10 Best Email Marketing Practices and Strategies in 2024

Email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies as it reaches target customers on a personal level. But despite being consistently hailed as a marketing staple, email marketing can be a serious challenge. This is a reality among small businesses that are still navigating the dos and don’ts of email marketing, trying to figure out which strategies work for them, and what email marketing software can help them deliver successful campaigns.

In this article, we will share with you some of the email marketing best practices that you can implement to refine your email marketing. The tips we provide here are based on the latest marketing trends to make sure that you can have a deeper understanding of your target audience’s current preferences and develop an email marketing strategy that can engage and convert them into loyal customers.

In a recent report by HubSpot, Litmus, and Wistia, it was revealed that 77% of companies reported that email marketing had shown more engagement in 2021 compared to the previous years. The increase in engagement can be attributed to the shift in tactics used by marketers when it comes to delivering email campaigns to accommodate the sudden shift in the buying behavior of customers during the pandemic. This time, they put more importance on segmentation of their email list, hyper-personalization of content, and maximizing automation tools to streamline the email marketing process. There is also a change in email frequency as more companies who sent a maximum of two emails per week saw better results compared to those that sent five to eight emails on a weekly basis.

Email marketing, when done right, never disappoints even during the most challenging crisis that took place in 2020. According to a report by Litmus, email marketing had an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent in 2020, which was the highest ROI among marketing channels at the time. Now, in 2022, many still believe that email marketing will continue to play a crucial role in the growth of a business. And in this article, we delve deeper into relevant email marketing tips on how you can make the most of this marketing strategy.

1. Personalization Remains a Top Priority

Personalization has never been more relevant than it is today. When it comes to email marketing, customers want to be seen as individuals rather than a segmented group of targeted audience. For this reason, they expect to receive content that is tailored to their needs and preferences. Furthermore, a significant portion of customers is willing to give businesses access to relevant information to get personalized offers.

A survey of more than 1,500 companies shows that 27% of the surveyed businesses utilized message personalization in 2021 more than other email marketing tactics. The same approach continues to be part of the email marketing best practices in 2022. Combined with the information shared by customers, marketers also take advantage of marketing analytics tools that give them further insight into their subscribers’ preferences. These details include the email client and device used by their subscribers to open their emails, among others.

Every layer of relevant information contributes to the level of personalization you can incorporate into your email marketing. And when done right, personalized content delivers more than better customer engagement and inbox placement.

2. Leverage the Power of User-generated Content

Brands that heavily lean on social media platforms to promote their products are well-acquainted with the use of user-generated content (UGC) in eliciting the feeling of FOMO or fear of missing out among their followers. Seeing how effective this strategy is when it comes to increasing brand awareness and driving sales, marketers are now also integrating customer reviews, testimonials, and ratings in their email campaigns.

For companies that already have a good list of user reviews and ratings, this can be a much easier task. One of the ways they can incorporate UGC in their email marketing is by sending the best reviews to their subscribers who are most likely to use the same product. And for businesses that do not yet have a good amount of reviews and ratings to use as part of their email marketing strategy, they can solicit testimonials from their existing customers. Some companies do this by running UGC contests on their social media. These contests encourage customers to send or post actual photos and share their experiences in using the company’s products or services.

It is important to note that UGC is different from influencer-created content as the latter often involves a business deal between the company and the influencer. Furthermore, between UGC and influencer-created content, consumers believe UGC to be more authentic and more likely to influence them on whether they can trust a product or service.

3. Keep a Healthy Email List

Maintaining a clean email list is one of the email best practices that are not often prioritized by businesses that place more importance on the number of subscribers. This, however, can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy, which you can assess by looking at the statistics of the campaigns you are sending. If you see that your open rate and click rate are declining and your unsubscribe and spam reports are increasing, consider these as warning signs that your email list needs a good scrubbing.

But before you do a thorough cleanup of your email list, you must first dig deeper into the reasons behind the declining performance of your campaigns by reviewing your email campaign reports. For example, if your email campaigns have a high bounce rate, you may have email addresses in your list that no longer exist. You can also check for emails with incorrectly spelled email service providers (“gamil.com” instead of “gmail.com,” etc.) as this also affects the delivery rate of your email campaigns.

Unengaged subscribers can do more harm than good to your email campaigns’ performance. But before you consider removing inactive subscribers from your list, it is recommended to make a final effort to reengage them by creating a campaign designed to gain back their interest.

Cleaning up your email list can be done at least twice a year to make sure that your subscribers are those who want to receive your emails. This does not only help improve the accuracy of your email campaigns’ statistics, it also improves your reputation as a sender. You will have high engagement and conversion rates, and your email campaigns will have a lower chance of ending in the Spam folder of your subscribers.

4. Microsegmentation of Customers Delivers Better Results

The traditional approach to segmenting your customers may still be effective but it is no longer the only best way to categorize your subscribers. Microsegmentation is the modern approach to aggregating your customers at the granular level. This offers you more opportunities to create and launch effective personalized email campaigns.

This approach to segmenting your subscribers can supercharge your email marketing strategy. Breaking down the demographics, geographic, psychographic, and buying behavior into more specific categories enable you to create campaigns that are hyper-personalized for each micro-group you are targeting. For example, you want to segment your customers based on their buying behavior. The data on purchase history, however, can still be considered a very broad category. You can then dig deeper and create a micro-category based on purchase frequency. From there, you can categorize your subscribers into frequent buyers, occasional buyers, and first-time buyers and come up with separate email campaigns for each.

Microsegmentation empowers companies to discover ways to further aggregate their customers into more specific categories that are relevant to their business. And while it may sound like a very complex process, micro-segmenting your customers is easier with the help of data analysis systems.

5. Incorporate Interactive Elements in Your Email Campaigns

One effective way to increase engagement is by allowing your customers to actively participate in your email campaigns instead of just being mere recipients. You can do this by making your email campaign more interactive and dynamic. You can use GIFs instead of static product visuals, or you can add transition effects to the images that your customers can swipe themselves.

Embedding videos in your email campaign is another way to make it more interactive. Videos also deliver entertaining and educational content, and have been proven to be effective in convincing consumers to make a purchase. And aside from adding dynamic visual elements, another way to make your email marketing campaign more interactive is by allowing your customers to respond to your surveys right from the body of your email campaign. This does not only make answering surveys more fun, it is also more convenient, especially for customers using their mobile devices.

6. Use Incentives to Build Your Email List

Getting subscribers is not easy, especially for small businesses that are just starting to build their brands. While buying an email list is the easier option, this is a no-no as sending unsolicited emails leaves a negative impact on your brand’s reputation.

There are different ways to organically build your email list and enticing website visitors with gifts if they sign up is one of them. These gifts can be in a form of discounts or gift vouchers that they can claim after signing up for newsletters. Offering referral rewards is also another way to increase the number of your subscribers. You can add these offers as pop-ups on your website or you can redirect your traffic to a squeeze page.

Moreover, you can use the same approach to boost the performance of your email campaigns by incentivizing open rates and offering other rewards to boost engagement.

7. Use Email to Optimize Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Delivering a seamless omnichannel experience is something that modern-day marketers strive to achieve and for good reasons. Customers want convenience and the same smooth experience, regardless of the channel or platform they are using to interact with your brand. This is true among 56% of online shoppers who prefer online retailers that enable shared shopping cart platforms across different channels.

For example, a customer started adding items to her online cart from her desktop computer but want to continue shopping from her mobile device instead. Retailers that offer an omnichannel shopping experience have the capability to let the customer pick up where he or she left off. This means the can just continue shopping from a mobile phone without having to add the items that have already been added to one’s cart from a desktop browser.

The same concept can be applied to email marketing and one way to achieve this is by making sure that every email campaign is optimized for mobile devices. Another way to incorporate email marketing to your omnichannel strategy is by using the channel to learn more about your customers’ preferences through surveys. Advanced targeting is also another area where email can be very useful. A good example of this is sending emails to customers who purchased your products to get their feedback.

8. Ensure High Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is crucial to the success of your email marketing campaigns. An email campaign is successfully delivered if it directly reaches your subscribers’ inboxes—not their spam folders. While the idea appears to be very straightforward, the process involved in ensuring a campaign’s high deliverability is much more complex.

Among the factors that affect your campaign’s deliverability are the quality of your email list, the type of content you are sending, and email frequency. Deliverability also depends on the reputation of your IP, your domain, and even the email marketing platform you are using to send your campaigns. This is why it is important to choose a mass email service provider that has a good history of inbox placement.

Other vital factors to consider when choosing an email delivery service that offers a high deliverability rate are the authentication protocols it offers. These tools help in proving the legitimacy of the emails you are sending. With these protocols in place, the chances of your emails being labeled as suspicious or spam are also greatly reduced. Having a dedicated IP address is also more beneficial when it comes to building a good IP reputation. While sharing an IP address with other senders is more cost-efficient, you have less control over deliverability since your IP reputation also depends on the other senders using the same IP address.

Fortunately, today’s leading email marketing solutions are equipped with all the necessary tools to ensure that your email campaign will reach its intended audience. It is just a matter of choosing which software fits your email marketing needs and your budget. And if you prefer to not make a significant investment in an email marketing solution right away, there are free email marketing solutions you may want to check out.

9. Enable Dark Mode on Your Marketing Campaigns

A survey among Android mobile users shows that 81.9% of mobile users use dark mode on their devices. As for iPhone users, the adoption rate of the dark mode interface varies between 55% to 70%. Some of the reasons behind this preference are reduced eye strain and battery consumption. For some users, the combination of a dark background and light-colored text improves the content’s readability.

But how to know if your customers prefer dark mode or not? While there is no accurate way to tell which customer wants a darker interface when viewing your email, the best way to accommodate their preference is by giving them the option to view your email campaign in dark mode. You may also want to check which email client our customers are using dark mode as not all email service providers support dark mode themes.

10. “Noreply” Email Addresses Must Go

If you have been a subscriber of company newsletters for the past several years, you are probably well-acquainted with “noreply” emails. A lot of businesses use “noreply” email addresses to stop their subscribers from directly responding to the emails they send. This practice, however, has been proven to be counterproductive. One of the reasons why you should stop using no-reply email addresses is your emails are more at risk of being caught by spam filters. This reduces your campaign’s deliverability and overall success. Another reason is that it creates a communication barrier between you and your customers. While it makes sense to you to have a separate customer support channel for their inquiries, some of your customers may not appreciate the inconvenience of switching to another platform just to respond to your email.

Instead of using “noreply” emails, you can instead create a persona and use an actual person’s name. If you are not keen on using a name, you can go for “customerservice@email.com” or “customersupporta@email.com.” Furthermore, allow your customers to respond directly to your emails and ensure that every query is answered or acknowledged promptly. You can use an autoresponder to make this task easier.

What are examples of email marketing software?

Using the right tools plays a crucial role in the success of an email marketing campaign. There, however, are thousands of email marketing solutions that promise the same thing. To help you narrow down your options, we have listed some of the leading platforms you might be interested in:

Freshmarketer

A product by Freshworks, Freshmarketer is designed to help marketing and sales teams deliver unique experiences for each customer. This free marketing automation platform is equipped with robust tools that segment and target customers based on their online behavior, which offers marketing teams insight into the type of personalized campaigns that would interest their customers.

HubSpotVISIT WEBSITE

Another free marketing solution, HubSpot Marketing enables businesses to create optimized websites and email marketing campaigns with the help of user-friendly tools. This platform is ideal for small and startup businesses as it does not require its users to have advanced coding skills.

Maropost

Maropost Marketing Cloud is a cloud-based platform that provides marketing modules designed for ecommerce and businesses in the travel and tourism and media and entertainment industries. Aside from its powerful segmentation and analytics tools, this software solution also optimizes your marketing campaign across multiple channels, such as email, social media, and SMS.

MailerLiteVISIT WEBSITE

When it comes to marketing systems that promise to optimize your email marketing campaigns and increase your subscribers for free, MailerLite has all the tools necessary to deliver the results your need. This platform automates email delivery, which can be triggered based on how your target customers interact and engage with your contena. Furthermore, MailerLite comes with reporting tools to help you keep track of your campaign’s performance.

vcita

If you are a professional whose bread and butter is providing professional services to your clients, vcita is the web-based application you might need. This digital platform helps you manage all crucial business operations from appointment scheduling, CRM, payment, to managing marketing campaigns.

It Is Not Yet Too Late to Start Your Email Marketing Overhaul

If there is one marketing channel that has consistently delivered results since the early days of digital marketing, it is email. But just like other marketing strategies, email marketing has gone through and will continue to go through changes as it adapts to new email marketing trends.

This is why it is important to not only keep track of your campaigns’ performance but also periodically assess if the marketing strategies you are implementing are not only effective but also timely. While your strategies and email marketing tools from last year may still work, changing some—if not all—of them may drive better results.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.