Email Marketing Best Practices 2020 and Beyond.

Why Email Marketing and It Should Not Be Ignored.

Not doing email marketing is like leaving money on the table - regardless of other forms of digital communication via social media or advertising investments. From new order enquiries to regular newsletters, emails are essential growth boosters for just about any industry.

Why Email Marketing?

It’s undeniably effective and cost efficient. 

For years, strong brands used and are STILL using email marketing to build long-term success in customer relationships maintenance across various stages in a customer lifecycle.

What’s changed in modern email marketing is more of the transitioning from a one-size-fits-all mass email distribution, to more targeted campaigns and personalized messaging; this includes getting subscribers’ consent, messaging segmentation and value-based personalizations. 

Simply put, subscribers who opt-in to your email lists have voluntarily given you the permission to engage them via email.

As commonly known, email marketing is used for various marketing communications - to provide values in exchange for the emails, to notify new updates or important developments, provide value-based information (tips, blogs, webinar invites..), or drive traffic to a limited-time offers ...etc. 

So not optimizing good email marketing strategies can mean wasting the chance to potentially increase a brand’s reputation, nurture leads interests and customer loyalty building.. all of which may have a significant impact to higher conversion rates.

Benefits of email marketing

Nurture relationships with new leads - By engaging new leads with a first time welcome email to continuously follow up email sequences, it gives the brand the opportunity to stay in touch with new prospects - keeping their interests alive, while moving them towards taking action to fulfill their needs, using relevant stage-by-stage messaging and call-to-actions.

Strengthening relationships with current customers - A brand that consistently serves values in various forms to their customers regularly (newsletters, personalized invites, seasonal greetings..) helps promote healthy and steady business partnerships in the long-run. 

Build up trust and brand reputation  - Email marketing is also a channel to practise value sharing on a consistent basis - blogs or reports publishing notifications, new discovery or product developments sharing, or organizing invites for webinars.. to name a few.. enabling a positive brand expertise and continuous initiatives impression among market players and its subscribers community.

Best practices in email marketing

Here are some best practices in email marketing to kick-off your campaigns in 2020 and beyond.

1. Use double opt-in

Double opt-in means a confirmation email will be sent automatically to your new subscribers (requesting for their validation) once they have submitted their emails. This step ensures that your subscribers are using a valid email address to sign-up, ruling out any possibility of spam issues and serves a proof of consent - in accordance to GDPR requirements.

2. Choose the right email frequency

Understand how often your subscribers would like to get your emails. Conduct a survey to find out the average acceptable frequency, so your email open rates are healthy and less spam reports which may hurt your email credibility.

3. Segment your email lists

This step is important for more successful targeted campaign, higher relevance and response rates. Depending on your campaign objective and goals, divide your subscribers by categories or leads scores, by location, interest, customer lifecycle, purchase history or any commonly shared factors.

4. Use personalizations

Include a personal touch in your messages such as: using the subscribers name, send out emails at certain time-zones which increase higher chance of email being noticed and read, use localised context for unique market needs / occasions. These little personalizations can help improve open rates, motivate more call-to-action clicks, and eventually conversion rates.

5. Use behaviour-based triggers

Setup emails to be sent out based on email recipients’ responses or interactions made - send reminders if the email is not opened for 24 hours, trigger different sets of follow-up emails based on the links clicked on inside the initial email messages when a choice or list of options is presented.

6. Be mobile-optimised

As it is commonly known, emails are often opened in mobile phones in hand anytime anywhere. For best user experience in email reading, ensure that your email content is mobile friendly.

7. Use a clean email list

Regularly check your database for activeness of email users and their responses. Sending out emails to non-engaging subscriber lists too often may hurt your own deliverability and credibility. Send out reactivation emails to see if they are still interested to be in your list and offer an unsubscribe link to be excluded from your list. If you don’t have any responses still, it is best to delete them from your database.

8. Avoid spam triggers

Avoid using common words / phrases that might trigger the spam alert : using exclamation marks, not checking your spellings, using full caps in the entire sentence, using the word free to often, click here links, too much images in the content and so on.

9. Plain text messaging vs. html content

Although plain texts can be as effective as html content, but it is understandable that we want to have our emails looking attractive and eye-catching especially for e-commerce clients. It all depends on your target audience, but try to keep away from outdated templates and keep your images to a minimal in order to optimise your deliverability.

10. Don’t buy email lists, build them up

No one likes a spammer. Practice permission-based marketing and conform to data protection laws in order to safeguard your own business integrity. There may be popular alternative traffic providers like solo-ads as a fast solution, but it's still not comparable to building your own lists (more quality and clean list). This is due to the reason of protecting yourself not to end up as an email blocklist - which normally happens when people who received “unwanted” emails marking you as Spam.

11. Use domain emails

Be professional. Use a business domain email. While many may debate about using free emails like Gmail, outlook or yahoo for example, it may bring your business emails deliverability more harm than not - as these are regular inbox providers for personal use. So although technically, it is possible, but it is not designed for mass email distribution without being flagged as a spammy activity.

Conclusion

Email databases are deemed as highly valuable assets for any business, and email marketing when used to its fullest potential, is one of the best online strategies to be adopted for long-term business sustainability and profit multiplier. 

For best campaign planning, execution, results tracking and staying organised with your email lists, use a reliable email service provider (ESP) also known as email autoresponder / email marketing platform to manage your campaigns efficiently and scale easily with automation.