Assignment 7 - Task 1

Email Marketing Best Practices 

Email marketing is a great way to connect with your audience, send regular reminders of your business or content, and encourage brand loyalty. There are some best practices to keep in mind, and a few things to avoid.

One way to greatly increase user engagement and brand loyalty is by personalising the email, even just ensuring a merge tag is used to include the individuals name.1 This can also include making sure the content is relevant to the user, making them feel it was specifically chosen for them. As an example, if you know the customer has previously purchased a product from you, including this in the email with further suggestions of more products they would be interested in.

Furthermore, optimising the subject line and preview text is important in grabbing the attention of the audience. The subject line and preview text are the users first impressions of the email, it should give them insight into the purpose of the email and intrigue them to click and read more, essentially the subject and preview line can determine whether the email is opened or not. It’s important to keep this short and sweet, don’t overcomplicate it, and emoji’s have been proven to be very effective in grabbing attention of the user.2

Testing for time optimisation. Although there are some general good times to send emails, such as during the working week, the best time to send your emails is very dependent on your audience.3 For example, if you have an international audience, time differences will need to be accounted for. If your audience is mainly professionals and work emails, during the week and during working hours is beneficial. However, if you’re a retail company with generally personal emails, this might be better outside of office hours. A/B testing is a good way to see what works for your audience and what doesn’t, keeping track of this and building your own best practices around it will optimise your results.4

Ensure that there is a clear call to action in the email.5 The purpose of the email has to be clear, do you want them to read your content, take a look at your website, buy a new product, etc. This needs to be clear to the user and visible for them, buttons or images are generally better than linked text as it stand out more, and is easier for mobile users too. This is what drives your conversions and makes the email useful for not only your business, but the user too.

Another key way to not only increase your engagement but ensure that your most engaged users are receiving more content is to regularly clean your subscription lists.6 Most CRM systems will allow you to filter for the most-least engaged users on the list, you can then remove the least engaged from the list and add them to another, which you may more occasionally contact rather than regularly. This ensures that you are not over-engaging with users who have little interest in your

content, and are feeding regularly content to the users who are really interested in your brand/content. This will also help in having less unsubscribers from your content, as those who do not regularly engage will only receive occasional content which they may still find useful.

Generally, there are a few mistakes to avoid, which are ultimately the opposite of the above. For example, sending out an email without a clear goal or call to action. Sending each user the same email, with no personalisation or relevance to them. Overlooking or overcomplicating the subject line.7

However, one thing not mentioned above, which can be a very costly mistake, is overlooking GDPR policies. General Data Protection Regulations are incredibly important for your campaigns, there are some simple ways to ensure you are compliant in these regulations. For example, make sure everyone receives a GDPR email with your policy when they are added to your CRM, and ensure there is a visible subscribe link in the footer of the email.8

[1] Understanding eCommerce, 30^th July 2021. [accessed 11^th August 2021] 4 Best Practices for Email Marketing in 2021 - Understanding eCommerce

[2] Ibid.

[3] Oracle, 31^st January 2020. [accessed 11^th August 2021] The Holy Grail: Email Send Time Optimization (oracle.com)

[4] Ibid

[5] CyberDream Developers Blog, 8^th June 2021. [accessed 11^th August 2021] 11 Email Marketing Best Practices 2021: How To Write Engaging Emails For Your Business - Blog - CyberDream Developers

[6] Understanding eCommerce, 30^th July 2021. [accessed 11^th August 2021] 4 Best Practices for Email Marketing in 2021 - Understanding eCommerce

[7] Email Design (beefree.io), 30^th September 2020. [accessed 11^th August 2021] 7 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid - Email Design (beefree.io)

[9] Ibid.