Email Marketing Best Practices

Email marketing is a great way to reach your customers, clients, constituents, or prospects. But are you doing it effectively? Are your emails standing out in an already saturated inbox? Are they even making their way to an inbox? Current email marketing best practices confirm that engaging readers by asking questions, using short subject lines, and making sure your email design works on mobile devices, leads to higher open rates and keeps you and your message from being ignored.

Would you believe that more than 122 Billion emails are sent each hour, worldwide? B2B open rates are 11 to 15% and click through rates are 2.1% to 5%. Make sure your email stands out!

Top Ten Best Practices for Email Marketing

Subject Lines – General

1. Punctuation is unnecessary.

2. Use Capital Letters to Increase Engagement

Example: The Top 5 Reasons To Open This Email

Subject Lines – Details

3. Personalization increases open rates.

Users are 22% more likely to open an email when addressed by first name.

4. Keep the character count to a minimum.

Mailchimp suggests 50 characters or less.

Content Tips

5. Don’t sound like a salesman. Drop the jargon and use clear wording.

6. Focus your message to meet the promise of your subject line. Less is obviously more.

Be Creative / Call To Action

7. Our experience shows that questions spike reader interest and encourage clicks.

8. Colors are important.

Orange and red are the best colors for call to action buttons. Make sure to place buttons at the very beginning and also end of your email.

Testing

9. A/B Testing is critical to constantly improving email marketing campaign performance. Some approaches work better than others.

Be sure to conduct your tests with a sizable audience to ensure statistical significance.

Mobile

10. Responsive Design. Make sure your email looks great on phones and all devices.