Best Practices for Your Email Marketing Campaign

Marketing via email is essential for businesses looking to connect with new customers, maintain existing relationships, or announce upcoming promotions and product launches. But a poorly executed campaign can completely flop, or worse, lead customers to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Here are eight tips to make your email campaign a success from start to finish.

1. Get to the point.

Your subject line should grab readers’ attention, and let them know what to expect when they open the email. Mysterious or ambiguous subject lines might attract the odd reader who looks for wit and prosody in their inbox, but the vast majority of people prefer a simple and specific subject line that accurately summarizes what’s inside.

2. Don’t overflow the inbox.

Your emails should be a consistent presence in your subscriber’s inbox, but they shouldn’t come so frequently that readers are overwhelmed. A basic rule of thumb: don’t send emails more frequently than people check their email. Three back-to-back unread messages from the same source stick out to customers as an annoyance, and they might unsubscribe.

3. Time your messages to your subscriber’s day.

Be cognizant not only of what you put in your emails, but when you send them. If you’re advertising a product for leisure, send your message around quitting time; if you’re announcing a promotion that benefits office workers, try to hit their inbox right around the time that they log in for the day. For businesses that market to people across different time zones, there are products available to space out your email blasts so they’ll arrive at the same hour in each location’s respective time zone.

4. Include a call to action.

You want readers to finish your email and understand exactly where to proceed if they’re interested. Make sure to let them know exactly what you’re asking of them, and phrase it in a way that makes them feel included in something special.

5. A sense of urgency does a lot.

A good email gets the reader to click a link, but does that link get opened in a tab for later, and possibly forgotten about? Or does the reader navigate immediately to your site to learn more and/or make a purchase? Including a deadline pushes readers to act now, and even if your promotion is just beginning, language that makes the opportunity seem fleeting can boosts sales at the start quite a bit.

6. Don’t make your subject boring.

Even a concisely worded subject line that clearly conveys the necessary information can get skipped over. Include words that attract the reader’s attention; sensory details and unusual adjectives are great for this.

7. Get with the times.

Believe it or not, people have lives away from their computers. Keeping up with what’s happening in news or sports can provide you with interesting angles for your subject lines and emails, putting your emails firmly in the here-and-now instead of making them seem robotic.

8. Write like a human.

Obviously, you should avoid curse words and overly colloquial language, but you don’t need to be overly formal when writing an email. Throwing in a little bit of personality will keep your reader’s attention and make them feel like they’re engaged in a real conversation - and that feeling often leads to a purchase.