Top 10 Email Marketing Best Practices in 2024

Effective email marketing is vital as it offers direct and cost-effective communication with high engagement rates. It allows for personalized messaging to a subscribed audience and ensures higher relevance and impact.

It is essential to understand and adapt email marketing best practices to increase effectiveness of your marketing emails.

Discover top 10 email marketing best practices that would enhance your deliverability and increase your open and click through rates to support your email marketing strategy.

What are email marketing best practices?

1. Know your audience

Understanding your audience is essential for effective email marketing. Having a deep understanding of your subscribers’ preferences, needs, demographics, and behaviors help you to create more relevant and personalized content which, in turn, boosts engagement and conversion rates. Some of the tactics to get to know your audience include:

Segmentation: Divide your email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria like demographics, purchase history, or engagement level.

Surveys and feedback: Ask your subscribers directly about their preferences, interests, and what they expect from your emails.

Analytics: Use email and website analytics to track subscriber behavior, such as open rates, click-through rates, and content preferences.

2. Write engaging subject lines

The subject line is often the first thing recipients see, and it plays a crucial role in determining whether an email is opened or ignored. Effective subject lines should be:

Attention-grabbing: Use compelling language that increases curiosity or highlights a benefit.

Clear and concise: Keep it short and to the point. Most email clients cut off subject lines beyond a certain length, especially on mobile devices.

Personalized: Whenever possible, personalize subject lines with the recipient’s name or other relevant information to increase engagement.

Avoiding spam triggers: Avoid using overly salesy language and caps lock, as these can trigger spam filters.

To create unique and personalized subject lines, you can utilize generative AI for your email marketing campaigns. Generative AI learns from your targeted customers’ behaviors and preferences and generates attention grabbing subject lines to support your email marketing efforts.  

Crafting engaging subject lines would positively affect your key email metrics by increasing your open and click through rates and boosting your email marketing return of (ROI) investment rates.

To learn more about key email marketing metrics, check out email marketing benchmarks.

3. Send welcome emails

Sending a welcome email is the first interaction you have with a new subscriber. Welcome emails set the tone for your future communications and are crucial for making a positive first impression for your marketing emails.

Welcome emails typically have high open rates as they introduce your brand, set expectations such as email frequency and types of content, and encourage subscribers to take a specific action, such as making a purchase or following your social media channels.

4. Experimenting with A/B testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, involves sending two variations of a marketing email to two segments of your audience to see which performs better.

The goal of A/B testing is to continuously optimize your email marketing efforts based on data-driven decisions.

This method allows you to experiment with different elements of your emails, including:

Subject lines: You can test your subject lines to check for different tones, lengths, and the inclusion of emojis or personalization.

Content and design: Experiment with different layouts, images, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and content lengths to see what resonates best with your audience.

Send times: Test sending your emails at different times or days of the week to identify when your audience is most likely to engage.

5. Optimize the timing

To boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, it is essential to identify the most optimal email send times. The timing of your marketing emails can significantly impact their open and engagement rates. For higher email engagement, you can follow below steps:

Understand the habits and preferences of your target audience: To better engage with your email recipients, it is beneficial to consider your audience demographics, time zones, and industry specifics.

For example, working professionals might check emails during commute times which would make early mornings or early evenings optimal for sending your marketing emails.

Avoid busy times: Certain times of the day are universally recognized as busy or stressful, such as Monday mornings or late Friday afternoons. Emails sent during these times are more likely to be ignored. Therefore, avoiding them would result in higher open rates and more engaged subscribers.

Testing: Finding the right time isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. It often requires A/B testing and analyzing your marketing email performance data to understand when your particular audience is most responsive.

It is also essential to decide on the best day for sending email marketing messages. According to 35% of the email marketers, Tuesday is the most optimal day for marketing emails.¹

6. Manage your email list

Creating, segmenting, and cleansing your email subscriber list are vital for ensuring that your email marketing efforts are effective and legally compliant. These practices help in delivering more personalized and relevant content, leading to better email engagement, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, a stronger ROI for your email marketing campaigns.

Your email list is a valuable asset, and its quality directly impacts the success of your email marketing campaigns. Best practices for managing your email list include:

Regularly cleaning your email list: Periodically cleaning your email list to eliminate inactive subscribers and incorrect email addresses is crucial for managing bounce rates and ensuring list health. This practice enhances both the deliverability of your emails and the level of engagement you receive.

• Having subscribers who consistently ignore your emails can damage the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, as it prevents an accurate assessment based on the responses of your most engaged audience members.
• It’s important to periodically review and remove those who haven’t interacted with your emails over a set timeframe. This process not only refines your email open rate but also maintains the cleanliness of your email list by excluding individuals who have lost interest in your communications.

Additionally, you might consider setting up a system where less active subscribers are shifted to a mailing list with lower email frequency, depending on their level of engagement.

Opt-In practices: Ensure subscribers have explicitly opted in to receive your emails to help maintaining a list of engaged and interested users.

7. Ensure consistent email design

Maintaining a consistent marketing email design in your email communications is vital for several reasons:

Brand recognition: Consistent use of colors, fonts, and layout in your marketing emails helps in building brand recognition. Subscribers should be able to immediately identify your brand when they open the email.

User experience: A consistent and familiar email marketing layout improves the user experience by making it easier for subscribers to navigate your emails and find the information they need.

Professionalism: Consistency in email design conveys a sense of professionalism and attention to detail which would enhance your brand voice and credibility.

Adaptability: While consistency is important, your email marketing design should also be flexible enough to accommodate different types of content, from newsletters to promotional offers.

To achieve a consistent email design, consider using email templates that align with your brand voice and are easily customizable for different types of messages.

Brand logo and sender signature: Including BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) to your marketing emails enables you to visually confirm the sender’s identity through a familiar logo. In return, recipients would be more likely to trust and engage with the email, which can be beneficial for email marketing efforts.

BIMI is a standard that displays brand logos within supported email clients next to authenticated emails. It’s a part of a broader effort to increase email authenticity and to help mitigate fraud.

Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

A clear CTA is crucial in guiding subscribers on what to do next. Whether it’s making a purchase, reading a blog post, or signing up for a webinar, your CTA should be:

Visually prominent: Use buttons or contrasting colors to make your CTA stand out.

Wording: Use actionable and clear language that conveys the purpose of the CTA correctly.

Strategic placement: Ensure that your CTA is placed where it’s easily seen, ideally above the fold for your subscribers’ ease of use.

8. Adapt double opt-in

Double opt-in is a two-step process where a user first signs up for a contact list and then must confirm their subscription through a follow-up email. This practice has several benefits:

Improved list quality: This approach ensures that only genuinely interested subscribers join your list, which would lead to higher engagement, open and click through rate.

Reduced spam complaints: By confirming their subscription, users are less likely to mark your emails as spam, therefore improving your email marketing sender reputation.

Legal compliance: Double opt-in process is required in some regions as a part of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

9. Avoid using no-Reply sender mail address

It is advised no to use a no-reply sender address for a more effective email marketing strategy. Some of the reasons are:

Customer engagement: A no-reply address can deter subscribers from responding to your emails, which would limit engagement with your email marketing platforms and damage feedback opportunities.

Deliverability: Some email providers may flag no-reply addresses as spam and this can potentially affect the deliverability of your marketing emails.

Instead, you can consider using a monitored email address that encourages replies, even if it’s not for direct communication. You also need to make sure to provide clear instructions on how subscribers can get in touch with you through other channels.

10. Optimize for mobile devices

With the increasing use of smartphones to check emails, mobile optimization for email marketing has become crucial. To ensure that your emails are mobile friendly and can function well on mobile, you can follow these steps:

Responsive design: Using responsive email designs would automatically adjust layouts based on the screen size.

Concise content: Keep your content brief and to the point for more mobile friendly email marketing design, as reading lengthy emails on mobile can be challenging.

CTAs: Make your call-to-action buttons large enough to be easily accessed on a mobile screen.

Testing on multiple devices: Before sending out a marketing email, test it on various devices and email clients to ensure it displays correctly.

Implementing these email marketing best practices can help you create effective email marketing campaigns that engage your audience, build relationships, and drive results.

External links:

• 1. “E-mail marketing: best week day for campaigns 2023“. Statista. Retrieved March 27, 2024