Top 10 Email Marketing Tips

Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to create meaningful relationships with your customers, build loyalty, and increase sales - and these email marketing tips will help you make 2022 a sure-fire success.

Trends come and go but true quality will always stand the test of time. 

The latest tech, the newest trends, powerful AI and sophisticated algorithms count for nothing if your email campaigns don't pass the quality benchmark test. Nothing is ever going to replace great content, intelligent design and being able to put the right message in front of the right people at the right time.

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Email marketing tips

Our top ten email marketing tips cover:

1. The purpose of email marketing
2. The importance of email marketing data
3. Email marketing subject lines
4. Email marketing content and design
5. The best calls to action in email marketing
6. Great landing pages
7. Email marketing deliverability
8. The best time to send email campaigns
9. How to test your email marketing campaigns
10. Measuring the success of your email marketing

These tips will help you take your email marketing to the next level and show you how to create campaigns your customers will love.

1. The purpose of email marketing

Your email marketing campaigns need to have a purpose otherwise it's just marketing noise. Ask yourself: "Why am I sending this email campaign and what do I want it to do?"

You should have a clear purpose and a clear intention for what it is you want the recipient to do.

Whether it's getting them to book a staycation, fill out a survey, or simply nurturing the relationship with quality content, signpost your purpose with clarity.

With a clear purpose, you'll know how you want your subscribers to feel when they receive an email campaign from you and what you want them to do.

2. The importance of email marketing data

The success of your emails will, in a large way, be in direct relation to the quality of your data. 

The more data you can legitimately collect on your customers the more complete a profile of them you can build. Through this, and understanding their behaviours, you'll be able to create marketing content personalised to them by segmenting your database. This will give you the power to put the right message in front of the right people. 

It's also vital you keep your email marketing database in good health to ensure you don't fall foul of data privacy regulations like GDPR.

Read more about the importance of email marketing data

3. Email marketing subject lines

The primary purpose of your subject line is to cut through the noise and to make people open your email. If this fails, all the hard work you've put into creating your great content, brilliant offer and optimised landing page will fall by the wayside.

At its very core, a great subject line will inspire people to act. It needs to be relevant, enticing, clickable, short and sweet (a maximum of 70 characters), and immediately elevate your brand's email from the others competing for attention in the inbox.  

Discover hope to write the best subject lines and preview text

4. Email marketing content and design

Your design should be on brand, should work seamlessly across all devices and email clients, and your subscribers should instantly recognise your email marketing campaigns as belonging to you. 

As for content - find out what works for you. It could be short, sharp, sales-driven messaging or it could be long-form, storytelling content - often a mixture of both works well. Don't be afraid to try different types of content to find out what works best for you.

Find out how to make your email marketing design best-in-class

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5. The best calls to action in email marketing

A powerful call to action will define how many people engage with your email. There's a reason it's "call to action" and not "make them act." You have to invite your subscribers in. You have to pull, not push.

It needs to be immediate, present, relevant and personalised. In a nutshell, you need to find a compelling way to tell your customers to 'Do this now!'

Learn what makes the best email marketing calls to action

6. Great landing pages

This isn't part of the email itself but is an essential part of email marketing. 

Good landing pages are clear, they don't make the user think, they are easy to navigate, and they have a very clear message and action to take - and the content should work in unison with the email rather than simply repeating what they've already read.

Like the anatomy of an email, a landing page has to be created to make your customers do what you want them to do. Make life easy for them and they stand a much higher chance of converting.

7. Email marketing deliverability

You need to make sure your email works on multiple devices but also in different email clients. There's nothing worse than giving your customers a bad experience and more than 90% (Source: Adobe) won't bother trying to read something if it doesn't display properly. 

Emails sent out with mistakes look unprofessional, can cause reputational damage, and can be reported as spam - impacting the delivery of future campaigns. 

Deliverability is far more mainstream now than we've ever seen before and - not having the right configuration in place - is something that's affecting all senders. It can have a significant negative effect on email marketing programmes and, without the correct set up, can lead to your emails ending up in spam folders or not being delivered at all.

Discover everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability

8. The best time to send email campaigns

A really common question we're always asked is 'What day and time should we send the email?' The answer is it differs from industry and industry, season to season, and even company to company. 

One place to start is by looking at your Google Analytics and identifying when your key customers are online and engaging with the site naturally. Aim to send at a time when they are online and potentially more receptive. 

Finding the right time to send an email isn't an exact science yet - and the perfect time to send simply doesn't exist. However, through a combination of common sense, historical performance and industry trends, you can find the best time to send your emails, often with surprising and dramatic results.

9. How to test your email marketing campaigns

Testing works with everything from finding the right time to send, to finding the best subject line and even to finding the best performing content. 

There are many different ways to test an email and equally many other ways to measure success.

 What's important is to isolate one variable at a time in order to get a meaningful result. For example, you could run an A/B split test by changing the subject line of an email but you would have to send both emails out at the same time to make it a fair test. 

Equally, if you want to test sending at different times, make sure everything else in the email remains constant. It's also good practice to keep things fresh and experiment with mixing things up - while consistency is key it doesn't hurt to try new things especially as consumer habits change.

Learn how email marketing testing can help optimise your results 

10. Measuring the success of your email marketing

Email is such a powerful marketing channel to use because it's so easy to measure performance. Alongside the standard metrics, like click through rates, it's easy to link your emails to Google Analytics and then measure how the visitors to your site from email behave in comparison to other traffic sources. .

To come full circle, go back to your purpose and ask yourself what a conversion looks like to you, what success means, and identify how you're going to measure ROI. 

By measuring your results, evaluating them and learning from them you'll be able to continue making stellar campaigns to wow your customers and give you the results you want to see.  Analysing the results of previous campaigns then forms the basis for future campaigns.

Summary

The email marketing industry is an incredibly exciting place. As a marketing channel, email has been around the longest and yet still possesses the most longevity. Move on past the basics and you'll step into a world of advanced automation, sophisticated segmentation, behavioural-driven emails, and contextual targeting.

Download these tips and more to take your email marketing in 2022 to the next level.

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