Email is a complex aspect of marketing. The landscape constantly changes – just like the people. For you to run successful email marketing campaigns, you will have to stay current with the email marketing best practices of the time. Also Read :- SEM vs SEO Let’s first briefly look at the top eight email marketing tips you should always apply to every email campaign.

1. Get personal.

Personalization is one of the essential elements you need to strive to nail in every campaign. However, many people have misunderstood personalization to mean addressing a subscriber by name. While that is part of it, there’s more to personalization, such as:

• Being relevant
• Sending timely emails
• Anticipating your subscriber’s needs

To win at sending personalized campaigns, you need to have a strategy for collecting relevant data from your customers.

2. Promotions aren’t everything.

While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to grow your business, you need to realise that promotions are not the core of email marketing. The heart of your email marketing must be to establish and nurture healthy relationships with your customers. These healthy relationships will result in customers providing lifetime value and act as the driving force of your business’ growth.

3. Automation is a must.

Let’s be honest – without automation, you won’t see the outstanding results of email marketing. Without automation, you’re missing out on revenue. Automation helps you by:

• Increasing conversion rates
• Improving efficiency
• Allowing you to scale easily

Apart from these three (out of many) advantages of marketing automation, you also get the benefit of having more time to do other things that help your business grow.

4. Segment for the best results.

Segmentation is the process of grouping customers who have specific attributes in common. This allows you to:

• Design customer journeys that are unique to the group, thus increasing efficiency.
• Create personalized content to influence your customers into taking action.

Never send the same email to your entire list, as this increases the chances of your content being irrelevant. When your customers find you to be unrelated, they’ll end up unsubscribing from your list.

5. Keep your emails out of spam folders.

If your carefully constructed emails are flagged as spam, they’ll never see the light of day. Start by making sure your recipients have opted into your emails, so you aren’t running afoul of any regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act. Beyond that, avoid using all caps, too many exclamation marks, and hyperbolic phrases (“ACT NOW BEFORE TIME RUNS OUT!!!!”). Poorly formatted HTML in your emails can also hurt how they’re handled. Every spam filter is different, so an email might pass through one filter but get flagged by another.

6. Make emails mobile-friendly.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Many people reach for their phones. 66% of email opens occur on smartphones or tablets. If your emails aren’t optimized for viewing on these devices, you’re potentially missing out on a massive number of clicks.

7. Test, test, test.

Never send anything without making sure it’s working correctly. Double-check that your messages look the way you want them to be by sending them to employee accounts. Ideally, you will view them on Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo, and various mobile devices before finalizing your drafts. Ensure that all your links work and any personalization shortcodes aren’t failing. Sending mass emails without double-checking the content would be like turning up to a business meeting having chosen your outfit in the dark. If it goes wrong, you’ll look bizarre and unprofessional. Also Read :- Social Media Marketing – A boon for small business

8. Above all else, provide value.

Great email marketing ultimately comes down to giving your audience something that sticks with them – something that keeps your business on their mind, whether that’s educational information about your industry, operational messages about your service, or marketing messages about the products you offer. Otherwise, that message is just going to end up in the trash. Like most marketing efforts, becoming successful with email marketing is a process. It’s a blend of good planning and analyzing data to improve your campaigns, but the only way to learn and improve is to go out there and apply these Email Marketing Tips. Start emailing!