7 Email Marketing Tips You Might Not Think of

There’s a science to creating the perfect email. From the subject to the footer, your email needs to engage recipients and prevent them from pressing delete. After all, as soon as they’re bored, they will delete a marketing email. You have to captivate your audience for email marketing to work.

Our team put together a list of email best practices that you might not be so familiar with. These tips will help drive engagement with your audience and are easy improvements that you probably never thought of before. Let’s dive in:

1. Give them more than one way to click through
The goal of your email copy is to get the recipient to take some kind of action. They need to click on your email to take the next step. You increase your odds of a click-through when you give the reader more than one opportunity to click. For example, it’s always a good idea to include a text link to your landing page as well as a graphic call-to-action.. Some readers are drawn to images, while others might have inbox settings that prevent images from loading. If you’ve provided more than one way to act on the offer in the email, your lead can find it in any circumstance.

2. Create a clean plain text version
You have no idea how your leads’ inboxes are set up. They could easily prefer plain text versions of emails to make them more digestible, and you need to be prepared for this scenario. If you don’t manually edit the plain text version of your email, it will be full of unreadable clutter from the images you use. Be sure to not just make an HTML version that’s pretty, but to also pretty up your plain text version.

3. Avoid red buttons and text to avoid spam filters
Although it might be true that red text on a white background is vibrant and noticeable, it’s also possible that your emails could get caught in spam filters because of this. You never want to get caught in spam filters, because you lose credibility this way. You’re better off choosing another contrasting color combination that still suits your brand’s color scheme. It’ll keep your emails looking professional, less spammy, and ultimately might increase deliverability.

4. Delete the clutter
To make your email easily digestible, you have to be consistent. Multiple typefaces, too many images, and even too many calls-to-action can clutter up an email and make it hard to read. Simple design and easy-to-read headlines will make your email digestible for readers. 

5. Put lots of effort into your subject line
It can be argued that the subject line of an email is the most important part of the whole email. If people aren’t intrigued by your subject line, they won’t get to see the fantastic email waiting for them just beyond the click.. Avoid overused headlines that sound too much like a sales pitch. Instead, consider asking your leads a question that your email can answer.

6. Personalize as much as you can
Everyone thinks of email marketing as impersonal and automated. Using first names in the email copy, even a simple “Hi Gary,” can help increase engagement with the email. However, you need to be sure your contact database fields are labeled correctly,, because the only thing worse than getting an email with no personalization is getting one that says “Hi Walcowitz” because of a database issue.

7. Test and keep improving
A/B testing can be one of the most fun parts of creating an email marketing campaign. Finding out what makes your leads tick, how different colors work, and if typography matters, is a great way to not only grow better at creating effective marketing, but also to learn more about your leads. Just make sure that you’re properly A/B testing, and not adding too many factors into the mix.

Email marketing can be tricky, but if used properly it can generate leads and build connections between you and your customers. What are your best tips for creating an email marketing campaign? Comment with your best advice below!