Email marketing best practices to turn campaigns into sales

Email Marketing is a tool that businesses can use to acquire, engage, and retain customers. Moreover, it is all about giving customers delightful and valuable experiences that keep them engaged with your brand and product. 

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.

Let’s discuss how email marketing and the usage of promotional emails can help you to grow your business, and we’ll give you a few tips to help you get started with a successful email marketing campaign.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is sending commercial emails to a list of contacts who have given their express permission to receive email communications from you. You can use email marketing to inform your contacts, drive sales, and build a community around your brand, like with a newsletter.

Modern email marketing has moved away from one-size-fits-all mass mailings and instead  focuses on consent, segmentation, and personalization. This may sound time-consuming, but marketing automation does the heavy lifting for you.

Types of email marketing

Here are four types of popular email marketing campaigns and how you can use them to help your business grow.

1. Email Newsletters

One of the most common and popular email marketing campaigns are Email Newsletters. As a small business you can use an email newsletter to provide subscribers with helpful knowledge and tools. It is important to add value to your subscribers’ inboxes; to do so create engaging content, including thought leadership, how-tos, and announcements about new services/ products.  To measure the effectiveness of your newsletter ask yourself if the content helps build a  relationship with subscribers, increases retention and engagement, and strengthens subscriber loyalty.

2. Acquisition Emails

Acquisition Emails can help your small business acquire customers who have opted to receive your emails but have not yet converted into customers.  By creating attractive offers and informative content you can show those in your email list the value of becoming an active customer. Acquisition emails are a great way to move leads through the conversion funnel faster, grow your business and drive additional revenue, and target users who have expressed some interest in what your business has to offer.

3. Retention Emails

If you have some experience in email marketing campaigns, consider Retention Emails for your small business. By sending a message requesting feedback or an offer to subscribers who haven’t interacted with your business or emails campaigns lately, your small business can keep the lines of communication open. Retention Emails are a very useful email campaign strategy that can help you keep your hard-won customers.

4. Promotional Emails

Promotional Emails are a great way to drive sales, signups, and new product offerings for your small business. Also, Promotional emails include offers that entice and encourage your target to buy a new product/service. Use promotional emails to reward engaged subscribers with exclusive offers, drive new products or services to subscribers, and cross-sell products to your customer base.

Best practices to turn campaigns into sales

1. Use double opt-in email sign-up

Sending information and offers through email is a form of permission marketing. 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:

• A website visitor fills out a sign-up form on a landing page on your website.
• They receive an email confirming their sign-up for your mailing list.
• After confirmation, they are officially a subscriber who has opted in to receive emails.

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.

2. Send a welcome email

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:

• Introduce yourself and your business. A welcome email is a good opportunity to build brand affinity for your company and strike an emotional chord with a subscriber. Tell a new reader a bit about yourself and why you started your company, bringing them behind the scenes of the journey from idea to launch. Add personal touches like a photo of your team and a handwritten signature at the bottom of the email.
• Send a curated list of your best content. If part of your email marketing strategy is sharing useful information and tips, new subscribers will miss out on the rich backlog of your previous content. Use your first email to a new reader to curate a handful of your most popular articles or sendouts. 
• Provide a discount or promotional offer. Often, businesses incentivise website visitors to sign up for an email mailing list by providing a promotional discount, like 10% off their first order. In this case, use your welcome email to follow through on that promise, providing subscribers with a discount code and even curating a selection of products they can splurge on. Alternatively, use the element of surprise and provide newcomers to your email list with an unexpected discount to spark delight.

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. 

3. Avoid using a no-reply email address

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:

• No-reply email address. This type of email address is not set up to receive incoming emails. They are often structured as noreply@company.com. This is a good option for transactional emails (e.g., buying or shipping confirmations, password resets, etc), but avoid them for regular emails to subscribers. 
• Valid email address. This type of email address is set up to receive incoming emails. They are often stylized with aliases, such as leslie@company.com or hello@company.com. This is a good option for regular emails to subscribers. 

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. 

4. Personalize your emails

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:

• Website browsing emails. With an email marketing platform that integrates with your website, if a website visitor becomes a subscriber and also opts in to website cookies, you can send them emails based on their browsing history on your website. For instance, in the case of an online store, an automated email can send them a few of the items they clicked on but didn’t buy. 
• Abandoned cart emails. Sometimes customers get to checkout but don’t make a final purchase. Automated abandoned cart emails can send a reminder to their inbox, prompting them to buy.
• Birthday offer emails. Collect birthdays on email subscription forms to send offer codes on a subscriber’s birthday as a celebratory gift. 
• Product purchase education emails. When someone makes a specific purchase, send them emails that help them make the most of their latest buy. 
• Personalization helps you send “just in time” emails that provide subscribers with a custom experience. 

5. Write casually and conversationally

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. 

• Avoid complex language. Often people subscribe to an email list because they want information from experts. However, expertise can be conveyed without using overly complex language that makes writing harder to understand and alienates readers. Instead, keep your language simple and clear. 
• Use contractions. One way to make writing sound more natural is by using contractions like “who’s” and “there’s” versus “who is” and “there is.” We generally default to speaking with contractions, and a good rule of thumb for a conversational email tone is to write how you speak. 
• Leave out jargon and acronyms. Your industry likely has jargon and acronyms that insiders are familiar with. However, this won’t be the case for everyone who reads your emails. Write out acronyms in full and use common terms so there’s no room for confusion. 
• Speak like a trusted adviser or friend. While drafting emails, adopt the voice you might use while giving advice to a friend. Be direct and honest, but also light hearted. 

These small changes can be the difference between emails that are immediately archived and ones where subscribers read until the end. 

6. Keep emails brief

There’s no need for a detailed back story in email marketing campaigns. Have a sense of urgency; reader is busy and if they don’t get your message quickly, they won’t wait long before they hit ‘delete.’

Moreover, your subject line should be 6-10 words, according to one oft-cited study. Your email should be concise as well. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, keep that in mind as you create your email. House most of your content on your site and use emails to drive traffic there.

In that case, not saying everything can be a helpful part of your email marketing tactics. If readers want to know more, they’ll click through ― exactly what you want.

7. Make emails easy to skim

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:

• Keep your paragraphs short. Use the “one idea per paragraph” rule and keep your message clear, concise, and to the point. 
• Use bullet points and lists. Breaking down information in bullet points and lists (like this one) is more skimmable than sentences in a block of text. 
• Throw in headers. For longer emails, use catchy and informative headers to divide up your email.
• Add in graphics. Add in relevant graphics or photographs, like snapshots of your products, to break up text and draw the reader’s eye.
• Bold important information. If your email has a central message, like prompting readers to answer a survey or announcing a collaboration, put that message in bold. 
• Use CTA buttons. Make the action you want the reader to take obvious with a colored CTA box and clear CTA text that stands out. 
• Leave some white space. Skimming is harder without breathing room between lines of text; use white space strategically to make your email flow.

These simple tips can make your emails easier to read and ultimately get your message across more easily to subscribers. 

8. Perfect the subject line

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 like a copywriter. While an email subject line isn’t a magazine ad or billboard, think of writing a line that commands the same attention or builds a sense of intrigue about the contents of your email. 
• Keep it short. Most email clients have a character limit, after which your subject line is cut off. Say more with less words by limiting the character count of your subject line.
• Let readers know what’s ahead. Don’t be coy. Let subscribers know what awaits them in opening your email. 
• Add a sense of urgency. If you have a special pricing promotion or a sale on your website is coming to an end, let readers know directly in the subject line. 
• Make it timely. Looming calendar dates like holidays or events can inspire action. If you’re an accounting service, let subscribers know when tax day is coming; if you sell bespoke ornaments, let readers know about the Christmas delivery cut off. 
• Stay original. Overuse of terms like “free” can get readers to tune out and can also impact deliverability. 

Think about the subject line that will make a reader click instead of opening another email in their inbox. 

9. Consider your preview text

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.

10. Have a compelling CTA

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. 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.

11. A/B test your content

Test, analyze, repeat: the best marketers test their email marketing tactics relentlessly. Small business owners may feel like testing is too hard, but the right platform can help. And it’s always harder to ignore email testing and lose revenue than to test and earn more. Here’s how A/B testing works:

1. One version of your email (A) is sent to a subset of your mailing list (e.g., 100/1,000 subscribers).
2. Another version of your email (B) is sent to a different subset of your emailing list (e.g, 100/1,000 subscribers). 
3. After a period of time, one of the two emails “wins,” determined by performance based on metrics like open rate, click-through rate, or another variable you set within your email marketing platform. 
4. The winning version of the email is then sent to the remainder of your email list (e.g., 800/1,000 subscribers). This process can be automatic or manual. 

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:

• Headline
• Preview text
• CTA button
• Visuals 
• Copy

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.

12. Use audience segmentation

One key advantage of email marketing 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).

Here are a few different ways you might segment your email list:

• Based on provided demographic information like gender, age, or location. If you’re a clothing company that offers clothes for men and women, you can send different emails with product options and information for each segment. 
• Based on expressed content interests. A furniture store that sells items for kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms can inquire what content a website visitor is interested in during the sign-up process. 
• Based on requested email frequency. If you generate a lot of email content, you can ask subscribers at sign-up how often they want to receive your content and subsequently segment them into categories like “bi-weekly,” “weekly,” or “daily.”
• Based on website activity. Depending on when an email subscriber last visited your website, or what they viewed while on site, you can send targeted reminders and prompts. 
• Based on purchase history. Segment customers based on what they’ve bought, allowing you to send follow-ups for feedback or specific product-focused content.
• Based on email engagement. Email marketing platforms generally provide information on how subscribers engage with your emails, including opens and clicks, that can be used to create segments.

13. Make your emails accessible

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:

• Use image alt text. Add descriptive alt text to images.
• Use meaningful anchor text. Avoid using anchor text like “click here” when using hyperlinks; instead use descriptive text.
• Make your emails keyboard-only accessible. Test whether your email can be navigated with only a keyboard for readers who don’t use a mouse. 
• Use dark fonts. Font colors like black and dark grey are generally the easiest to read. 
• Use contrast. Try running your color selections within an email through an online contrast checker to ensure your content is easy to discern. 

14. Optimize for mobile

54% of all email opens now happen on a mobile device, so more than half of readers will see your message on a small screen. If you can, use a responsive sending program which will adjust your message for mobile users. Send users to mobile-friendly pages on your website, and keep the HTML simple for fast loading.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this: test your email before you send it, checking how it renders on a mobile device. Opt for email marketing platforms that have responsive design templates that look good across devices from desktop to mobile to tablets.

15. Set a consistent cadence

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. 

16. Use analytics to drive your email marketing strategy

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:

• Open rate. The percentage of subscribers who open your email newsletter.
• Click-through rate (CTR). The percentage of subscribers who click on a link in your email newsletter after opening it.
• Unsubscribes. The percentage of subscribers who opt out of receiving your email newsletter after opening it. 

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.

17. Include share options for distribution

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:

• Campaign URL link
• Facebook share button
• Twitter share button
• LinkedIn share button

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.

18. Use lead magnets for more subscribers

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.

Also, 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.

19. Regularly clean your email list

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. 

• Re-engage inactive subscribers. Use the tools in your email marketing platform to identify inactive subscribers. From there, create a drip email re-engagement campaign or send an email requesting that they express interest in staying on the list. 
• Remove subscribers from your list. Remove email subscribers that remain inactive after attempting to re-engage them, or subscribers who don’t respond to an expressed interest prompt. 

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.

20. Make it easy to unsubscribe

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:

• Having no Unsubscribe button. Not only is this against anti-spam policies like GDPR, it’s irritating to subscribers and hurts your brand. 
• Hiding the unsubscribe button. Avoid black-hat marketing tactics like having the unsubscribe link in white, making it harder to detect. 
• Asking people to email you to unsubscribe. Unsubscribing from an email list should be as easy as one to two clicks. Do not ask subscribers to opt-out of a list by sending you an email. 
• Asking for feedback before unsubscribing them. Answering a survey should not be a condition of unsubscribing from a mailing list. While it’s perfectly fine to ask readers why they’re leaving, this should be optional and come after a subscriber has been removed from your 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.

Wrap up

Email marketing is a powerful tool that can be used to acquire, engage, and retain customers. By implementing a successful email marketing campaign your small business can benefit greatly. Be sure to select the correct email marketing campaign to achieve your small business goals.

Keep in mind that when your customer/target finds your email very valuable they’re more likely to forward it and/or share it with others (make sure to always include your social media share buttons).