10 Best Practices For Email Marketing For Small Businesses

Email marketing is one of the best marketing technique that converts to sales. Surprisingly, some entrepreneurs cannot boast of any successful email campaign. If you are one of such entrepreneur, you may be doing some things wrong. It’s time to learn the best practices for email marketing, so you can change your narrative.

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Before sending email to your subscribers, there are basic things that must be in place. It’s not just about sending emails, guidelines must be adhered to.

In this article, we have compiled ten best practices for email marketing you can start exploring now.

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Although, there are numerous best practices available for email marketing, this article covers the essential practices needed for the success of your email marketing.

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Best Practices For Email Marketing

1. Send Welcome Emails

When someone sign up for your newsletter, its good practice to send a welcome email to them to seal the business relationship. Additionally, a welcome email introduces your subscribers to your brand and help guide their expectations from you.

The welcome emails should be sent immediately after sign up, when the user still remember you. Also, the email should be personalised with their names and should include the information on subsequent mails from you. More importantly, let them know the best way to contact you and how often they’ll receive your mail.

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2. Avoid Spammy Contents

To improve customer engagement with your email, send contents that are valuable to your subscribers. Usually, people will unsubscribe from your email list if your contents are irrelevant and inconsistent. As much as possible, stay away from sending all-uppercase texts, unnecessary exclamation marks, tricky phrases and the likes.

Before sending your email campaigns, read through your content to ensure it presents your brand in the right way. Because, the credibility of your brand will be judged by the type of content you put out. So, take it seriously.

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3. Avoid Buying Email Lists

Actually, this is a no go area. Signing people up in your email campaign without their consent is not good for your brand. Besides that, you will have a high rate of unsubscribe and spam report. Also, your email marketing provider could ban you if you keep having high spam rates and unsubscribes.

Preferably, compile your email lists organically. For instance, you can get the email address of people you’ve spoken to about your brand. Another way is by putting up a form on your website where people can subscribe to your newsletter or adding a signup form to your Facebook page.

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4. Use Email Signature

One of the best practices for email marketing is to include email signature in your campaign. This is also applicable even if you are sending the email as a company.

Normally, people tend to pay more attention to emails with email signatures of a particular person from the company. This makes them feel they are relating with a human being and not a machine or an invisible marketing team.

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5. Always Track Click And Open Rates

Essentially, a great email marketer should always track the progress of his campaigns. It’s important that you enable your campaign reports so you can know subscribers reactions to your email.

Additionally, this report will help you discover what’s working and what to improve on. If your audience relates more with a particular campaign, it’ll give you an idea on the type of content that gets their attention. So, you send out more of the type of content they relate with.

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6. Personalise Your Greeting

More often than not, people will not open an email they perceive to be general or an email that says, ‘Dear Subscriber’. When you personalise your email greetings with your subscribers name, you will have more opens, more clicks and more business.

Interestingly, this is not a complicating task to accomplish. There are email
marketing platforms like ‘Mailchimp’ that helps you do that effortlessly.

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7. Make Your Subject Lines Compelling

The first thing people see before opening an email is the subject line. In a matter of seconds, they will decide whether to open the email or not. So, it takes only few seconds to compel a subscriber to open your mail. Therefore, put a lot of thought into your subject.

A good subject line should have some sense of urgency, be concise and should be between 30 to 50 characters. Also, your subject should give your audience an inkling of what to expect in the mail. By all means, avoid beating around the bush in your subject.

In addition, avoid putting the main message and the calls to action at the bottom of your content. As a matter of fact, the most important message should be repeated three times in the email such that someone just glancing through will get the message.

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8. Brand Your Email Header

Your email subscribers should recognise your email just by looking at the email header. Don’t leave your subscribers confused about the source of the email. Usually, a header should have your logo, then a simplified summary of the information contained in your email.

More importantly, your email header design should be able to grab the attention of your subscribers at first glance. Great visuals captures people’s attention and prompt them to action.

9. Embrace The Power Of Story Telling

Story telling makes our list of the best practices for email marketing. And, here is why; story telling may be old fashioned but its still as effective as ever.

Moreover, if your end goal is to get people to buy from you, you need to appeal to their feelings and emotions. Story telling appeals to feelings and emotions.

Certainly, story-telling is one of the creative ways to get high click-through rates for your email marketing. So, study your audience and start telling stories in a way that appeal to their feelings.

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10. Always Send A Test Mail To Yourself First

By doing this, you are putting yourself in your subscribers shoe. And, this will help you check for typo errors, broken links, inappropriate format, blurry images and so on.

It’s good practice to send a few test emails to your team or friends for verification before finally sending to your subscribers.

In your email, don’t forget to always add ‘subscribe to our email campaign’, so that when your subscribers forward your email to friends or business partners, they too can subscribe.

There you have it. Did we miss out on any best practice for email marketing? Let us know in the comments.

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