Email Marketing Best Practices: Part 2

It is reported that 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. It’s easy to understand why companies continue to utilize email as a critical and strategic component of their 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