When it comes to email marketing, much like any other industry, there are some best practices – things that we consider common knowledge. If you’re new to the email marketing game, all of this can seem foreign and you don’t know where to start. On the flip side, if you’re old hat at email marketing, you might not have noticed how quickly the industry moves and changes. So for old and new alike, here are some email marketing best practice tips that you might not know.
Tip #1 – The Best Practice of Design
This seems like the most basic of the best practices, getting the design of your email marketing campaign right. But, it’s often the easiest to overlook, with aesthetic overtaking the importance of functionality. Luckily, you can have both! There are some design factors (with research and data behind them) that will get you better results.
For example, the most basic design rule of them all is to make your campaign 600 pixels wide. This makes sure that your email will fit on every desktop screen, so it’s more accessible to all your recipients. It also cuts down on the number of words you have per line of text in your email campaign, making it easier to read. TouchBasePro’s default template builder will make your campaigns 600 pixels wide by default, but if you’re using a custom template, we recommend you don’t go over 700 pixels for your width.
Tip #2 – The Best Practice of Personalisation
Not personalising your marketing campaigns is honestly the lazy way to go. If you’re tempted to send a generic campaign to your subscriber base, you should rather keep in mind that research has shown an impressive return on investment on segmented and personalised campaigns.
Use your lists to their full potential, target your subscribers based on gender, location, monthly spend or whatever data you have, and you’ll start to see higher conversion rates almost straight away.
Tip #3 – The Best Practice of Mobile
Between 2010 and 2015, open rates on mobile devices for email campaigns have increased by 30%. In fact, something like 65% of total emails opens happen on mobile devices like tablets or cellphones. So if you’re not mobile ready and your campaigns aren’t optimised, you could be losing out on communicating with half of your subscriber base!
Luckily, all the built-in templates in the TouchBasePro template builder are automatically mobile-friendly, but that’s not the only factor that goes into getting optimised for mobile. Things like your subject line, pre-header text and From Name all have their parts to play.
Tip #4 – The Best Practice of Automation
While regular newsletters and one-off campaign will always form the cornerstone of your email marketing strategy, email marketing itself has expanded to include so much more than that, and automation is a big one. Automated email campaigns are the emails that will be fired off when a user interacts with your website in some way. They’re both personalised, and highly relevant to what the user is currently experiencing, so they’re seeing a major upswing in terms of engagement and conversion.
Automation will get the right person, at the right time, with the right message, allowing you to send smarter and target better than ever. TouchBasePro has great built in features, for automated workflows and smarter transactional mail that allows you to leverage the every-day emails that you send.
In Conclusion
Whether you’re a newcomer to email marketing, or you’ve been around the block, there’s no better time like the present to brush up on the basics. This way, you can keep up to speed with our ever changing industry, and get the most out of your email marketing.
