Ultimate Guide to Email Send Best Practices - SharpSpring

If you have opt-in forms on your site currently and you’re not seeing a good number of signups (and your website traffic is good) it’s time to review and optimize to create a signup form that converts.

Make your opt-in forms work for you! They should be unavoidable and, no, we don’t mean a frustrating-to-close pop-up, but if the only way to sign up for the list is through a pop-up then that is not enough. Make sure if a user lands on the site and moves around the site they can still easily see the super awesome mailing list sign up.

Every email strategy should include a welcome campaign for new subscribers. How many email lists have you subscribed to only to forget because you didn’t receive a single email until 3 weeks later? Your customers should not be having the same experience.

Email is not billboard or ad marketing. Email attempts to build a 1:1 relationship between the brand and the customer. These prospects trusted you enough to hand over the keys to their inbox. Greeting them with a welcome email creates familiarity and trust.

There are many ways to create segments for targeted marketing based on the data you’ve collected. What did they purchase lately? Where do they live? Which pages on your site they visited most recently? All these touchpoints are opportunities to fine-tune the customer journey and start offering them exactly what they are looking for.

Of course, the limits of your segments are based on the data points you are collecting. Using an integrated marketing tool will allow for tracking of more touchpoints and creating more automated campaigns around those. 

There are policies around collecting and storing people’s personal information. You may have heard of GDPR or CAN-SPAM, but with Apple Mail’s Privacy update and CCPA in California, ignoring the rules can end up being costly.

It’s important to understand what to do in order to be compliant before starting to collect email addresses. Looking at other businesses might not be the best option unless you know they are a reputable sender. Because email, unlike social media channels, is largely managed by individuals on websites, it is very common to see examples of brands not following the rules.

A/B testing has always been standard practice for optimizing emails once you have a list of a few thousand subscribers or more. Testing is how email marketers know whether one subject line is better than another or which day of the week gets the best engagement.

Seasoned email marketers know that testing for content and engagement can be a game-changer. Marketers can test for which button colors get the best clicks, whether customers prefer reading about a topic or clicking through to an explainer video, and even if they respond better to images or copy.

Set reporting goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in advance. This will not only help make reporting a breeze once a campaign is over, but it also helps marketers look for optimizations to make along the way.

Deciding KPIs in advance gives marketing teams a specific goal to work towards and ultimately push them to create better emails. If marketers understand the goals of the campaigns, whether that’s raising product awareness, clicks to a landing page, or form fills, they can use their tactics and creativity to guide people to taking the desired actions.

High unsubscribe rates don’t necessarily mean that customers hate your business, but they can signal other issues that should be addressed. Rising or higher than average unsubscribe rates can point to customers receiving too many emails or emails they feel are irrelevant to them.

Test an adjusted content strategy and watch to see if rates improve. Also, don’t be afraid to ask! Survey your readers on what their ideal frequency would be to gain some real insights.

We all know that Q4 sneaks up fast and the holiday season can be madness for all types of industries. If you’re just starting to incorporate email into your marketing, make sure that you account for any additional emails or special campaigns that will need to be created for national, local, and business holidays and events.

Using automation here can be key to landing huge sales throughout the season. From abandoned cart emails to lead nurture campaigns after a new product release, talk to us to find out how automation has been a powerhouse for businesses.

Email fatigue is real and it’s one of the main things that affect your sender status. If subscribers are getting too much email, they might unsubscribe or worse, they’ll ignore you until you start hitting the spam folder.

Start slow and test how your audience responds by watching engagement rates and unsubscribes. Don’t forget to count any automated campaigns that are running. If someone is in the middle of a drip campaign that sends daily updates for 7 days, it’s good practice to keep them off the mailing list until they’ve completed it to avoid mailing them too heavily.

Create segments for your VIP contacts. These can be contacts that interact with your emails the most often, attend the most webinars, or have purchased the most. Special campaigns can be sent to these lists to nurture the relationship. These rewards don’t have to be discounts but they can be. Rewards can be first look at new releases, asking their opinion on a new product offering, or insider content.

Bonus points if your email software offers lead scoring. Those scores are an easy way to segment your most die-hard customers.

Long gone are the days of “Hey [FNAME]!” as an effective way to get opens and clicks. Personalizing data fields is still a tactic smart marketers keep in their toolkit, but personalization has evolved.

Besides first name and birthday, marketing teams are using location, behavioral, demographic data to personalize the customer journey. Retail sites thrive off of this type of marketing. As consumers, we’re all familiar with the experience of viewing something at our favorite retailer only to receive an email a day later with the item and others similar to it in our inboxes.

Often, marketing channels get treated as disconnected tools when they are all tools meant to work together to build business. Use email as another tool to leverage promotion of social media events or Lives. Social media and other channels can also be used to grow your email list. Your social media followers are not necessarily your email subscribers. Grab them in both places so they’re less likely to miss a message.

If you’ve ever had to send a “Oops, sorry about our last email…” subject line, then you know the pain of missing something before hitting send. The best way to combat send button anxiety is to have an email pre-send checklist handy every time before you hit “send.”