7 Best Practices for Email Marketing in 2024 

Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool to communicate with clients and customers, but at the same time, can be an uphill battle when it comes to having people actually read your messages. 

Even if your brand or business hasn’t tapped into email marketing yet, we know there is a huge opportunity to reach new audiences since professionals check their email at least once a day, if not multiple times a day. 

But, what are the best practices for email marketing in 2023? Is email marketing still a thing in 2023? Yes, it very much is. However, just like everything else, this medium continues to evolve and change. The strategies behind how brands used to send emails might not work as effectively now. 

Have a Strong Email Marketing Strategy 

First and foremost, having a strong email marketing strategy is essential to organizing your messages, and ensuring you have a clear idea of how you want to communicate with your audience. What is your main objective for email marketing? What tools will you use? Which team members will oversee these actions? 

Just like anything else in this industry, you need to have a strong strategy before jumping straight into the chaos. To help build your email marketing strategy, follow this guide below: 

Choose An Email Automation Platform 

Email marketing is important, but it isn’t everything. Therefore, it shouldn’t eat up all your time. Using an email automation system is extremely helpful in sending out emails, and automatic responses. You can use email marketing software tools such as Mailchimp, Zoho Campaigns, MailerLite, Klaviyo, and GetResponse, just to name a few. However, it also takes your research to find which email marketing tool is best aligned with your brand and goals. 

Once you have selected your platform, play around with it and get to know its features. Send yourself test emails, create different templates, and design creative graphics for campaigns. 

Review Your Email List

When we think about sending an email to promote a new product or service, the right strategy would be to send it to as many people as possible, right? Wrong. At some point, clients will leave, become uninterested, or stop interacting with your emails completely. 

Therefore, it’s important to periodically review and edit your email lists, to ensure you’re sending them to people who are sure to open and read your emails. Also, open rates are critical for IP reputation. If you continue to have very low open rates, this could result in your emails becoming detected as potential spam, which is something you definitely want to avoid. We advise you to review your email lists every few months, to ensure you’re engaging the right people. 

Personalize and Segment 

Creating segmentations in your emails allows for more personalized emails. Through this, you categorize your contacts based on how they interact with your brand, which plan or membership they hold, what products they like, etc. 

Segmentation depends on your business goals, and what you offer. You can segment by demographics, behaviors, if they attend any of your events, or if they are subscribed to your newsletter, discounts list, etc. 

This also opens up a variety of campaign options, because you can now target different audiences specifically, increasing the chances that they will relate or engage with your messages. Then, track this data to see your open rates, clicks, and responses. Bring this back to your strategy to continue refining your email tactics. 

Short, Sweet, and To The Point

We know that emails can be a great place for sharing stories, providing resources, and offering special deals. But, it’s easy to get carried away with writing emails. To maintain readers’ attention, keep your messages short, sweet, and to the point. This doesn’t mean you can’t tell a story, or share a valuable newsletter or article. However, there is a difference in sharing compelling information, and just filling in sentences. 

No one feels special when they know a brand has just sent a long mass email to all users. When you go to write your emails, come up with a few main points and stick to these in your emails. Stay on topic and avoid throwing in random links or resources that don’t follow the message. This will also allow you to create multiple shorter, segmented emails, that will continue to engage your audience. 

Ask For Feedback 

If you’re not sure of what opinions your audience has, or what they want to see, ask! We know that being an authentic brand is extremely important, and along with that means being vulnerable. Remind your audience that you are there to answer their questions, and listen to their feedback. 

When you take this feedback and implement it into your future emails or campaigns, these actions will not go unnoticed. This also allows your community to weigh in on conversations, and unique engagement. 

Retarget… Smartly

I’m sure we are all familiar with the idea of retargeting. Sending a follow-up email or message to someone that has interacted with your brand, but decided to leave before a purchase or investment. This has been a popular email marketing best practice in 2023, because it can extremely effective, if done correctly. Be cautious about running retargeting, and avoid overdoing these types of campaigns. 

When you send a retargeting email, get more specific and consider offering a special offer for these users. A generic email will not go far, because users will detect this is just another automated retarget. Review which actions these users took, and where they exited and left your brand. 

Track Metrics 

I’m sure this will come as no surprise because here at Metricool we love metrics. But, it’s true! So for this last email marketing best practice for 2023, know that tracking your email metrics is extremely important. It will help you gauge how your strategies are working so you can continue to refine these tactics. What are the best email metrics to measure? 

• Open rate: This is a no-brainer, and shows the percentage of users who have opened your email. Open rates are one of the most fundamental email marketing metrics and one that you can use to compare data. 

• Click-through rate: This metric measures how many readers have clicked on links included in your emails. This is calculated by taking the total number of clicks, or unique clicks, divided by the number of delivered emails, then multiplied by 100. Viewing this data will give you insight into how many are engaging with other content and links. 

• Conversion rate: Conversion rates measure how many readers clicked on a link, and made a specific action. For example, if you offered a special Black Friday discount with a link to the offer, conversions would be all those that successfully made it to the point of sale. This is important not only to see how many people are converting, but which users are converting. 

• Unsubscribe rate: Although this is a metric we want to keep as low as possible, it’s inevitable that someone will unsubscribe from your emails. However, it’s important to look at this and ensure you don’t have any spikes. But don’t get discouraged. This can be a positive aspect because it will help you fine-tune your email list. 

• List growth rate: Of course, growing is always the goal, right? You can find this by taking the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribers, and then dividing that by the total number of contacts, and multiplying that number by 100. Analyze this to see how your email list is growing over time. 

We know that email marketing can be a heavy task, but you don’t need to overcomplicate the process. If you’re starting from the beginning, keep it simple and use these email marketing best practices in 2023 to grow your list over time. 

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Anniston Ward , 31 January 2024