Email Marketing Best Practices

Here are the top 10 email marketing best practices, based on insights from the Email Marketing Industry Census 2016

1. Engage in basic segmentation: 78 percent of companies said they’re doing basic segmentation, which means they’re creating slightly different versions of the same email marketing message to cater to different segments of their customer base.
2. Optimize for mobile: 64 percent of companies said they’re using single-column email designs that allow for easier resizing and responsive design that automatically resizes an email based on screen size, and eliminating content in mobile emails that ordinarily displays on full-sized computers.
3. Clean your list regularly: 54 percent of companies surveyed said their email marketing success also hinges on ensuring they regularly clean their mailing list of emails that bounce back as no longer valid. They also quickly remove email addresses from the list when customers request it.
4. Encourage sharing of your email on social networks: 47 percent of businesses surveyed said they got more mileage from their marketing emails after asking their customers to share those emails on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media networks.
5. Use your transaction emails for marketing: 43 percent of businesses said they had a standard practice of inserting marketing messages into transaction emails.
6. Include video content: 42 percent of companies said that adding video content to their email was critical to the potency of those marketing messages. Given that YouTube is the second most popular site on the web, this move is pretty easy for agencies that could easily post video of their properties.
7. Do remarketing: 41 percent of companies surveyed said they regularly use emails to remarket to customers. Web visitors who fail to confirm their new subscription to your e-newsletter, for example, might be prodded again by email to confirm that sign-up.
8. Personalize your email: 37 percent of companies surveyed said personalization of emails was also key to their marketing success and went beyond simply addressing a person by first name. Other personalized data, such as the person’s birthday, acknowledgement of previous goods and services purchased by the recipient, and similar qualifiers, was included in the email, indicating the company truly knew who they were emailing when they put together the message.
9. Use emails for lead nurturing: 35 percent of companies said that once they received a nibble on an offer by email, they regularly followed up with additional emails to try and close the deal.
10. Combine email with multichannel triggers: 31 percent of companies said once contact was made by email, they followed up by reaching out to the customer via other channels, including Facebook, Twitter, telephone and old-fashioned snail mail.