Email Marketing Best Practices

Many marketers are now doubted the success of email marketing since many people always ignore their email. In fact, if it can be used correctly, it can be a very strong marketing technique. Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways in direct marketing. It allows the customer to communicate with the marketer/seller and develop a relationship based on value and trust. However, if it done incorrectly, marketing via email may lead to the collapse of product image. To avoid this from happening, marketers must often practice in using email as their marketing tool.

Important elements of email marketing

Not having enough experience in using email marketing may cause your email to be ignored or blocked. In order to make sure that the message sent to its destination, some of these important practices should be considered:

Subject lines
People may say “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but in fact, who among you who wants to take a risk to buy a book that has a cover that is not interesting - unless you already know its content - ? The same thing applies to the subject line for email marketing as well. Be specific in your subject line so it will sound both interesting and convincing. Don’t make it too long or too short and use the capitalization of each word correctly. Avoid using the dollar sign ($) and repeated punctuation so your email is not marked as spam, either by the system or by the recipients itself.
Wrong example: “[TODAY ONLY] Order our products now for only 10$ - FREE SHIPPING!!!!”
Right example: “Get 25% off and free shipping for all our products today”

Text body
Nowadays, most of the email clients are able to display the HTML messages. There are numerous benefits of sending your promotion-mail as an HTML message. But the problem is when the customer turns off their HTML viewer on the email client or it doesn’t support the version of HTML that you used. Based on this reason, you should consider of creating the text version of every sent email. Or, upload the HTML message to your website and give your customer the link in your email.
Example: “ Dear customer, your monthly newsletter is now available. However, your email client doesn’t seem to support HTML or the feature may be turned off. But, you can read it online at http://yourwebsite.com/thismonth/newsletter.html ”

Timing of delivery
Each individual has their own professional time to handle email. If you’re sending emails to a company or firm, it is advisable to send out an email marketing message between 9 am – 3 pm on Tuesday – Thursday. Why? Because Monday is usually a busy and hectic day so there is almost no time to open a newsletter email, and emails are often ignored in Friday prior to weekend. But if you are emailing a personal customer directly, the ideal time is between 5 pm – 8 pm on Friday – Sunday because they are very likely to be online over the weekend and have more spare time to read your message.

Frequency of delivery
As well as the timing, managing the sending frequency of the emails is also important. It is better to send a high-quality newsletter per month than a daily but low-quality newsletter. Or, let the customer itself to decide which mailing frequency that they prefer, by giving them the choice on the sign-up form.

Personalization
Improve open rates and response rates by adding some personalization to your email marketing. Make use of the mail-merge feature on the email clients.

The best practices for email marketing

These practices will be useful for you, along with the experience you gained by interacting with customer via email, it will minimize the possibility that your email is ignored or blocked by the customer. The best email marketing practices may lead to the growth of your subscriber list as well as building a strong relationship with them resulting in increasing on sales.