5 Habits of the Lucky Email Marketer

Sometimes you have to make your own luck, especially when it comes to email marketing.

There’s no better time than right now to adopt the email marketing best practices that will propel your campaigns to success. And while at the end of the day, you only have so much control over what happens once you press “send,” taking care to adopt better habits is almost certainly going to help put the odds in your favor.

So what are today’s top marketers doing — and not doing — to get lucky with their emails? Here’s a look at the mistakes you want to avoid, plus five email marketing habits that are as good as a pot of gold.

Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Before we get into best practices, it’s helpful to look at what can hinder your good luck and prevent you from getting the results you’re looking for.

Among business professionals, at least 80 percent say they rely on email marketing to drive customer acquisition and retention. Email has huge potential in terms of audience engagement and lead nurturing, as well as an impressive ROI that makes it more than worth your while.

However, to really make it count, you need to avoid common roadblocks that can stand in the way of your brand and a great performance. Here are some of the big ones.

• Sending too many emails. Almost half (45.8 percent) of email subscribers say they will flag a company’s emails as spam if they receive them too frequently — an outcome that harms not just your contact list but your reputation with email servers. The ideal frequency varies, but once a week is a good place to start.
• Buying contact lists. Organic growth is a slow process, and we understand the urge to take a shortcut. But companies that buy email lists are setting themselves up for failure since purchased addresses are low quality, unlikely to convert, spam bait, and, in many cases, illegal.
• Failing to include a call to action. Your call to action (CTA) is perhaps the single most important feature of any email. Not only does it direct subscribers to the action that you want them to take, but it’s also one of the most telling measures of whether your email was a success. Even if you’re just sending a company update or general news item, make sure to include a CTA on the page.

5 Email Marketing Habits to Start

There are a lot more email marketing mistakes out there. Let’s focus on the things you can do to boost your email marketing luck instead of just what you should avoid.

You probably already know about optimizing your subject lines and the power of personalization, but here are some other must-adopt habits for taking your campaigns further.

1. Send a welcome email

A welcome email is one of the most effective things that your organization can do to engage with subscribers. Welcome emails boast 4x higher open rates and 5x higher click-through rates than your standard email messages, making them the perfect place to start on the right foot.

2. Segment your audience

Marketers who rely on segmentation for their campaigns report as much as a 760 percent increase in revenue. Use email marketing automation software to easily segment your audience by demographics, behaviors, and/or where they are in the sales funnel. By doing this, you’ll target the right people with the right content instead of losing interest by sending people content that doesn’t apply to them.

3. A/B test

Something as simple as the placement and color of your CTA button can profoundly affect your conversion rates. Use A/B testing to test and tweak this and other critical features so that you’re not inadvertently relying on formats that are working against you instead of for you.

4. Keep mobile in mind

About 3 in 5 consumers are checking their email on a mobile device, and if your email doesn’t look right, it’s almost guaranteed to end up in the trash folder. Make sure that every facet of your email translates into a mobile format, including your email design, text, and links.

5. Audit your lists

Just as important as bringing on new subscribers is performing regular audits of your existing contact list and removing any dud addresses. Sending messages to addresses that bounce or send your emails right to spam has a negative effect on your reputation with your email provider — and can ultimately harm your ability to achieve high deliverability rates.

Put luck on your side by following these email marketing tips (and avoiding those all-too-common mistakes). You’ll get yourself closer to striking gold, and you’ll also ensure you don’t step on your own feet on the way to success.