Stephanie Donelson

We’re almost a month into the new year and it’s still the perfect time to add new best practices to your marketing mix – and this includes email marketing best practices!

Email marketing has evolved rapidly over the last few years and has grown to become an integral part of any successful marketing plan. If you want to adapt some new email best practices in 2020 to improve delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and ultimately conversions, be sure to add some of these 9 best practices to your email marketing strategy in the coming months.

9 tips for a better email strategy in 2020

1. Manage and maintain your email lists

Your email marketing strategy is only as good as your email list.The focus in the past was on growing email lists, but in 2020 your focus should be on strengthening your list and improving your engagement with your current subscribers. Why bother trying to get the email address of someone who won’t engage or purchase from your brand?

Start by curating segmented lists to deliver more targeted emails that are more likely to drive conversions. 

Your email lists should include subscriber information like:

• Name
• Email address
• Gender
• Location
• Communication preferences
• Buying habits
• Cart abandonment or previously looked at

Ask in your welcome email or have subscribers fill out a profile to tell you exactly what they want from you and let them choose how often they want to hear from you. This can go a long way in improving your open and click-through rates.

Clean your lists

Scrub your lists and delete bad email addresses or even worse, ones that were purchased. No matter how tempting it is to have a nice big email list, you’ll end up hurting your open rates, conversion rates, and could eventually get blacklisted from ever sending marketing emails again. 

To keep your delivery rates high, showing the ISPs that your emails are relevant and not  spam, you’ll want to suppress unengaged contacts from getting your emails or deleting them entirely. 

2. Be a tease in the subject line

There’s a reason movie studios release teaser trailers, to drum up interest and make you want to learn more. So why not apply the same principle to your email marketing and tease people in the subject line by not giving the ending away or leaving them on a cliffhanger?

You could always try something like:

• The secret to getting extra points
• Your dream trip awaits
• Four reasons people love Brand Name
• What can you save?
• Tonight only! Your favorites on sale
• It’s not too late…
• Preview our biggest sale of the year
• What’s in store…
• Your closet’s missing something…

Just be sure to use this tactic to really drive open rates and not rely on this strategy for every email or people will start ignoring them or get annoyed by them.

Also try to keep your subject line about five words or less and inspire action or drive up urgency to encourage subscribers to open and read your email.

3. Personalize the subject line

I’ve talked in the past about the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) and how we love reading content that’s about us or seems to be written directly for us. Adapt that idea to the subject line by adding the recipient’s name to it to catch their attention.

You can also personalize the subject line by including some of your company’s branding, injecting some personality or humor into it, or even adding emojis. 

4. Optimize pre-header text

Your pre-header text is another chance to drum up excitement about what’s inside their inbox, but it is not meant to be a spot where you simply repeat your subject line. 

Check out these good examples:

Now, for ones that started off well:

In this example, Etsy was so, so close to doing pre-header text by building on their subject line but then they didn’t have enough characters in there so it defaulted to showing the next lines of code, including the dreaded “view this email in a browser link.” And the Hilton Honors one repeated itself and I don’t need to see the brand name back to back.

5. Drive action with your Calls to Action (CTAs)

It’s so easy to throw in a “Shop Now” button or “Learn More” but since it’s a new year, it’s time to throw out the old and try something new – and more fun!

Call attention to your CTAs by making them descriptive or specific, easy to act on, and hard to miss – perhaps in a contrasting color. Try putting the user in the CTA to ramp up the WIIFM. 

Examples of more enticing CTAs include:

6. Think long-term

Right around Black Friday I got so bombarded with emails from Origins that I actually emailed them about how annoying their email strategy was and how I was going to mark the next email from them as spam. It was ridiculous, I was getting 10 emails a day with the same subject line and everything. 

Do not be like Origins in this case. Do not annoy your customers for a short term win of boosting sales. Focus on building a relationship and providing value to your subscribers so they want  to stay on your email list and are actually excited when you send an email instead of staring at their inbox like this:

Engagement is key for long-term success with your email subscribers and you’ll get a better lifetime value out of engaged customers instead of a few quick conversions after bombing people’s inboxes.

7. Mix up email formats

There are many email formats you can send subscribers these days:

• Welcome emails
• Educational emails
• Newsletters
• Drip campaigns from form fills
• Sales emails or promotions
• Event promotion
• Cart recovery

But each of these emails has a different goal and each should be distinct and recognizable for what it is. By having these different formats, you can share targeted information with your subscribers based on what they want or their previous interactions with your brand. 

A note on having multiple email campaigns is to turn on frequency capping so you’re not sending one user six emails from six different campaigns. That’s one quick way to turn off a potential customer. 

8. Run A/B tests

A/B testing is an easy way to learn what your audience wants to see and what inspires them to take action in your emails. By testing different variables over the course of a few emails, you can start to identify patterns and wins to optimize future campaigns. 

What to test in your emails:

• Subject line
• From name
• Pre-header text
• Email copy or layout
• CTAs
• Images

Be sure to think like a true scientist and only test one element at a time or you’ll botch your whole experiment. You’ll also want to ensure you have a large enough sample size to determine accurate results, sending email A to 10 people and email B to 10 people is not a big enough split.

9. Proof your emails

Send a test version to yourself and another person on your team to check for errors, wrong links, missing alt text, etc. It can be hard to proof your own work as you know it so well and your eyes will sometimes skip right over problems as they’re used to seeing them. 

No matter how small the change may be, I always send a new proof after making any edits to an email campaign to make sure I can test the latest version of the email. 

You may even want to create a pre-send checklist so the other person knows what they’re checking for and can ensure you’ve ticked every box before hitting send. Your list should include things like:

• Unique from name (not a noreply@email.com) 
• Strong subject line
• Pre-header text
• Link to a browser version
• Social media links
• Contact information
• Main CTA above the fold
• CTAs linked to appropriate pages
• Alt text for images
• A healthy mix of buttons and hyperlinked text
• Error-free copy
• The right segmented lists attached to the campaign

Do you have any other email marketing best practices you’re implementing this year? Tell me in the comments below or on Twitter!