Top 5 Email Marketing Best Practices for 2022

Posted by Spike MondayMotivator

Why Email Marketing?

Email is making a big comeback this year. With returns from social dropping even more, privacy issues and people realising they need to stay top of mind with their customers, email marketing is back! 

In reality being able to communicate one to one with your customers never goes out of style. But, it can be lost in the never ending marketing choices business owners are faced with. And, for many people, both historically and, sadly still today, email marketing means to spam. It’s also seen as the poor cousin of marketing channels.

However, the reality is that when executed properly email marketing outperforms all other marketing media. Often returning greater than ten times the initial investment.

To help you we’ve compiled our top 5 email marketing best practices to empower and inspire you to create your best email marketing campaigns yet. 

  1. There is POWER in personalisation

Have you ever heard of the saying “a person’s name is the sweetest sound for them”? When talking to someone, one sure thing to do to catch their attention is to call them by their name. Not in a creepy way though 🙁

Imagine applying that to your email marketing strategy? Think about it, which email are you most likely to open or read? “Hi, Valued Customer” or “Hi, Bob”? I’m guessing it’s the latter. Although we’d back that “guess” up with data.

But personalisation does not end in having your subscribers’ names in the Subject Line or copy. It’s preference centres and sending to them in their local time at the best time possible. It’s studying your customer’s behaviours and making sure you are adapting to what they want. You can start simply and use your data to get closer to sending the right message at the right time to the right person.

  1. Think mobile first

Every year, the number of people accessing their emails through their phones is growing exponentially. An email that’s not at least mobile-friendly is an email done wrong.

We are a generation that’s glued to our phones, wherever we go, no matter what we’re doing, our phones are always in our hands. Imagine your customers getting an email and it doesn’t display correctly on their phones? You’ve just lost their interest. There’s a 0 to small chance that your reader will log in to their computer just to check on your email.

Think about and test your mobile version. It’s easy in a platform like Mailchimp to preview your mobile version and make tweaks to get it right.

  1. Timing – or when to send your emails

Pick a time and then stick to it. That’s the best recommendation for timing. In Mailchimp we use the Send Optimisation tool from time to time to check our timings. However, it generally aligns with when we decided to send the emails in the first place. Being consistent builds an expectation in your customers sub-concious that you’re going to send them an email when you said you would send it. 

Customers often leave the emails in their inbox to open later. But, being as busy as most of us are we’ll forget about it and need a powerful reminder to open it again. Always resend your emails a few days later to maximise the return on your time, effort, deals and customer attention.

  1. Listen.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions and engage with your readers. Imagine having to listen to someone who doesn’t only talk continuously, but also doesn’t engage with you? That’s one boring conversation.

It can be applied to email marketing as well. Try including questions like “what do you think about it?” and see the difference that a question embedded in your email marketing can do. Incentives don’t laways get you the best feedback here so use them wisely.

  1. AB Testing. Always, be testing

Firstly, test your email before you send it. Send it to someone else in the business who didn’t work on it to make sure all the links are working, the copy reads correctly and it looks exactly like you want it to. 

AB Testing is the next step. This will mean that your campaigns will have two different versions and you will test them against each other. Usually, this can be done by having two different subject lines to see which email will get more opens. Or a different layout or Call To Action button to see which one will get more click-throughs.

In Mailchimp you can test a lot more than just AB but you need to have an objective you can easily measure before you start down that path. 

Finally, email marketing is a practice. Keep practising, keep improving your email marketing and keep an eye out for the next email marketing best practices. 

If you want to discuss how best practices can double the revenue from your email marketing over the next 12 months, get in touch. I’d love to chat.