Best Practices on Email Marketing

It is easy to confuse me with a spammer when you hear about the rate of success I’ve had. To be honest, all the success I’ve had is through constantly engaging my audience with email marketing. So, these have mostly been nurturing emails to opt-in lists. And yes, sending a million emails has definitely taught me a thing or two about email marketing best practices- with some help from Marketing Automation Software, of course.

Although, I am still learning, yet if a few effortless tricks could help me better my results, I am sure of its rate of success amongst others. The intent is universal – to get a specific action from the recipient. So here is what I have learned:

Play it personal

Personalization is the flavour of the season and yes, you can use it to your advantage. It is seen that personalized messages had the highest open rate behind timely news and affiliation emails. Personalization can come in the subject line or in the salutation, I recommend staying away from uses of “Dear,” especially in the subject line, where characters are limited.

Keep it short and breezy

Like your subject line -which should be 6-10 words, your email should be short and snappy. Keep your big picture strategy in mind when making email content decisions. If readers want to know more, they’ll click through. This way you can drive in your message, without being a drivel about it- this teasing is proven to work. Also, play with whatever content you have- a tantalizing sneak peek is refreshing in the market of boring, full disclosures.

Use of Image and Links

To my experience, more links (more than 5) means more chances of the email landing into the spam. Infact, the images that we use affect the deliverability. For Outlook, Yahoo, we need to externally download the images, in order to view them, which mean that the recipient will have to take an extra action to view the emails properly. But, who wants to do that?

Luckily, for those who like having images in the emails have Gmail has made that easier for you.

So, the wise thing to go about this is to check the number of email recipients who use Gmail. For instance, I know 65% of my email recipients use Gmail but I cannot ignore the rest 35%. Therefore, I prefer not to insert too many images in my emails.

Timing is of the essence

Marketing is a game of time, where smart individuals know when to woo their target. Yet, there’s no universal answer to what time, exactly, is right. That is specifically restricted to your customer base, a factor that you have to always keep in mind.

It would be wise to either pitch your mail in the morning when your TA(target audience)-s mind is on high alert or post work– when they can respond at ease.

Avoid Mondays as it comes with its share of stress and responses are often negative, making it detrimental for business.

Dress up sharing through incentives

It is essential to be crafty while pushing your message across. While it is a good sign for TAs to spread good publicity, they’re unlikely to do it of their own volition. They’ll need some prodding, in the form of value-added incentives. Offer a promo code or a giveaway to new subscribers and to those who share. Don’t be afraid to ask readers to help get the word out through forwarding and sharing.

Simply dropping “share buttons” at the bottom of a message won’t do the trick- you need to add value to it.

 Ajay Chauhan
Founder SalezShark