5 email marketing best practices for the new year

Email marketing consistently continues to be the ‘backbone’ of a marketer’s arsenal but it is also one of the oldest tools in our kitbag. As we enter the New Year determined to fulfil our resolutions, we thought that now was the perfect time to remind ourselves of five best practices of email marketing to refresh your campaigns this year.

  1. Know your data – The beginning of a new year is a good time to really familiarise yourself with your data and to take some time to cleanse it. By this we mean removing any old contacts who could be affecting your domain by bouncing multiple times. Also, consider updating your current contacts: do names need editing or do they need moving from a prospect to client address book? By freshening up your data, you are able to reduce any risk of sending to people who do not want to be sent to or (and it does happen!) sending incorrect information in client emails.
  2. Understand your contacts – Understanding who your audience is helps immensely in email marketing. By segmenting your contacts due to their behaviours, you will be able to really tailor your campaigns so they are relevant to each contact. If you know your contacts well, and are aware that, say, 80% of your contacts are interested in a particular topic, you could group them together and send them a communication that’s relevant to them without the other 20% becoming disengaged.
  3. Design, design, design! – Design matters more today than ever before, with technological advancements enabling an audience’s inbox to fill up with animations and personalised designs. With all that, it’s increasingly hard to demand the attention of an audience. Poor design leads audiences to automatically dismiss communications and plant a seed of negativity against businesses. Really look at your communication templates – would you trust the business behind the design? We can help with that.
  4. Automate your way into an audience’s inbox – Automation in email marketing allows you to seamlessly keep the connection between yourself and your audience. What’s more, it ensures the communication is only achieved when your audience wants you to. What could make them any more relevant? Automation sends a series of communications to your audience, and they only continue through the process if they themselves have shown interest, such as link clicks within a campaign. An easy way to get started with automation is through an on-boarding process, with a number of welcome emails which offer more information.
  5. Experiment and take note – Knowing what works for your own audience is key to mastering the art of email marketing. So be sure to test new techniques when communicating with your audience and monitoring what works and what doesn’t.

If you would like to find out more about any of the above tips or talk to us about designing a new template, contact one of the team today on support@clients-first.co.uk.