Sending an email or two is easy. But a long-term email strategy that grows your business requires an intentional approach using email marketing best practices. From the right tactic to get new subscribers on your list to the best ways to let readers unsubscribe, the world of email marketing has rules worth learning.
By focusing on email best practices, you’ll connect with your customers and grow your business by turning subscribers into sales.
Not knowing these guidelines might mean sendouts that look right on desktop but wrong on mobile, a mailing list that’s large but unengaged, or emails that never get opened. By focusing on email best practices you’ll connect with your customers and grow your business by turning subscribers into sales.
If you’re just getting started with email marketing or have hit a plateau in growing your email list, this article includes tips to enhance your emails and help you develop an email marketing strategy that works. Using reliable email marketing software can also streamline your efforts and ensure better performance across campaigns. We’ll walk you through 20 email best practices to help you optimize your emails, moving beyond sending one-off emails and toward building a sustainable email marketing strategy that pays dividends for your business.
Sending information and offers through email is a form of permission marketing, a term coined by Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers. Godin advocates for customers to opt into marketing and decide when, where, and how they’re advertised to, suggesting this is the most effective (and respectful) way to turn onlookers into customers. When a website visitor, prospective customer, or previous buyer signs up for your mailing list, they’re giving you permission to communicate with them.
Double opt-in email sign-up, compared to single opt-in, helps you collect email addresses with an additional confirmation step that ensures you truly have someone’s permission to send them an email. This method prevents fake sign-ups and also helps ensure you’re compliant with anti-spam regulations and laws like GDPR.
Here’s what double opt-in email sign-up looks like in action:
Beneath Your Mask, a luxury skincare company, uses double opt-in email sign-up, following-up with a welcome email after a subscriber is on their list.
Many email marketing platforms, like Mailchimp, provide the option to enable double opt-in email sign-up to help businesses maintain high-quality mailing lists. This email marketing best practice will help you build an engaged list and maintain a high open rate that leads to sales.
After a customer has opted in to receiving emails, send them a welcome email to establish an early connection and prepare them for what’s to come. Welcome emails generally have an average open rate of over 86% and are worth taking advantage of. Most email marketing services let you send an automated welcome email after a new subscriber joins your mailing list. Ensure your welcome email is evergreen and relevant to newcomers.
Here are a few different ways to make your first email to a subscriber count:
Bushbalm, a company that develops a natural skincare product line, encourages website visitors to sign up for its mailing list with a promotional discount. In its welcome email, it provides a limited-time special offer for new subscribers.
Your first contact with a subscriber is an opportunity that shouldn’t be squandered; instead, set an intention for your welcome email that serves your business goals.
With a direct line to a subscriber’s inbox, email marketing is an opportunity to build a solid relationship with readers. The type of email address you use can impact this relationship. As an email marketing best practice, avoid using a no-reply email address. Instead, opt for a valid email address that subscribers can actually respond to. Here’s the difference between the two:
Monitor your business’ inbox for incoming emails and respond in a timely manner. As your company grows, set up your inbox to filter out out-of-office auto-responders and auto-forward subscriber responses to your customer service specialists. An email that appears personalized encourages engagement and feedback from your newsletter subscribers that can help inform your business and positively impact your email delivery rates.
Forge a connection with subscribers and provide them with the most value possible by personalizing the emails you send. One of the simplest ways of adding a personal touch to emails is addressing subscribers by name using merge tags on email marketing platforms that dynamically add personalized information to your emails. However, this is just one of many ways you can add personalization to your sendouts.
Opt for an email marketing platform with robust automation features that allow you to create an email experience that feels tailored to each subscriber:
Personalization helps you send “just in time” emails that provide subscribers with a custom experience.
As a business, you want to approach customers in a way that feels polished and professional. However, in practice, this can lead to stiff formality that makes your emails sound cold and impersonal. Instead, opt for a tone in your emails that’s casual and conversational.
These small changes can be the difference between emails that are immediately archived and ones where subscribers read until the end.
On average, a person sends and receives 121 business emails each day; an email you send a subscriber is just one in an endless digital pile. Give your email a better chance at being read by keeping emails short and to the point.
Sundays, a furniture company, sent out short and to-the-point emails for their biggest sale of the year during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
According to Campaign Monitor, the ideal email copy length is between 50 to 125 words. This is just a guideline and you should experiment with the length that works for your company’s audience. However, avoid emails that are too lengthy and make readers click away mid-way through. Instead, get straight to the point and make the information you’re trying to convey obvious to a reader––whether that’s an upcoming promotional sale or the launch of a new product line.
People generally don’t read every word of an email, at least to start. Instead, while reading online, people often adopt an F-shaped reading pattern that is optimized for efficiency, initially focusing on the upper portion of a text, before scrolling vertically. A reader’s eyes skim for important details to get a broad idea of what a newsletter sendout is saying.
Structure your emails to help readers quickly take in as much information as possible. Here are a few tips for avoiding giant blocks of text in favor of skimmable content:
These simple tips can make your emails easier to read and ultimately get your message across more easily to subscribers.
Spending time crafting an engaging and informative email only matters if a subscriber opens it. That’s why a headline that catches a reader’s eye from their cluttered inbox is so important. Avoid gimmicks like ALL CAPS, excessive exclamation marks, and emoji overload and try these tips instead:
Think about the subject line that will make a reader click instead of opening another email in their inbox.
If a subject line is your title, the preview text is your subtitle. While the subject line is what a subscriber sees first, the preview text gives you another chance to inspire someone to open your email. Don’t default to preview text that pulls in preheader text or the first line of your email. Instead, customize your preview text and choose a line that coaxes readers toward reading what you have to say.
Rather than using the preview text to simply restate the subject line in slightly different words, consider these two lines as complementary. Here are a few examples from real companies:
Take advantage of preview text to tell subscribers what’s to come in your email and entice them to click and read your message.
Emails are a great medium to inspire action; that’s where call-to-actions (CTAs) come in. Add CTA buttons to your emails to help make it explicit what the reader should do. Your CTA text should be short (one to five words) and concise, while your CTA button should stand out from the rest of your email and be clearly visible to a reader.
The sustainably crafted dinnerware brand Fable used a straight-forward CTA in a promotional email to drive subscribers toward a sale on its website.
Mejuri, an everyday fine jewelry brand, uses a fitting CTA to drive traffic to the gold collection on their website.
By tracking the click-through rates (CTR) on your CTA across emails, you can determine which messaging is effective and which offers subscribers find most compelling.
One valuable feature within most email marketing platforms is the opportunity to experiment with your email content through A/B testing by sending out different versions of a single email.
Here’s how A/B testing works:
With A/B testing you can compare different elements of your email sendout to see what performs best. Here’s a list of the different elements you can experiment with through an A/B test:
While A/B testing can be an effective strategy, developing multiple emails can be time intensive and unrealistic for a small business. To start, test simpler aspects of your emails, like headlines and preview text. As your email marketing strategy expands, consider testing other features of your emails too.
A/B testing is an email marketing best practice because it allows you to put your hypotheses to the test. If you suspect that a shorter email will perform better than a longer one, you can run the experiment. If you have a hunch that asking a question in a headline will yield a higher open rate than a statement, you can let your subscribers decide. A/B testing different elements of your emails over time will get you closer and closer to the winning formula that works best for your business. While email testing is valuable, ensure you’re measuring the right thing. While metrics like open rate and click-through rate are valuable to know, it’s even more important to know how effective your emails are in goals like converting customers to subscribers.
One key advantage of email marketing, as compared to other marketing channels, is the ability to send tailored emails through audience segmentation that yield more targeted and granular campaigns.
By capturing important details about subscribers when they sign up, or creating different segments based on email or website activity, you can send relevant updates to different segments of your mailing list (e.g., four segments of 250 subscribers each) rather than sending broad emails to your entire list (e.g., one segment of 1,000 subscribers).
A small email study conducted by Mailchimp sampling 2,000 users who sent segmented campaigns found evidence that segmented campaigns are more effective than non-demented campaigns:
Here are a few different ways you might segment your email list:
Many email marketing platforms make this process simple and automated. However, segmentation works best with a wealth of content, which can take time and energy to create. As you grow your business, and expand your email marketing strategy, you can make your email campaigns more granular and targeted over time.
Blindness and visual impairments, like color blindness, are more common than you might think. With a few tweaks to your emails, you can make them more accessible to a broader range of readers who have visual limitations or view your content facilitated with an e-reader. While web accessibility (or a11y) is a broad subject, here are a handful of guidelines that will help make the emails you send accessible to the most people possible:
By following these guidelines, you can share information about your business that more subscribers can engage with.
Since marketing emails are often drafted and edited on desktop computers, how an email appears on mobile can be an afterthought. It shouldn’t be––mobile clients account for 41.6% of email opens. Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this: test your email before you send it, checking how it renders on a mobile device.
Partake, a gluten-free, vegan, and allergy-friendly food company, creates vibrant emails that look great across devices.
Opt for email marketing platforms that have responsive design templates that look good across devices––from desktop to mobile to tablets.
Your email content is one thing, your email cadence is another. As part of your email marketing strategy, decide on the frequency and timing of your sendouts. This can feel like a complex task; there’s no shortage of data on how often you should send marketing emails and when. Yet, arguably, many of these differences in open rates and click-through rates based on cadence are relatively small.
Ultimately, what performs best with your subscribers will be determined by a variety of factors, including your business offering and the industry you exist in. Campaign Monitor’s research ultimately found that the best open rate was only 9% better than the worst; focusing too much on timing is probably less important than other aspects of your emails you can test. As an email marketing best practice, prioritizing consistency will ultimately be the best way to find what yields the highest engagement from your subscribers.
Use analytics to make data-driven decisions about your email marketing strategy. By paying attention to the email marketing metrics across campaigns, you can adjust your sendouts to better engage your readers. Here are a few metrics worth paying attention to:
Compare the analytics from your campaigns to email marketing benchmarks to see how you compare and whether there’s room for change and improvement. However, while it’s good to be aware of these numbers, avoid over-indexing on their importance. Ultimately, a good open rate or click-through rate is one that’s better than what it was yesterday
Set up your newsletter to spread by adding options that allow readers to share your emails. While readers can forward emails, you can also prompt subscribers to share sendouts with their friends, family, and followers using share options in your emails. Many email marketing platforms, like Mailchimp, allow you to enable the following share options:
Enabling URL and social sharing can get your emails in front of a new audience, helping them to find your business and even promoting them to subscribe.
Lead magnets are an effective strategy to encourage website visitors to subscribe to your email list. A lead magnet is a free resource offered to someone in exchange for their contact details (e.g., email address, name, phone number, demographic details). For example, a business selling productivity journals could have a lead-magnet pop-up on its website, offering an annual planning PDF resource in exchange for an email address.
Encircled, a slow fashion brand focused on sustainable apparel, prompts website visitors to subscribe to their mailing list by asking them to answer a survey that sends them their fashion profile.
Here are a few type of lead magnets you can try:
Aside from helping grow your list, lead magnets allow you to provide value to someone from the very first email you send. This leaves subscribers with a positive first impression, letting you quickly build interest in your products and affinity for your brand. Additionally, the information you collect through a lead form can be used for email segmentation and providing subscribers with a tailored email marketing experience.
While growing a large list of email subscribers can be valuable, ultimately, subscriber count is a vanity metric: data points that appear impressive but don’t impact the bottom line of your business.
On the other hand, email marketing metrics like open-rate, click-through rate, and conversions are much more informative. For instance, a list of 5,000 subscribers with a click-through rate of 5% will drive more traffic to your website than a list of 10,000 subscribers with a click-through rate of 1%. Additionally, an engaged list can help your delivery rate by reducing any spam complaints or unsubscribes.
If a significant portion of your list has not engaged with your content for months, it’s worth either attempting to re-engage them or unsubscribing them from your list in order to maintain an engaged list.
As an added bonus, many email marketing platforms do volume pricing, charging you based on the number of subscribers you have. Regularly cleaning your list not only keeps your list engaged, but can help you save money that can be re-allocated to other parts of your business.
Try as you might, not every subscriber on your mailing list will be excited, engaged, and energized by your emails. A percentage of your email list will unsubscribe, likely after the email you send. However, as previously discussed, your subscriber count is not the number you should be paying the most attention to. Having unengaged or uninterested readers leave your list is helpful in the long run. Avoid the following email unsubscribe tactics that prevent subscribers from leaving your mailing list:
If opting in to an email list is someone saying “yes” to permission marketing, someone opting out is saying “no.” You should make this process as easy as possible, with a clear Unsubscribe button in the footer of every email you send to stay in compliance with the law and leave a good last impression.
Following what might seem like an endless number of email marketing best practices feels daunting at first. But as you solidify your email marketing strategy, many of these best practices will become second nature. You’ll instinctively opt to structure your email in a way that’s skimmable and impulsively check your email campaign analytics, mining for insights to inform your next sendout.
Putting these practices into use will improve the emails you send subscribers, making readers more willing to get to the end of your message or click to your website. By approaching email marketing with intention, every sendout is an opportunity to turn an email to an inbox into interest in your business.
What are email marketing best practices?
Email marketing best practices are general guidelines for businesses to use when sending emails to subscribers on their mailing list. Email marketing best practices are a core pillar of any long-term email marketing strategy. Following these best practices can help companies send better emails and build better email campaigns that engage customers, drive more business toward your website, and keep your email marketing strategy in compliance with anti-spam legislations like GDPR.
What are examples of email marketing best practices?
Email marketing best practices include guidelines like using double opt-in email sign-up, sending a welcome email, avoiding no-reply email addresses, personalizing emails, A/B testing your content, segmenting your audience, optimizing your sendouts for mobile email clients, and cleaning your email list.
How can email marketing best practices help my business?
Employing email marketing best practices means better emails for your subscribers that are delivered, opened, and engaged with. Crafting emails with these guidelines in mind will help subscribers build brand affinity for your company, trust in your products, and in interest in your services.
What are practices I should avoid when sending emails to subscribers?
There are a slew of email marketing faux pas, including single opt- in email sign-up, purchasing third-party email lists, sending personalized emails, and maintaining a list that’s large but unengaged. By following email marketing best practices, you can avoid sendout slip-ups that cause readers to disengage or unsubscribe from your email list.
Are there different email best practices for different industries?
Email marketing best practices are generalized guidelines that are effective across a range of industries, whether you’re a company in beauty ecommerce or productivity B2B software.
