E-mail Marketing Best Practices: Tips To Get Your Email Campaigns Opened Without Being Annoying

By ideamktg

When we take on a new marketing client, we usually take over their email campaigning. We set them up with a Mailchimp account and import their existing email list. Since we don’t have a lot of history on the existing list, we want to make sure our first email campaign is exciting, engaging, and stands out.

If not, this is the sink-or-swim moment where users will unsubscribe, report the campaign as spam (hopefully not) or just ignore us. We have compiled a list of tips to consider that should help get your email campaigns opened and read by your email list. Studying that open rate is important and if the open rates aren’t strong enough, we might recommend new email campaigning strategies or new organic list-building techniques.

If you are sending your own email campaigns, take the advice of others that send email campaigns regularly: read the Mailchimp blog as well as the best email marketing practices from industry leaders. Email campaigning can be a great tool for inbound marketing, but it can also be a spamming annoyance if you do it impolitely or incorrectly.

Here are some of our top email marketing best practices that will ensure you won’t annoy your audience!

Send For Gmail:

Although not everyone uses Gmail, we do know that more than 500 million users and 5 million businesses use it. With these stats in mind, it is important to deliver emails that work with Gmail inboxes to ensure that your emails are seen.

Does your Gmail Inbox look like this? Notice that the promotions tab has 50+ unread emails. Well, unfortunately, that’s where many promotional emails wind up. So finding ways to make your emails stand out and get read has become a bit more challenging.

Are You In Love With Your Subject Line?

The subject line of your email is very important. If they don’t open it, they can’t read it. So making sure we do everything possible to get them to open it is essential in the email campaigning sphere. Sabel Harris wrote a fabulous article for Contactually about subject lines that will get your emails opened. Her tips are spot on and backed up with research and data.

• Ask Questions
• Detail what is in the email and personalize with recipient’s name
• “How To” subject line because that’s the trend in internet search
• Humor and nonsensical subject lines grab recipient’s attention
• One-word subject lines
• Lists in the subject line
• Curiosity or apologies in the subject line

Be Inclusive, Not Exclusive

If you are sending to a general list, be sure you are including everyone. You probably won’t get a positive response from your “Bring Your Mom To Brunch” email from the motherless recipients. If you don’t have all the first names for your recipients, come up with a replacement intro and don’t include the name in the subject line. All the more reason to try and gather more information about your clients.

Resend To Non-Opens (Vary the Subject Line & Send Day/Time)

This is like the 2-for-1 in email campaigning. It takes very little extra work (in Mailchimp) to set up a resend and send it to anyone that didn’t open your first campaign. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more cumbersome for Constant Contact to resend emails. Three tips to remember when you set up your resend email:

1. Change up your subject line, even if it’s just adding one character. This will ensure it doesn’t stack with the first email in Gmail inboxes.
2. Pick a time and day that is different than the first send.
3. Segment your list so you are only sending to those that already opened the first email.

Don’t ClickBait

A recent study analyzing over 9 million subject lines by ReturnPath showed that the shocking “clickbait” subject lines do not work in email subject lines, despite their positive outcome in capturing web traffic. Using “secret of” or “shocking” or anything using discount, save, sales, or clearance all had lower read rates.

Be Edgy, Controversial But Be Polite

Consider what you like and don’t like in your own email box and respect that. Of course, there will always be those people that HATE all emails that don’t come from their family members and don’t understand how they got signed up for that list. I personally don’t unsubscribe often from lists, I just let them pile up so I can search for them if I need but if you send me more than one email a day every day, I will probably unsubscribe. You will figure out the best balance point between too many emails and not enough by studying your campaign stats.

Don’t Send An Oops Email. Well Maybe Do.

Maybe it’s the marketer in me, but I always read emails with Oops or Mistake in the title because I want to see what the mistake was. Then again, if you have to resend a newsletter because the first one was missing a link or had a typo, do you really want to call that out to your whole list? I guess that depends on the type of business and how important that link is.

What Does Your Email Look Like Without Images?

Some email programs, including Outlook, do not automatically open images from emails, so businesses actually block images from appearing on work devices. If your recipients are opening emails at work and their email settings (or their organization’s Outlook settings) block images like the below screenshot, you need to consider this when designing your email.

Uploading a poster with all the details as an image will not be very effective for these recipients. Consider sending less image-heavy emails and be sure to pimp out your alt tags and be sure your email says something even if your images don’t load.

DON’T USE ALL CAPS!

USING ALL CAPS IS LIKE SHOUTING AT YOUR AUDIENCE AND NO ONE WANTS TO BE YELLED AT.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to digitally shout at you, I was just trying to get my point across.

Subject Line Best Practices

According to the data-driven peeps at Phrasee, see how to make a difference from first glance with your email marketing subject line. 

Email marketing is more than just sending out a PDF version of your snail mail newsletter attachment to a BCC list. There is a lot of data out there to help make better, more informed email campaigning decisions.

We believe in good email marketing, and yes, we may snicker and share #emailfails when they come through our inbox, but only because we know we can help. If you want help with your email marketing, your inbound leads, and/or a lead-generating website that delivers you those leads, shoot us a message, because we would love to help.