10 Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a highly effective way of putting your business and content directly in front of your audience, or shall we say straight in their mailbox. Join us as we discuss the do’s and don’ts of email marketing.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is an incredibly vital marketing channel businesses can use to promote products, services, blogs and content. It aids in keeping your community up to date on all happenings and the latest news, launches and offers going hand in hand with your marketing efforts.

Email marketing plays a massive role in your overall marketing strategy by inciting lead generation, creating brand awareness, building a relationship with your community or keeping the customers engaged between interactions and conversions through various types of marketing emails. If you’re considering email marketing, ROAR can take a look at your current digital strategy via our digital marketing consultancy.

Let’s get stuck into the do’s and don’ts of email marketing.

The do’s and don’ts of email marketing

The do’s

• Determine who will receive your email marketing campaigns

Simarlily to other campaigns you must be aware of who you are targeting and want to reach. This will include building an email list that includes those who are interested in your business or have signed up to receive marketing communications from you. But how do you achieve this? Well, you can push for email signups to those who visit your website by using pop-ups, an exit site signup prompt or a signup button for example.

• Set your goals for each of your marketing campaigns

Again, like the majority of other campaigns, it is so important to determine what you want to achieve with your emails. Consider what you want to overall achieve and how you are going to achieve it.

Let’s lay out a few examples of goals for an email marketing campaign:

Increase engagement: increase the number of users who are interacting with the content of your website which includes any information regarding your products, services or businesses overall.

Encourage inactive users to get back involved: If you are seeing a decrease in website traffic? Take the time to tailor your email marketing to show subscribers what you and your business have been getting up to and let them know of any new developments you have occurring.

• Consider what type of email you actually want to send 

Before you begin sending out emails left right and centre you must settle on what type of email you would like to send. Consider your goals, are you hoping to promote your business? Would you like to offer new services? Do you want to just update your subscribers on your recent news?

Knowing what email you want to send will assist in the creation of your emails and the content included. It will certainly assist in the wording and language you used in the body and text which in turn will attract new customers and drive leads and conversions.

• Create a subject line that is eye-catching and interesting

The subject line of any email is the first thing a subscriber will see as your message lands in their inbox so you need to make it count.

The subject line is what attracts users to open and continue reading the content inside your email so think about it thoroughly before sending it. A few of ROAR’s tips would be to keep it short and straight to the point, avoid including trigger words that could result in your email landing in the spam folder and be mindful of not misleading your subscribers. It is also worth considering that the personalisation of a subject line can make a massive difference as it presents a new level of drawing attention.

• Add a CTA (call to action)

Call to action are instructions to the reader to continue their involvement with your business and take more steps. This could be as simple as ‘Click to read more or ‘Click to buy.’ You could include a bunch of content that is engaging within your email marketing but providing this with nowhere for your subscribers to go provides nothing valuable other than an opened email. Unless your subscribers decided to visit your website on their search engine of choice you’ve pretty much lost them there. A CTA provides somewhere for your subscribers to go after interacting with your email like your website for example.

• Evaluate your campaigns

The only way to fully understand how your email marketing campaigns perform is by collecting data and studying analytics to see what is working and what doesn’t.  This data can inform future email campaigns by allowing you to understand the successes and failures and focusing on using language and content that works.

The dont’s

• DON’T SPAM

There’s nothing worse than a business that spams your email with seven different emails a day all about randing things or worse, the same thing. Sending your subscribers too many emails isn’t keeping them keen it’s resulting in the majority of your email remaining unseen. Sending out too much content will turn your viewers off and potentially leave some of your mail landings in spam.

• Don’t overdo it with graphics and imagery

81% of emails are opened and interacted with on mobile devices so your emails need to be adapted for this. Taking into account the limitations presented by data usage, a large majority of mobile users will disable images on their mobile. If a large part of your email marketing campaign is relying on images and visuals it may never be read. Not only this, but images take significantly more time to load on devices so try to avoid this to keep your readers interest.

• Don’t send your emails out without a test

Many email newsletter software out there presents you with an opportunity to test your emails or preview them. This is always worth taking advantage of as it allows you to see whether your email is being received correctly. Is the layout working? Does the subject appear correctly? Make sure you do this to show a level of professionalism and ensure a great user experience for those reading.

• Don’t just send out emails for fun

Have you ever clicked on your inbox to find an influx of 75 irrelevant emails? Yeah us too, and how painfully annoying is it having to scroll through them all to find ones that are actually relevant? This is why it is vital to not saturate your subscriber’s inboxes with multiple emails and to ensure that what you are sending is relevant and valuable to a reader. Email marketing can take a substantial amount of time and money but if your content isn’t any good you won’t see the results you were hoping for.

Remember to check out our digital marketing consultancy to evaluate your current strategy.

Alternatively, Get in touch with a member of our team now and see how we can help your business.