Email communication is such a basic part of so many business marketing plans, pretty much everyone is using it. Many people are doing the same things in their email campaigns, and it can be easy to get into a ‘blast it out’ pattern.
You have your list, you have your strategy, and you have your email templates ready, but what else could you be doing to get really sharp on your email marketing campaign’s performance?
Here’s four ‘secret’ best practices that you don’t hear about often, but every marketer should know.
1. Up to 30 percent of your contacts’ email addresses change each year. What's that hissing noise? That's the air being let out of your email marketing plan. Everyone talks about the best practices for acquiring new contacts for your email lists, but what about taking care of the lists you have? It’s essential for marketers to validate their lists on a regular basis.
This can be done via email verification software and asking your list to opt back in on a regular basis. Asking for an opt-in after someone has been on your list for as long as a year (or more, depending on your audience) helps you know your message is welcome (reducing the chance it will be marked as spam) and re-establishes you in your customers’ minds.
2. Poor sender reputation can affect anyone and everyone who sends emails in bulk. This is a threat that you want to deal with before it happens. Many marketers only learn about the consequences after it happens – and they can no longer reach their audiences. Sales and customer satisfaction suffer as a result, and it can be a costly and time-consuming process to repair your sender reputation.
You can check email lists before you send to them – in fact, that is the best time to do that. But it's not enough to verify a list once – it has to be done more than once over time, as email addresses that previously were fine can one day become spamtraps or invalid.
3. Consider the domain you are emailing to, and customize content for that domain. For example, if you don’t use Gmail, you may not realize that users have their emails divided into tabs that exist by default in every inbox. A Gmail user can change these tabs, but the defaults are generally “Primary,” “Social,” and “Promotions.” You can guess that “Promotions” is probably not looked at by users as often as “Primary.” (See more on Gmail inbox placement in this blog post.)
A marketer would want to get their emails in “Primary,” to ensure the message is received. When I recently received an email from a business that specifically asked me to move their emails to “Primary” so I would be sure to receive them, the personalization impressed me.
This relates to good list segmentation, but not all marketers are paying attention to the actual email domain that the message will end up in, and that can affect deliverability as well as open rates.
4. Customers expect personalized content they can use. Time for a tropical vacation – but you have to stay in the hotel room the whole time. How does that sound? Probably not great, as it's hardly within your expectations. That is how your subscribers feel when they get an email from you that has irrelevant information or is focused too much on promotions and sales – it doesn’t meet their expectations.
Everyone knows you need to have good content in your email, as well as excellent design. But what about being useful and personal? Even the best call to action isn't going to be valuable to your subscribers if they can't apply it to their busy lives. Give your subscribers something to talk about and share. Get them excited about an announcement that only they know about ahead of time. Share some advice and expertise from your industry to help them with their own concerns.
Customer recipes for food and beverage companies are one example, or clothing retailers can create a breakdown of what celebrities wore to a recent award show for wardrobe inspirations.
Get 10 more tips on personalization methods you can use in this Quick Guide to Email Marketing from StrikeIron and MarketingSherpa.
What tricks do you have up your sleeve as an email marketing professional? Send us a note or leave a comment.
Photo credit: Steven Depolo