Email Marketing Best Practices:
What to know in 2024
What You Need to Know to Get your Message in the Inbox and Stay Out of the Hot Box
Email marketing can be challenging, but we’ve made it easier by highlighting key best practices for 2024. Follow these essential strategies to optimize your campaigns, enhance deliverability, and engage your audience effectively.
Check, Recheck, and Check Again
We're all 1,000% better at catching errors in our emails after we hit send. Read your email out loud, test your emails for spam, test your emails in your inboxes, test your links, use a grammar plugin to check for spelling or grammar mistakes, check that you have the right list attached, and then do it all over again before hitting the send button.
No Link Redirects
Before adding a link to your email, you want to be sure to use the finalized or resolved URL. It's easiest to copy and paste the URL into a browser window (even better an incognito browser window) and let the browser resolve to the final destination first. Grab the resolved URL and use that for your email.
Focus On One Idea per Email
Focus on one idea, one thing, one topic, one problem, or one solution. Having multiple ideas reduces effectiveness and you'll lose your reader's attention.
Offer Upgrades to Active Customers Only
The most common mistake is to blast all subscribers with upgrade emails, even ones who have yet to try your product.
Instead, focus on conversion first and only send upgrade emails to activate users already receiving value from your product.
Sending upgrade emails to irrelevant users can hurt your brand.
Use Your Preheader
A preheader is the preview text for an email that sits right under the subject line before you've opened the email. Typically, you would put the first line of copy in the email, such as the email's header. Leaving this blank is losing out on valuable real estate at best. At worst, sometimes the preheader will be automatically filled with the first piece of copy the email provider thinks should go there... which is sometimes the code used to build the email in the back end (very bad and spammy look to a reader).
Tell Relatable Stories
Telling relatable stories impacts the reader and makes perfect email content. It's a perfect way to humanize your brand and earn trust.
The most compelling stories come from life experiences. Look internally to share how you or your team use your service or product or look through past support tickets or customer interviews.
Design for Mobile First
Mobile has surpassed desktop for users opening their emails, so it's no surprise that you'll need to design your emails for mobile first. Buttons and links should be about the size of your thumb or between 44-48px squared. Fonts should be 16-22px. Any fixed widths should be 320px wide (the width of a phone screen) and adjust to 600-680px wide for desktops.
Avoid Spam Words in Your Emails
Certain words or phrases can land your email in the spam folder.
It's best to avoid all of the following:
Anything Money Related: Win, Won, Free, etc.
Subject Lines: ALL CAPS, percentages with numbers, and dollar signs.
Buttons: Urgent calls to action, or 'click here.'
Be Transparent and Consistent
Let your customers know when and how often to expect an email communication from you when signing up. If the customer expects a once-a-month communication but receives an email twice a week, chances are they might be irritated and want to opt out, report it as spam, or worse, you'll lose their trust.
Run A/B Testing
A/B testing is a strategic process that compares two versions of the same email against each other using a smaller list subsection to determine the better engagement performer. After the winner of the two versions is determined, the winning version is sent to the remainder of the list, yielding better engagement rates overall.
Segment Your List
The more segmented your lists are, the more personalized they are and the more relevant your content is. People are far less likely to unsubscribe from your list if they're always interested in what you have to say.
Avoid Using No-Reply
Ensure your emails are sent from a real email address. Using no-reply will decrease your sender's reputation since spam filters typically don't like them. It will also make the reader feel undervalued and give your brand a cold feeling.
Design for Dark Mode
Dark mode is becoming increasingly popular, and people choose dark mode for a few reasons:
It's easier on the eyes and minimizes eye strain, especially in low-light environments.
It reduces screen brightness, increasing battery life.
It can improve content legibility for accessibility.
Regardless of the reason, dark mode is here to stay, and you should respect the user's preference by creating your emails with a fallback dark mode in your design. If you don't design it, the email service provider will do it for you, and it's not pretty.
Here's a few things you can do:
Switch any JPGs out for PNGs for their transparency, which will look good in any background.
Optimize your brand logo containing dark text by adding an outline around it that matches the light mode background. When in light mode, it's invisible, but when in dark mode, your logo doesn't disappear.
Add enough padding around non-transparent images that require a background so the color change isn't awkward.
Add metadata to your <head> and <style> to turn on dark mode and fallback CSS to render it perfectly.
Practice Good List Hygiene
Removing inactive users from your main list has many benefits:
It ensures you're only sending relevant content to the users who want it.
~ Remember, people have a right to change their minds.It helps keep your costs low by not sending emails out into the void, never to be read by these users.
~ The costs can add up when your email sending service charges per email sent.It helps keep these users subscribed for possible future purchases.
~ You haven't allowed them to get annoyed with all the emails filling their inbox and unsubscribe.It immediately boosts your engagement rates, such as open rate, click rate, and click-through rate percentages.
~ This isn't just a fake boost in your numbers; this is a calculated strategy and part of your segmentation process.It compounds your deliverability by increasing your sender's reputation.
~ The more you increase your engagement rates, the more the email service providers (ESPs) will look upon you favorably, and the more they will put you into the inbox.
An email list of 10,000 highly engaged subscribers can outperform an email list of 100,000 unengaged subscribers.
Keep these subscribers for your bigger marketing campaigns instead, such as Black Friday or Mother's Day. It's much harder to get new subscribers than it is to keep them, so give your subscribers what they want.
Never Purchase an Email List
Most emails in purchased lists are typically invalid, inactive, or a spam trap from the email service provider (ESP).
If the email address is a spam trap:
ESPs create or recycle email addresses and spread them around the internet so that only bots scraping the internet can see them for the sole purpose of catching spammers. Anyone emailing one of these traps will instantly get banned from that ESP. Often, the ESP will add your domain to a blacklist, and your entire domain will have trouble, affecting your business emails and your website, which is incredibly difficult and time-consuming to recover from, if not impossible, in some cases.
If the email address is valid and active:
These users never opted in to receive an email from your business. In the best-case scenario, they'll unsubscribe. In the worst-case and most likely scenario, they'll report your email as spam. Being reported as spam will significantly affect your sender's reputation, leading to all your emails landing in the spam folder. A high unsubscribe rate will also inevitably affect your sender's reputation, leading your emails into the spam folder.
If the email address is inactive:
You're spending money to send emails into the void, never to be opened. These non-readers will never open their emails, and all of these non-opened emails will not only skew deliverability data but sending so many unopened emails will negatively affect your sender's reputation, which, in turn, leads your emails into the spam folder even without anyone reporting them as spam.
Always Stay Compliant
The best practices above will help you reach more inboxes and keep people engaged with your content. But more importantly, you should always adhere to all the laws and regulations for email marketing, or any marketing, for that matter.