Email marketing can be one of the most effective tools in digital marketing, but it has to be done correctly, focusing on some key elements and practices, and avoiding others. In this report, I will focus on 5 great email marketing practices and 3 mistakes to avoid.

Create a solid contact list

The first thing to do when deciding to start an email marketing campaign is to come out with a solid contact list. Email marketing is a permission-based marketing strategy, meaning that it is crucial that people give their permission to be contacted. The best way to do it in to create a CTA from the main blog/social network profiles/etc, showing to users the chance to subscribe to a newsletter. If someone follows a blog this same person could be really interested in more content from the same person or organisation. On the other side, it should be clear that what is offered is valuable and worth sharing (Forsey, 2020).

Personalise your content

Once the contact list is ready it is time to start to focus on the content, but even before that is good to keep in mind that email personalisation is highly rewarded. It’s not only about inserting the customer’s name at the beginning of the email but foresee what they could be interested in. Some aspects to base your email campaign could be interests, geographics, demographics and psychographics (Beck, 2019). The more the target persona is clear the easier it is to direct the right product or service towards them, and this will be appreciated by someone whose needs are clearly taken into consideration.

Make it personal

Let’s pass to the content. Obviously, the emails need to be engaging and enrich subscribers. The main point of a good campaign should be to have the full attention of the audience, and the best way to do it is to create a community and make them part of the journey. Andy Puddicombe, the creator of Headspace, makes his audience part of his joys and difficulties, nurturing the bond with his subscribers (Daly, n.d.). This also makes people feel connected to a group of like-minded people (Delmore, 2020), a place where they feel they can share their passions.

Test it before sending it

When the email is ready there is a crucial step to take before sending it to subscribers, which is testing it. Even if it looks perfect on the computer screen, it doesn’t mean that it is going to show perfectly on other devices. Among other main issues, there are broken or incorrect links, grammar errors, problems with fonts and text displacement (Salmeron, 2019). If one or more of these issues are present in your emails, it can easily translate in a loss of subscribers, who will find your email not intuitive and hard to read.

Track your emails

Once the email has been sent it can be useful to track how people are responding to it. Like any tool in a marketing strategy, the efficiency of the email campaign must be tested, but to do is necessary to have in mind what is the aim of a specific email marketing campaign. Luckily, some KPIs are almost universal. Among these are: clickthrough rate, conversion rate, email sharing, list growth rate, ROI and unsubscribe rate (Kolowich, 2020). When you decide which metric is the most important for you it is possible to work on it and make that aspect of your campaign bulletproof.

It’s now time to go through 3 mistakes that could undermine your email marketing campaign.

Don’t buy a contact list

Buying a contact list looks like the quickest way to have a huge audience, but it is the worst move you can make. Not only you will be contacting people that didn’t express any interest in what you have to offer, but it is also a violation of the General Data Protection Regulation. A new privacy policy came to use in 2018 and it was stricter about how companies get the consent from customers and how they store that data (Specht, 2018), meaning that the consent needs to come directly from users.

Less is more

One mantra of a good email marketing strategy should be: less is more. This should be applied to the number of emails sent weekly. It has been widely reported that receiving too many emails is one of the lead reasons why people unsubscribe to newsletters(Greenspan, 2019). One of the many benefits of sending email less frequently will be the chance to save time and work on some other marketing strategy that can be more rewarding.

Avoid the spam folder

The last mistake to avoid is to end up in the spam folder. There are some precautions that can be taken to make sure that your followers are actually seeing your email, like working on your contact list and keep that updated, not using caps or spam trigger words (it is possible to find online lists of words that should be avoided) and avoiding videos or Flash files (Dudeck, 2017). Not only people will not read your email, but it will negatively impact on your email reputation.

REFERENCE LIST

– Beck, Clara (2019) How Can Personalisation Increase The Impact Of Email Marketing? (online). Available at: https://www.digitaldoughnut.com/articles/2019/october/how-can-personalisation-increase-impact-email [6th May 2020].

– Braunstein, Alexandra (2019) 4 Reasons to Decrease Email Frequency (online). Available at: https://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/4-reasons-to-decrease-email-frequency/ [6th May 2020].

– Daly, Jimmy (n.d.) Tips for Sending Dramatically Better Emails (online). Available at: https://www.getvero.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-best-practices/ [6th May 2020].

– Delmore, Tiffany (2020) How to Create Community Among Your Customers (online). Available at:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/345661 [6th May 2020].

– Diana, Salmeron (2019) Test Before You Send: The Importance Of Email Testing (online). Available at: https://www.wpromote.com/blog/email-marketing/test-before-send-importance-email-testing [5th May 2020].

– Dudeck, Joe (2017) 17 Ways to Keep Your Emails Out of the Spam Folder (online). Available at: https://www.keyholemarketing.us/17-ways-keep-emails-out-of-the-spam-folder/ [6th May 2020].

– Forsey, Caroline (2018) How to Build an Email List from Scratch: 10 Incredibly Effective Strategies (online). Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/list-building [6th May 2020].

– Greenspan, Sam (2019) How often should you send marketing emails? (online). Available at: https://jilt.com/blog/email-marketing-frequency/ [6th May 2020].

– Kolowich, Lindsay (2020) Email Analytics: The 8 Email Marketing Metrics & KPIs You Should Be Tracking (online). Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/metrics-email-marketers-should-be-tracking [6th May 2020]

– Specht, Bettina (2018) 5 Things You Must Know about Email Consent under GDPR (online). Available at: https://litmus.com/blog/5-things-you-must-know-about-email-consent-under-gdpr [6th May 2020].

– Vaughan, Pamela (2019) 13 Things to Check Before Hitting ‘Send’ on Your Next Marketing Email (online). Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32874/13-things-to-check-before-hitting-send-on-your-next-marketing-email.aspx [5th May 2020].