7 Email Marketing Best Practices

7 Email Marketing Best Practices

Email is the most used service on the Internet and, doubtless,
most useful. Many people use the Internet only for checking
their emails. Email marketing can be useful only if done right.
Otherwise, it can get you more harm that benefits. However,
there are things you can do in order to ensure that your email
marketing campaign is going to be successful. In this article we
provide you with 7 email marketing best practices.

Deliverability

Deliverability is probably the most important issue in today’s
email marketing business. There are many spam emails and many
legitimate emails are flagged as spam so they are not delivered.
They are not getting thru ISP spam filters. Good deliverability
ratio is the first step in successful email campaign because if
your emails aren’t delivered then you don’t even have an email
campaign!

In order to ensure that your emails will have good
deliverability you have to choose your email marketing vendors
wisely. You have to check if they are on “Blacklist” or
“Whitelist”. There are different organizations like Spamhaus
project and SpamAssasin that have their own lists which are used
by ISP. If your email service provider is blacklisted your
emails won’t be delivered! Also, you have to ensure that your
domain name isn’t blacklisted. In order to maximize your
deliverability it is recommended that your email service
provider offers Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header.

Using our award-winning Group Mail product, whether it is Personal
Edition or Business Edition you can be sure that your emails
will be delivered because we have a constant cooperation with
ISP.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

Your email newsletter should be CAN-SPAM Compliant. It is
recommended that you require double opt-in subscription so that
your subscribers have to confirm their request to be part of
your email newsletter. Don’t add your subscribers without their
permission and you should avoid adding them manually even if you
have their permission. It is good that they do it using double
opt-in method. Also, avoid using pre-checked subscription boxes.
One of the products in the Group
Metrics software called Opt-In manager will help you to do
this easily.

It is essential that you provide your subscribers with an easy
way to unsubscribe from your email newsletter at any time, when
they want. It is good that you offer one-click unsubscription
process with an unique address. This way there will be much less
requests from your subscribers that you remove them.

CAN-SPAM Law also requires from email publishers that they
include their physical postal address so you should include it,
too. Your have to show your subscribers that you are legitimate
company which have a presence in “offline” world, too.

HTML and plain-text versions

It is essential to offer your visitors to choose if they want to
receive your email newsletter in HTML or plain-text format. It
means that you should regularly send both types. Sending HTML
newsletters have more benefits than plain-text email
newsletters. You can use email tracking only in HTML newsletter
with image embedding, HTML newsletters have better click-thru
ratio because they look like the real web sites. You can hide
long URLs so that they will look professional.

However, some people prefer plain-text versions and reasons are
different. They use email clients that don’t support HTML
emails. Another thing is that HTML newsletter types are larger
than plain-text newsletters. Also, one of the reasons why some
people don’t receive HTML emails is security. In HTML
newsletters some people can embed malicious scripts or use them
for phishing (when they pretend that they are representatives of
one company and when people click on a certain link they are
taken to their web site that is designed almost identically like
original). It is mostly used in financial fraud attempts.

From and Subject fields

Your From and Subject fields are very important for getting
better open ratio and therefore to have successful email
campaign. You have to remember several simple rules.

It is important that your From field be consistent. You have to
choose one name, whether it will be a company name or personal
name and use it constantly. Once you change your From field it
is most likely that your open rates will decline.

Speaking about Subject field, it has to be short and catchy, to
grab attention of your subscribers. Your email has to stand out
in usually overloaded inboxes. It is important that you don’t
shout so instead of

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH…

use

Exclusive Interview with…

It is very good that you make your subject field standardized
and that the title be something related from the content of that
current issue.

For example, if you have a newsletter called Email Articles your
subject line can be something like this:

[Email Articles] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue#10,
August 29th, 2005

If your email newsletter has a longer title, for example, Email
Marketing Articles you can use this:

[EMA] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue #10, August 29th,
2005

Personalization & Segmentation

Personalization is connected with Subject fields, too. Some
people like to include first names of their subscribers in
subject lines in order to have better open ratio.
Personalization is also very effective when it is used in
editor’s welcome message or in articles.

For example,

Dear !*First_Name*!, welcome to the 10th issue of Email
Marketing Articles.

Powerful email marketing software like Group Mail,
beside standard personalization also has “if-then”
personalization for more advanced users.

Segmentation is the most important part in marketing. “What am I
selling and to whom?” It is not the same to sell your software
to novice users (newbies) or to seasoned users (knowbies). Also,
it is not the same to market your software to small business
companies and corporation. It is good that you make a good
segmentation of your email newsletter. Best way to do that is to
include several additional fields at sign-up process. Of course
this doesn’t mean that you have to ask 15 questions from your
new subscriber because many people leave when they see that
there are many fields to fill. After that, you will make several
email newsletters for each membership type.

With Group Mail 5 (Personal and Business Edition) you can make
unlimited number of lists with unlimited recipients in each.

Timing is everything

Another very important thing in creating successful email
campaign is timing. In almost every email marketing statistics
you will find information about when to email your subscribers.
So studies show that the best time for sending email campaigns
are days from Tuesday to Thursday. However, it doesn’t mean that
someone can’t have successful email campaign sent on Sunday. If
you send your emails in days that are not “prime time” you can
have a chance to avoid competition that will mail their campaign
in prime time. Tuesday-Thursday are generally best days for
mailing because, as you probably know yourself, too, not many
people like Monday (remember that song?). After a good weekend,
Monday is usually reserved for some consultation with the
management about weekly plans and task. Friday is, on the
contrary, favourite day for many people, because they are
planning their weekend. People often come home earlier on Friday
so your email can be buried in their inbox until Monday. And in
Monday, to be deleted with many others (we have already wrote
about Monday). On the weekend people usually don’t work but many
will still check their emails.

Also, you have to decide how often you want to send your email
newsletters. It will depend on your content. If your email
newsletter about latest industry news you can send your
newsletter once a month, because then it won’t be latest news
anymore. If you send a corporate email newsletter with news
about company and useful articles from your area of expertise,
monthly frequency is usually the best one.

You have to make several email campaigns and see which ones get
you best results.

And when we talk about best results the next logical step is
tracking.

Tracking

How do you know if your email marketing campaign was successful?
You have to know how many people opened your emails, what was
your click-thru ratio, your subscribers’ behaviour on your web
site after they had clicked and finally – how many subscribers
purchased your product.

With user-friendly Group Metrics you will be able to do that
and also to make polls to get even better view of your email
campaign