It is reported that for every dollar spent, email marketing delivers an average ROI of $42. It’s easy to understand why companies continue to utilize email is a critical and strategic component of any 2020 marketing plan.
Here are email marketing best practices to take into account in developing and distributing your upcoming email campaign, as well as post-email delivery rates.
General Guidelines
- Test your email with a friend or business associate to see if they can quickly identify the CTA—and if it sounds valuable
- Tie the email to the corresponding landing page very closely—headlines, copy and overall look and feel should be integrated
- Follow the same SEO rules for email as you would for website pages including keywords, anchor text for constructing the body of the message, images with alt-text tags, social media sharing buttons and so forth
Settings Recommendations
- Send the email from real person, avoiding “generic” email addresses such as “marketing@” or “sales@”
- Use preview text, include brief description at very top of each email as Outlook and Gmail show snippets
- Offer both plain text and HTML versions
- Always allow recipients the option to view email in web browser
- Test on multiple email clients to preview appearances across different mobile devices
- Avoid CSS shorthand—some email clients won’t support shorthand properties such as font or padding
- Avoid external or internal CSS classes or IDs, use inline CSS instead
- Avoid Javascript or other dynamic scripts—email clients block this functionality
- Use plain text-style bullet points—HTML-style bullets break or become wonky
- Avoid Flash or video embeds since the ability to view rich media in email is turned off by default in most email clients
- Include an image of your video player with a play button linked to your website page
- Avoid invisible text—it’s an instant red flag for SPAM filters
Delivery Rates
- Calculate delivery rate metrics to see the percentage of emails you sent that actually got through to the recipients:
Number of emails sent – (hard + soft bounces)
Number of emails sent
- Calculate the percentage of unique clicks in the links your email receives:
Unique Clicks on all links – multiple clicks of a single recipient
Number of emails delivered
- Remove hard bounces from your list—they are permanent delivery problems
- Monitor soft bounces after a couple of emails—they may reflect a temporary issue such as a full inbox or a server issue
