Email is an incredibly effective marketing tool, but many businesses underutilize its potential. Too often, email marketing is given a back seat to other more glamorous marketing channels. But when utilized properly, your email list can be incredibly lucrative when it comes to retaining existing customers and generating new business. Following these email best practices can help your business get the most out of your email subscriber list, resulting in more leads and conversions!
Outdated information is email poison, which is why cleaning out your email list is so important. Regularly purge your email list of any inactive addresses (ones that cause hard bounces) and any recipients that unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam. This will help you to improve your send metrics like deliverability rate and defend your sender reputation.
Sending the same message to everyone who has signed up for your emails doesn’t allow for any targeting, which means that the response rate will likely be much lower than if the message had been tailored to each sender. Segmenting your email list means breaking up your overall list into smaller lists (for example, current customers and prospects). Even amongst these lists, you can continue to dive them up further into even smaller more highly segmented lists (for example, current customers that purchased kids’ apparel in the last three months). The more specific you can get with segmenting, the more targeted your message can be. Targeted messages result in significantly higher engagement and conversion rates.
Using an email provider that allows you to personalize your emails with recipients’ names is a great way to make them feel like the email is specifically tailored for them, however, it’s not the only way to personalize your emails. Tying recipients’ preferences and purchase history into emails also creates the perception that the email is for them, and them alone! This is where your tightly segmented email list comes in very handy by allowing you to create one message per individual group to save time.
Once your email campaigns are developed, always check them to ensure that they’re ready to send. Having someone proofread your emails for grammatical and spelling errors will ensure that they look professional. You should also send a test email so that you can verify that images and other features are rendering properly for recipients on various types of devices. The time that you invest in this important step will pay off significantly the first time a mistake is caught in advance of sending a flawed email campaign.
