize your emails, make sure they work well on mobile devices, and follow other best practices, you can get more people to open and click on them. This will also help your email efforts succeed overall. Don't forget to review and change your email habits on a daily basis to keep up with how emails are changing.

Ready to elevate your email marketing strategy? Contact Further to learn more about how we can help you tailor an email strategy that fits your needs. 

The Further Team
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Further is a data, cloud, and AI company whose focus is helping you turn raw data into the right decisions. We empower you to discover new growth, unlock potential, and elevate performance.

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