Email marketing may not be a new marketing channel, but it remains an effective one. Effective emails convert warm leads into customers and help maintain repeat purchase rates. To generate more leads for your business, consider these email best practices.
Establish a Reply Email Address
Sending ‘no-reply’ emails to your customers creates barriers when providing customer service and abiding by email marketing laws. CAN-SPAM legislation indicates you must provide an option for customers to respond to your marketing emails. You are also required to provide a way for customers to unsubscribe if they choose. Using ‘no-reply’ in your sender email address prevents customers from responding with questions or unsubscribe requests. However, avoiding CAN-SPAM infringement is possible with an unsubscribe link.
In addition to customer service issues, using ‘no-reply’ email addresses also impacts the customer’s perception. Users are more likely to open an email they believe to be from a real person or tied to a customer service team. Consider using a name or ‘help@’ instead of ‘no-reply.’ Improve your open rates and engagement with this email best practice.
Avoid Purchasing Your Customers from a Third Party
Another email best practice to remember is to avoid purchasing email lists. Buying customer emails may seem like an easy way to grow your business, but be careful with this tactic. Email performance depends on open rates. When you purchase a customer list from a third party, customers likely will not open your emails.
Additionally, cold emailing customers who did not opt-in to marketing creates a jarring experience. Customers who do not subscribe themselves to your email list have a higher unsubscribe and spam rate. Being marked as spam negatively impacts your email marketing. Email service providers (such as Gmail) have rigorous spam filters. The more often your emails are marked as spam, the less likely you are to reach your actual customers.
With purchased lists, you also risk violating laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR requires companies to obtain consent for all marketing activities. You must be explicit about how your customer’s data is used and provide options for them to protect their data.
Basically, avoid purchasing third-party email lists at all costs.
Maintain Good Email List Hygiene
While many customers opt-out when they tire of receiving your emails, there are many more who just ignore them. Over time, these unengaged users remain on your email list, never opening the email or visiting your website. Since email marketing relies heavily on open rates for performance measurement, poorly engaged customers impact your campaigns.
Additionally, deactivated emails create hard bounces on your email lists. Hard bounces also happen when email addresses contain typos or are invalid. When this occurs, your open rate suffers. Every so often, remove unengaged users and hard email bounces from your list. This email best practice helps you maintain campaign performance.
Email Best Practices Also Include Maintaining Proper Sizing
When it comes to sizing in emails, keep in mind requirements for width and height, images, and length. Check and ensure your email size width is no more than 650 pixels. Anything larger than 650 px will not display correctly, causing your customers to scroll horizontally when reading. Horizontal scrolling creates a poor user experience and impacts the performance of your emails.
Additionally, keep image sizes small in your emails. When images and visual elements are too large, many email servers cut the message short. Maintaining a smaller image size ensures your full message is received by your customers.
Keep Important Messages Above the Fold
Another common email best practice is keeping important messages and images above the fold. Above the fold content is the information that initially loads when a customer opens their email. Anything included on the screen before the user scrolls down is above the fold. Placing your logo and branding above the fold creates consistency across your brand. Include your branding along with the main messaging at the top of the email.
Placing your call-to-action (CTA) and most important messaging above the fold ensures your customer reads the essentials. Plus, if your customer sees the CTA at the top, they are more likely to click through to your website. Email click-through rate (CTR) is a key performance indicator for email marketing.
Optimize Subject Line and Preview Copy
With email, there are many places to convey your brand messaging. Subject lines, preview text, headers, footers, and the main email body are a few examples. However, subject lines and preview text are the first places to grab your customer’s attention. Therefore, optimizing these two text locations is critical – especially when you are not seeing strong open and click-through rates.
Leveraging A/B tests is one way to optimize the subject line and preview copy. A/B tests split your list into two groups, showing Group A one set of email copy and Group B a second set. Copy testing is another example of email best practices because it informs other areas of your marketing. With A/B testing, you learn which message is more likely to engage customers and encourage their response.
Leverage Automated Email Flows to Build Your Brand
Finally, email automation helps you build your brand. When a customer opts into your emails, creating a strong connection with them is critical. Automated email flows instantly put your customer into a messaging flow, enabling you to guide them through the purchase funnel. Show your customer how your product works, encourage a demo or trial, or give them newly published content.
Over time, your customers consistently see your brand and build a connection between your product and their problem. Then, you can use email or outbound sales to convert them along the purchasing funnel.
Outsource Email Customer Service with Millennial Services
At Millennial Services, our agents have experience in email marketing customer support for brands in many industries. We teach our teams the email best practices necessary for your business to thrive. Our customer service team is well equipped to learn your company and provide personalized experiences for every customer. All agents are US-based and trained with a detailed implementation process. We extend your customer service team’s capabilities with 24/7 email support for your customers. Scale your business with outsourced email support. Contact Millennial Services today to build your email support plan!