20 essential email marketing tips for all businesses

Essential email marketing tips for all businesses.

1. Automate your welcome emails, opt-in emails, unsubscribe emails. Concentrate on your business and let the app do the donkey work.
2. Include a text version with your HTML email. This not only gives those with HTML turned off the chance to read your message, but also helps keep you out of the Spam filter.
3. Authenticating your domain will do the same, confirming you are a message coming from the domain you say you are.
4. Including personal info, like first name, can improve your email opens and Click-Through Rate (CTR). e.g. Hi [firstname], we haven’t seen you since [lastpurchasedate], have a 20% off voucher.
5. Don’t use RE: and FWD: at the start of your subject titles. People assume your message is a reply or something useful you’re forwarding, but they will alos soon realise it is not and stop reading, delete it or even worse, unsubscribe.
6. Announce your event/sale to your subscriber list before anyone else. There needs to be many benefits to signing up.
7. Use double opt-in to reduce the amount of fake, spam emails. Double opt-in method sends a confirmation email to the new subscriber. The quality of your list is a lot more important than the quantity of email addresses.
8. Explain in your image alt tags what is in the image. Most email clients don’t show images by default, so a text preview could initiate the subscriber to download the images and spend a little longer reading your message.
9. Don’t send too many emails. One or two a week maximum (depending on your business). Once a month or less is better. Again, quality over quantity, for your subscribers.
10. Make sure your email can be viewed on all devices. Mobile now accounts for 56% of all email opens. Have a responsive HTML email template designed that changes layout based on browser width.
11. Make sure your content/message can be scanned over quickly. Your subscribers are busy people. Break up long paragraphs into shorter paragraphs with subheadings giving a quick summary of what each one is about.
12. Use segmentation to separate content and send subscribers the information they want. An obvious idea is to have an option on sign up that identifies gender, so you can send info or sale details for men to the men and for women to the women.
13. Include an unsubscribe link. This is a legal requirement.
14. Include links to your social media profiles and links to share the content in the email.
15. Start an email marketing plan/calendar and work out what you want to send way in advance, then test and test and test again prior to sending.
16. Write content that means something. If you have nothing to say, don’t an email that week or month. Don’t waste your subscriber’s time.
17. Write your content with personality. It’s highly likely your subscriber’s are in an informal frame of mind, plus you are writing directly to them, you have their email address and first name (collected during the sign up).
18. Keep your subject to about 30 characters (including spaces). Desktops have enough space for 80 characters on average, but more and more people are using mobile devices to read email. Any more than 30 characters on a mobile device will be cut off.
19. Use icons in your email subject. These have been proved to increase email opens. The use of the word video in a subject also increases opens, but don’t use unless you have a link to a video in the email message, you don’t want to trick your subscribers.
20. Send your campaign on a day that will get the maximum opens and click-throughs. This will depend on your audience, but Tuesdays and Wednesdays are a good start. People tend to spend Monday mornings deleting emails sent over the weekend, so your email, if not deleted, will almost certainly get less attention.