Basic Email best practices

1. By Steven Duong

2. Email Marketing Service
Provider
— If you are doing email campaign chances are you are
using an email marketing service provider such as
MailChimp or Vertical Response
— I won’t get into the details of this, but if you are doing
email campaigns regularly; you should be using an
proper email marketing service provider who can
save your company a lot of time, money and most of
all agony

3. Best Practice
— Title of the email campaign
— Time of sending the email campaign
— Content
— Creative design
— Segmentation
— Integration
— Anti-spam legislation
— Analyse

4. Title
— Subject title of your email is very important. It can be
the difference on whether or not your email gets
open
— I find short, intriguing and call-to-action titles to be
the most effective, such as “tips on how to be more
holistic!”
— Also good to have your company name in the “From”
section of the email so the user know who the email
is coming from and won’t see it as SPAM

5. Date/Time
— Date/Time plays a very important role of whether or not
your email gets open or deleted
— Chances are the individual you are sending your email to
is already receiving emails from many other companies
— You must decide if your clients are B2B or B2C. Example
I find B2B is best send around 10:30AM earlier in the
weekday.
— Find the most optimal time to send your email so that it
will NOT be bunched in the middle of 60+ emails (many
of which are spams & campaigns), which tend to get
deleted without even looking at

6. Content
— Content is very important
— It should be information that 70%-90% of your
customer cares about
— They signed up for this email, it should be what they
expect
— Else they would unsubscribe or worst mark you as
SPAM
— Content shouldn’t be long either and should just get
down to the meat. If it needs to be long, then at a
certain length, link it to a website if the client decided
he/she wants to read more, they will click the link

7. Creative
— In order to compete with the many other emails your
client is receiving
— Your email should be creative, but at the same time
keep with the branding/look
— A consistent brand/look will let the client know who
its from and will prevent a quick deletion
— Many email applications do block images and its up
to the client’s decision on whether or not images are
to be display
— Always have a text only version of your email

8. Segmentation
— If you are a company that has a huge mailing list or
is not specializing in a particular niche market
— You should segment your email listing
— Group your listings into different demographics and/
or interests, etc..
— You want to send the right messages to the right
market
— You do not want to send irrelevant information/
messages to individuals in your mailing list

9. Integration
— Integrate your email campaigns with your Website,
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc…
— Brings consistency to your message and brand
— This also helps to leverage each of your marketing
campaigns, like get more “Likes” on Facebook, more
followers for Twitter and visitors to the Website

10. Anti-Spam Legislation
— Read over CAN-SPAM and Bill C-28
— Non compliance can lead to severe penalties
— Using a email marketing company will help you with
all the regulations and compliances and to make
sure you are following them

11. Analyse
— Periodically review your data
— Look over your reports – how many people actually
open and looked at the email? How many actually
clicked the links? How many unsubscribed? How
many subscribed? etc…
— Based on the report, do some experimentation and
see if you can increase the click rate, open rate or
decrease the unsubscribe. Such as maybe changing
the time the emails are to be send out

12. Steven Duong