No matter what level of email marketing experience you have, failing to follow these simple email marketing best practices can affect your email campaigns’ success.

By sticking to this checklist, you can help guarantee more opens, clicks, responses and ultimately sales, (if that’s your goal?)

Branding:

• Does your email feature your logo, corporate branding and colours?
• Does the branding on your email match the same style and feel as your website?

Content:

• Does your message contain the benefits to the reader? How will they benefit from your offer, latest news or new product or service etc?
• Does your email include well-placed, clear and compelling call-to-actions? Is it obvious what you want them to do next?
• Is your email well structured and have an even balance between text, images and links?
• Have you avoided using spammy words in your subject line and body text?
• Is your subject line intriguing and persuasive enough to make the recipient want to read on?

Personalisation:

• Have you tried personalising your email with the customer’s name, yet without over-personalising the email?
• Is your ‘From Name’ a named person or just a generic one such as info, sales or support? Using a name can help make it feel friendlier.

Data Management:

• Have you recently checked to see how up to date your email address data and contact groups are?
• Is your sign-up process as easy as it can possibly be? Have you personally tested it recently?

Legal Bits:

• Does your email contain any of your corporate details? Full company name, head office address, a contact number?
• Is your unsubscribe link clearly visible, simple and straightforward?

Technical Design & Testing:

• Have you tested the your email to see how it renders in different mail clients and web browsers? Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo etc?
• Have you included a link for the email to be viewed in a new web browser page?
• Do your images have alt text so that content will still appear even if the images cannot due to certain mail client settings?
• Have you kept the resolution size of your images and logos small and checked that they load properly and quickly?

If you can tick all these boxes, you’re ready to go!

For many email marketing campaigns, it is all about trying to increase your click rates and drive more customers to your website.  A simple tip to help you achieve this is to try using visual ‘buttons’ for your call-to-actions instead of words and sentences with links.  A well placed, compelling and persuasive button may just help you drive more traffic to your website.

Actionable buttons like ‘Sign Up Now’, ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Download Now’ will help customers easily identify what you want them to do next.

As always, test your email campaigns to see what kind of responses your emails with button links receive, and whether your customers use them more.

For more information or help setting up your button links, please call Mark on 0845 313 0912 or email enquiries@26.co.uk