Tips for email marketing

Marketers sent over 838 billion emails in 2013. This is an outrageous number. Many mis-use or abuse email as a marketing tool. Spam is not the friend of customers. This short list of tips for email marketing will help you keep your email practice on the straight-and-narrow.

7 Tips for email marketing

• Don't steal emails. Earn them. I understand the pressure the score results... and quickly. Sending emails to unauthorized or cold contacts is spam. Spam is bad for your brand and bad for business. Instead, only email to contacts that provide you their email and want communications from you. This will build better results short and long term.
• Prevent deliverability issues. Perform regular email list data hygiene. Keeping data up-to-date is the best way to improve email deliverability. Purge your list of inactive subscribers. The ratio of email volume to low engagement is a factor that can harm the reputation of your brand--automatically placing emails in spam folders. Work hard to keep the quality of your data and lists high. Focus on building better engagement rates.
• Mailstream cleanliness. Mailstream contamination happens when a marketing agencies or businesses run all email programs over one IP address. Segment your programs to prevent mailstream contamination.
• Appealing email content. Make sure your email content is interesting, helpful, entertaining or useful to your subscribers. Work hard to prevent unsubscribes. Judge the quality of your emails by engagement, open rate, complaints, unsubscribes, click-throughs and direct outreach.  Try experimenting by sending varying messages with varying lengths, layouts, subjects and structure. Pay attention to how users interact with your email content--and iterate. Solicit direct feedback from clients or advocates on the quality of your email campaigns. Praise their honesty.
• Optimize your subject line. Your email subject line is one of the primary reasons why users do or don't open your email. Judge your subject lines based on email open rate. Try A/B testing different subject lines, until you discover a winning recipe for your brand and audience.
• Use the right sender. Test the “From” line to improve open rates. Try sending from your company name and then from a specific person. Watch the open rate difference between the emails. Try using A/B testing to get a direct comparison score with the from line optimization.
• Segment your email lists. Don't send out email blasts, until you have big news... And when you do so, do so sparingly. Instead break up your lists into segments based on likeness between your subscribers, their interests or behavior. Consider using marketing automation to instantaneously grow your segments and apply workflows with email marketing. This will allow your brand to improve engagement rates, click-throughs and conversion from email.