The Best Email Marketing Practices for Your Campaign’s Success

Best Email Marketing Practices – The phrase “email marketing” is enough to evoke some drastic emotions because email marketing requires a whole of effort. 

And after all the efforts that you put in, wouldn’t you expect your email marketing campaign to reap all the benefits?

Moreover, chances are you are probably conflating it with your content marketing as well. This is bound to take a toll on you. 

And you initiate it always thinking that the end results are well worth the rigorous email marketing efforts, right? 

But what would you do if your efforts don’t reap the expected return on investment (ROI)? What if your viewer opens your email and simply hit the delete button without even giving it a second glance? 

If a user opens your email and doesn’t see what they were expecting or doesn’t find it interesting enough to give it a read, your email marketing efforts are simply going to waste. 

Unfortunately, they might even mark you as a SPAM and you end up losing a potential customer. 

But it’s not like you cannot do something about it. You can actually do quite a bit in order to increase your email marketing campaign’s success, that too with considerable ease. 

Some Of The Best Email Marketing Practices To Use –

1. Use a Double Opt-in Option 

Email marketing is not social media marketing. Of course, you already know that!

But the point is are you treating them in a different manner? 

Because, unlike social media channels, to send someone an email you have to ask their permission first. You can’t expect to interact with someone who has no wish to know about your brand. 

Thus it is better to contact only those prospects who register or subscribe to receive your emails.

However, even an opt-in form is not enough. What you need is a double opt-in option to ensure that the person did not subscribe by mistake the first time and actually want to receive your emails. 

So what is double opt-in?

A double opt-in involves sending a person a confirmation email after they sign up to clarify with them that they have signed up and asking them to verify or confirm by clicking a link or button if they indeed want to stay signed up.

Here’s an example of a confirmation email

There’s another way to do this. 

Rather than sending a confirmation email asking your prospect to confirm or verify, you can make their task easy by including a double opt-in form. 

Have a look at this double opt-in form: 

They have included the confirmation option in their form only: 

This practice saves your time and efforts by stopping you from sending emails to someone who is unlikely to give them a single glance. 

2. Schedule Your Email Marketing Campaign 

Scheduling your email smartly is one of the most important things in your email marketing campaign. 

The best day and time to send your email actually depends on your targeted audience – their age, region, occupation, and more. However, some researches are pretty much enough to give you a perfect idea about when you should time your emails. 

According to an in-depth research, Tuesdays around 10 am is the best day and time to kick off your email marketing campaign. 

Once you get the hang of your email marketing response or success rate, you can optimize the time accordingly. 

Moreover, make sure that you are carrying out your email marketing campaign according to your prospects’ time zone. 

3. Leverage Visual Content 

When you write your email content, what do you think of writing? 

Either you pitch your product or service or you send your newsletters, amount various other things. 

But what about the content? What does it generally contain? 

Most people think of text, text and then some more text… which is fine but textual content alone is not nearly enough, especially if you are looking to get your viewer hooked and reduce email bounce rate. 

If you are solely focusing on the text portion of your email marketing campaign then you are missing out on a pretty simple way to reduce email bounce rate. 

What should you do instead?

Add images, gifs, video, audio files, infographics – anything interesting that you can get your hands on. All this helps you to keep your reader engaged and compel them to visit your website to give your brand a thorough look. This not only helps to reduce email bounce rate but helps you to convert your lead into a customer as well. 

Furthermore, by adding visual content, your potential customer is likely to remember the content for a longer time. 

A report by John Medina says, “Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%”

According to a 2016 report by Content Marketing Institute, 55% of B2C content creators were focused on creating visual content for the year.

Even though the latter is more like content marketing statistics, the data says a great deal about your email content as well. 

How can you make your email content are appealing by adding visual content? 

Here are a few ideas:

1. Embed Videos/Gifs
Have a look at this email I got. In other circumstances, I would have deleted the email without even giving it a second glance. But as soon as I saw this popping gif, I was pretty much hooked. And the best part is, that creating gifs and videos wouldn’t take a great deal of production budget. You can look out for some video tutorials on Youtube and see how easily you can make them.

2. Add data & statistics-

This solves two purposes. For one, it makes the text less intimidating by breaking it down. Secondly, it serves as proof that shows the viewer that you are not making empty claims, but you have proficient data and statistics to prove your point.

3. Create custom images-

Contrary to what you might have believed until now – not a lot of people are taken in by the idea of stock images. In my opinion, they are kind of boring and plain. Who cares about some random models? Your viewers want to see something authentic about your brand. Thus, try adding your own images or screenshots to get more attention to your email, thus reducing the email bounce rate with ease.

4. Include a high-converting call to action

When you are writing your email, everything is equally crucial – from proper punctuation to an engaging subject line and more. 

But there’s one thing that will have a direct impact on your email marketing efforts and will help people take the action that you want them to take. That is a high-converting call to action (CTA). It is an absolute getaway to your email marketing efforts and if you are not including a call to action, you are losing out on potential sales. 

Gregory Ciotti, a content marketer increased open rates for his email newsletter by 59% after he included a specific action-based CTA for the email. 

Here are the results that he got after he included a high-converting CTA: 

Notice the dramatic increase in the click-through rate, from before to after: 

A call to action is not effective enough unless it has a specific motive. If your CTA succinctly speaks of the action that you want your prospect to take, then only one CTA is enough. 

Actually, one CTA is always a better option when it comes to the email marketing campaign, otherwise, you might end up confusing your prospects. 

5. Ask Prospects To Share Your Email 

Do you want more subscribers? 

Of course! Duh! 

The simplest way to get more subscribers is by including a sharing option in your email newsletter. 

Encourage your subscribers to share/forward your email to anyone who might be interested in the topic or someone who has similar interests. 

You can make your prospects’ tasks easier by providing a link that will redirect them to an email with a pre-filled subject line and body text. 

For example, you can provide a link along the lines of: 

Share this email with your friends!

And when your subscribers click on this link, they can be redirected to an email like this: 

Social Media Sharing: 

Along with this type of sharing options, incorporate social media sharing options as well to increase your audience base. 

By adding social media sharing options, you can get more eyes on your content and eventually to your brand. Moreover, it also helps you increase your social media followers.

You can read more about – Email Marketing Vs. Social Media Marketing: Which Path To Choose?

Conclusion 

These were some of the best email marketing practices for your campaign’s success. Along with these tips, you also have to stay wary of some of the common email marketing mistakes that might hurt your email marketing campaign. 

To share more insight on this topic, here we are sharing top hacks by OmniKick to Build a Killer Email Marketing List From Scratch.

You have to maintain a balance between your winning strategies and at the same time look out for the mistakes. 

Which email marketing practice did you find the most useful? Would you like to share your own email marketing success story?