Email marketing is a direct marketing method used to promote your company’s products or services. You can use it to inform your customers about your latest products and offers. Besides teaching prospects about your brand, it can also keep them engaged between purchases.

Interested in starting email marketing for your business or just need to up your game? Let’s examine the top five email marketing tips you should always follow.

1. Get personal

In every campaign, you should strive to nail personalization. People often misunderstand personalization as addressing a subscriber by name. Although that’s a part of it, there’s more to it, such as:

  • Relevance
  • Emails sent in a timely manner
  • Being aware of your subscribers’ needs
  • A customer data collection strategy is essential to sending personalized campaigns.

2. It’s not all about promotions

Email marketing’s ultimate goal is to grow your business, but promotions aren’t its core. Establishing and nurturing healthy relationships with your customers is at the heart of your email marketing.

Your business’ growth will be driven by these healthy relationships that will provide customers with lifetime value.

3. Automation is a must

The famed results of email marketing can’t be achieved without automation. Revenue is lost without automation. By automating, you can:

  • Achieve a higher conversion rate
  • Enhance efficiency
  • Make scaling easy

Besides these three advantages, marketing automation also gives you more time to do other things that will help your business grow.

4. Optimize your segmentation

Segmentation involves grouping customers based on their shared attributes. By doing so, you are able to:

  • Enhance efficiency by designing customer journeys that are unique to the group.
  • Influence your customers to take action with personalized content.
  • Not sending the same email to all your subscribers as this increases the chances that your content will be irrelevant. Your customers will unsubscribe from your list if they find you irrelevant.

5. A/B testing is essential

To continually improve your campaigns, you should always test important elements.

If you’re new to email marketing, there are a lot of things to learn. Isn’t it great to get advice from an expert in email marketing?

Here are 11 email marketing tips from some of the best.

1. Unsubscribes can be beneficial

“It’s impossible to please everyone. It feels good to remove people who aren’t interested in hearing from me”. Enchanting Marketing’s copywriting and marketing expert Henneke Duistermat.

2. Name and subject line are extremely important

“The subject line and name are perhaps the two most important aspects of a successful email. Subscribers need to recognize the email is from your company and have a compelling subject line to engage them.” Buffer’s Director of Marketing, Kevan Lee.

3. When you have something valuable to share, send it

“When I have something relevant to share, I email. Send away if you’re adding value to your subscribers’ lives. Don’t send if you aren’t adding value.” Founder of CopyHackers and Airstory, Joanna Wiebe.

4. Use email marketing in all customer acquisition emails

“I wish I had known that I should use email in all my customer acquisition channels, not just in my marketing efforts. For example, identify subscribers who have a higher chance of converting and creating more personalized, sales focused journeys for them.” Sujan Patel, Co-Founder of WebProfits.

5. Diversify your email marketing channels

“I wish I would have known to integrate my email marketing messages into different channels. This may seem obvious, but it’s the biggest mistake I made in my early days – and that I still see marketers making today. You have to market with a purpose.” Ali Rastiello, Senior Manager of Marketing Automation at BigCommerce.

6. Be relevant to your audience

“I wish I’d known that email marketing isn’t about the channel or the sending technology, it’s about the individuals receiving the email. It’s about making the email offer/content as relevant and valuable to them as possible. It’s about leading with marketing and letting the technology bring it to life, not the other way round.” Katherine Pay, founder of Holistic Email Marketing.

7. Focus on subscriber lifetime value, not campaign activity, when optimizing email campaigns

“Each email to a person will influence the success of the next one that person receives. If we want to get better results from our subscribers, we need to optimize on subscribers lifetime value – not on campaigns.” Jordi van Rijn, Email Marketing Consultant at eMailMonday.

8. Don’t stop testing

“Testing is the name of the game. Your audience evolves, you evolve, and your list of subscribers evolves. You have to constantly test and measure the results to find out what works best.” Val Giesler, B2C Email Expert.

9. Double the length of your subject line by using pre-headers

“I wish I had known the importance of pre-headers. The fact that you can double the length of your subject line is so valuable – and often overlooked.” Justin Khoo, Founder of FreshInBox.

10. Make your experiences more personalized by leveraging segmentation

“I wish I’d known more about segmentation. I always want to know more about who my audience is so I can create a more personalized, targeted experience that will add value for the right people.” Kayli Barth, Director of email marketing at MTL New Tech.

11. Recognize the complexity of email rendering

“I wish I had known from the beginning how inconsistent email client support for coding is and therefore how complex email rendering is. Today’s marketers need to create ‘platform perfect’ emails that deliver the best experience for users of key email clients.” Chad White, Research Director at Litmus.

With these practical and effective email marketing tips, you will be able to design and run successful campaigns. Email marketing is not a game of chance. A good ROI requires certain systems and structures.

If you’re looking for more tips from branding to digital marketing, check out our other blogs here.