Eight Easy Email Marketing Best Practices That Cost NOTHING To Execute

Though you may hear people say “I don’t use email anymore,” the data says that’s patently false. In fact, 81% of small and medium-sized businesses still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention (Emarsys, 2018).

Small businesses have a leg up on the competition in email because they are liable to hold consumer trust better than most corporate brands. Likewise, they are able to enact better personalization through localization and their intimate knowledge of a niche customer base. This leads to better opens, click-thru-rates, and as a result, more leads and conversions.

Conversions, New Customers, Calls, Building Subscribers.

Having a goal is crucial when creating an email campaign. The first thing you will want to ask yourself is, “What do I want our customers to do when they receive this email?” It could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or scheduling an appointment.

When setting a goal, this determines what your CTA (call-to-action) will be in the email.  

Once you’ve figured out what your goal is, it’s important to make your CTA great. When creating a CTA, it’s important to use strong verbiage that will provoke emotion or enthusiasm. Oftentimes, it’s best to start your CTA with a command verb so the customer knows to take action. Even a simple command such as “Learn More” or “Go” can be effective, but you should consider your audience. If you can tailor the command to your product or service without stretching it to a long phrase, try it out.

Analyze the effectiveness of your subject line to get the most opens: https://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

Without an awesome subject, what’s inside the email doesn’t matter. Your subject line is one of the most important parts to the email. It’s what provokes the recipient to open and learn more about your products or services.

This tool will measure the emotional marketing value of your subject line and tell you if it is spiritual, intellectual, or empathetic. The higher your subject line scores on this analyzer, the better your open rate will be for your campaign.

Stay on brand. CTA/Offer should be up towards the top of the email.

Once your recipients have opened the email, you want them to actually read what’s in there. If your email isn’t aesthetically pleasing, your readers are not likely to click. It’s best to put what your email is about at the top of the email with the offer.

You are more likely to get clicks to your website this way. It is also important to make sure that the colors, style, and wording is on brand with your company. This consistency is how your customers will know and remember you. 

UTMs, Tracking Phone Numbers, Google Analytics

How will you know how great your email campaign performed? How will you know to adjust if it failed to meet your benchmarks? How do you establish a benchmark, anyway?

For every link within your email, you should have UTM tracking set up. Here is a great campaign URL builder from Google that will turn your ordinary website link into a URL you can track:

If your email asks the customer to reach out to you via phone, it’s always a good idea to set up a tracking number (we recommend www.calltrackingmetrics.com) to measure the number of calls you received from this specific campaign. 

Products / Services / Offers

Make sure the URL within your campaign goes to the landing page referencing the product from your email. Nobody wants to click to your homepage and look for the product, service or offer you highlighted from your email campaign. If you confuse them, you will lose them!

When building and maintaining your email lists, make sure you segment your audiences into groups that are relevant to them. Most email marketing tools allow you to segment or tag your customers as either new customers, returning customers, and so on.

This helps ensure you send emails that are relevant to that specific customer. 

Schedule Your Emails At The Proper Time

The number one thing to remember when launching your email campaign is that not every time is the best time to send out an email. You want to do research on your industry and what times your customers are more likely to open and engage with your email.

Platforms like Mailchimp offer reporting that display effective times to send your email campaign and can actually calculate your send time by analyzing your current list.