11 Pro Email Marketing Tips

Article first published in January 2018, updated July 2019.

Email is a complex aspect of marketing. The landscape always changes – just like the people. In order for you to run successful email marketing campaigns, you will have to stay current with the email marketing best practices of the time.

In this infographic, we will share the most effective email marketing tips you can use to improve your campaign results.

Email marketing tips – the top 5

Let’s first briefly look at the top five email marketing tips you should always apply to every email campaign.

1. Get personal.

Personalization is one of the most important elements you need to strive to nail in every campaign. However, many people have misunderstood personalization to mean addressing a subscriber by name. While that is part of it, there’s more to personalization such as:

• Being relevant
• Sending timely emails
• Anticipating your subscriber’s needs

In order to win at sending personalized campaigns, you need to have a strategy for collecting relevant data from your customers.

2. Promotions aren’t everything.

While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to grow your business, you need to realize that promotions are not the core of email marketing. The heart of your email marketing must be to establish and nurture healthy relationships with your customers.

It is these healthy relationships that will result in customers providing lifetime value and act as the driving force of your business’ growth.

3. Automation is a must.

Let’s be honest – without automation, you won’t see the famed results of email marketing. Without automation, you’re missing out on revenue. Automation helps you by:

• Increasing conversion rates
• Improving efficiency
• Allowing you to easily scale

Apart from these three (out of many) advantages of marketing automation, you also get the benefit of having more time to do other things that help your business grow.

4. Segment for the best results.

Segmentation is the process of grouping customers who have certain attributes in common. This allows you to:

• Design customer journeys that are unique to the group, thus increasing the efficiency.
• Create personalized content to influence your customers into taking action.

Never send the same email to your entire list as this increases the chances of your content being irrelevant. When your customers find you to be irrelevant they’ll end up unsubscribing from your list.

5. A/B testing is a must.

Always test important elements in your campaigns to help you constantly improve your campaigns.

There’s a lot to learn when you’re new to email marketing. Wouldn’t it be great to get some wisdom from an email marketing pro?

In this infographic, we did just that. Receive 11 email marketing tips from some of the best in the business.

There’s a lot to learn when you’re new to email marketing. wouldn’t it be great to get wisdom from an email marketing pro? In this new infographic, we did just that. Get 11 email marketing tips from some of the best in the business.

1. Unsubscribes can be a good thing.

I’ve learned you can’t please everyone. Removing people who aren’t that interested in hearing from me feels like a good cleaning job. Henneke Duistermat (Copywriting and Marketing Expert at Enchanting Marketing)

2. From name and subject line are extremely important.

When I started email marketing I neglected perhaps the two most important aspects of a successful email: the subject line and from the name. It’s important subscribers recognize that the email is from your company and comes with a compelling subject line for maximum engagement. Kevan Lee (Director of Marketing at Buffer)

3. Send when you have something valuable to share.

I’ve learned to email when I’ve got something relevant to share. If you’re adding value to your subscriber’s life – whether with a great new post or a must-have offer – send away. If you’re not adding value don’t send. Joanna Wiebe (Founder CopyHackers and Airstory)

4. Use email marketing in all customer acquisition emails.

I wish I had known that I should use email in all my customer acquisition channels, not just in my marketing efforts. For example, identify subscribers who have a higher chance of converting and creating more personalized, sales focused journeys for them. Sujan Patel (Co-founder of WebProfits)

5. Integrate your email marketing messages into many different channels.

I wish I would have known to integrate my email marketing messages into different channels. This may seem obvious, but it’s the biggest mistake I made in my early days – and that I still see marketers making today. You have to market with a purpose. Ali Rastiello (Sr Manager of Marketing Automation at BigCommerce)

6. Think about your audience and be as relevant as possible.

I wish I’d known that email marketing isn’t about the channel or the sending technology, it’s about the individuals receiving the email. It’s about making the email offer/content as relevant and valuable to them as possible. It’s about leading with marketing and letting the technology bring it to life, not the other way around. Kath Pay (Founder of Holistic Email Marketing)

7. Optimize email efforts for subscriber lifetime value, not campaign activity.

Each email to a person will influence the success of the next one that person receives. If we want to get better results from our subscribers, we need to optimize on subscribers lifetime value – not on campaigns. Jordi van Rijn (Email Marketing Consultant at eMailMonday)

8. Test, and test some more.

Testing is the name of the game. Your audience evolves, you evolve, and your list of subscribers evolves. You have to constantly test and measure the results to find out what works best. Val Giesler (B2C Email Expert)

9. Use preheaders to double the length of your subject line.

I wish I had known the importance of preheaders. The fact that you can double the length of your subject line is so valuable – and often overlooked. Justin Khoo (Founder FreshInBox)

10. Leverage segmentation for more personalized experiences.

I wish I’d known more about segmentation. I always want to know more about who my audience is so I can create a more personalized, targeted experience that will add value for the right people. Kayli Barth (Director of email marketing at MTL New Tech)

11. Understand the complexity of email rendering.

I wish I had known from the beginning how inconsistent email client support for coding is and therefore how complex email rendering is. Today’s marketers need to create ‘platform perfect’ emails that deliver the best experience for users of key email clients. Chad White (Research Director at Litmus)

Wrap up

Armed with these effective and practical email marketing tips, you are in a better position to design and run successful email marketing campaigns. Remember, email marketing is not a game of chance. You have to put certain systems and structures in place for you to see a good ROI. For more insights and email marketing tips, make sure to check out our article on email marketing best practices you need to follow.

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