In 2022, 333.2 billion emails are expected to be sent and received each day (Statista, 2021). That’s a staggering amount of daily emails. And, this figure is also expected to increase to over 375 billion by 2025, which means that email is still one of the most promising channels for communication. But more importantly, this also means that as more people embrace the use of the medium, businesses will need to innovate to keep up with the evolving trends and needs of both existing and new users.

To execute a successful e-mail marketing campaign, a marketer now has to look into key data points such as where their target market is accessing their e-mails from, at what times, the kind of e-mails they are most likely to respond to, etc. To stand out, it is important that the practices one adopts for e-mails is tailored to their audience.

To make your life easier, we’ve listed down the best e-mail marketing practices for this year – those that are recommended by leading industry experts and have been confirmed by our own testing!

Create an Automated E-mail Strategy

If your e-mail marketing strategy is the same old boring routine of sending out weekly or bi-weekly long form newsletters with a call-to-action tacked on at the end, it’s in sore need of an overhaul.

A robust e-mail strategy that focuses on engaging with your target audience on a regular basis will allow you to see far greater returns. Now, we understand perfectly that doing so manually might seem like a herculean task for pretty any non-enterprise level businesses – so opt for automating your messages.

Automating your e-mails enables you to communicate with your audience on a regular basis in a more timely, relevant and personalized manner, using customer data to decide on optimal triggers. Automated e-mails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.

Analyze your current business processes – from sales to onboarding. Use the data obtained to figure out the optimal customer journey your target audience needs to convert into customers. Then scope out the range of changes you’ll need to make to your current system to get there.

For instance, you can automate your e-mails when onboarding a new user to your product. The first e-mail could be a welcome email that introduces them to the primary features of the product, the second could focus on nudging them towards using the first feature and how, the third on the second feature, and so on.

This also enables you to ensure that your user is onboarded well and understands your product completely. It will also help you identify stages wherein your user gets confused or doesn’t know how to proceed – once you identify these gaps, you can create a personalized process to circumvent these issues.

A well-integrated Sales enablement and acceleration platform such as SalesPanda, allows you to do better prospecting and lead nurturing with its campaign management module. Here you can run different forms of email campaigns such as text, HTML with personalisation and CTAs to generate better lead conversion opportunities.

Personalize your E-mails

According to another study by Radicati, you will be receiving 7% more e-mails in your inbox this year. This only goes to show that going forward, it’ll be even more difficult to make your e-mail stand out from the mass of other promotional mails and convince your recipient to grace you with a click.

This is precisely where the need to create personalized or contextual e-mails comes in. Personalization of emails can be achieved by sending e-mails based on customer behaviour. The idea is to be able to push out the right message at the right time, to the right people, to capture their interest.

The best practice behind successful personalization, is to successfully segment your target audience based on their past actions, preferences and other similar parameters. When you segment your e-mail list, you can then send different emails based on their points of interest to bolster your open rate.

Every customer is different and might relate to a different pain point – you need to be able to identify this pain point and create a personalized journey for each customer through your e-mails. No one in today’s hyper-informed world wants to do business with a stranger who does not even understand their pain points.

To segment your audience well, use of tracking and analytics tools, conduct surveys around topics of interest to them and invest time in social listening. These will give you the insights you need to determine what your audience is looking for, who they are engaging with, what they are saying about your brand and what expect to see in the near future.

Optimize your Emails for Mobile

Mobile e-mail can now account for up to 15-70% of e-mail opens based on the business’ target audience, product and e-mail type. This means, to grab your audience’s attention, you need to reach out to them where they are the most active – mobile devices.

While mobile friendly e-mails are no foreign concept, it is no longer just about using mobile-friendly templates. You need to make every aspect of your e-mail optimized for the mobile medium. The e-mail content and format should be able to adapt the screen of the device it is being read on, and the pages should be responsive and easy to scroll through.

Templates and responsiveness are just one aspect of mobile optimized emails. The other aspect that plays a major role in how the recipient interacts with the e-mail is the content.
Here are a few tips to ensure that your content is mobile optimized:

• Make your e-mails easily scannable – offer content that is important and use shorter paragraphs
• Ensure that your call-to-actions stand out from the other links in the e-mail body
• Choose different fonts to highlight important messages and direct your readers attention
• Create a subject line that is informative, yet still generates curiosity
• Don’t ignore the pre-header text and make it as descriptive as possible while using the minimal amount of words.

Focus on Sharing Knowledge

The consumer market today no longer tolerates pushy sales pitches. So all those newsletters and e-mails you sent across boasting about your product/service are likely to be ignored, or worse, leave a negative impression. Your focus should be to use e-mails as a channel to educate your audience about your brand.

Share information about your products and services, and how they are designed to resolve a pain point in their lives. The e-mail content should be focused towards providing more value to your reader rather than your sales goal. If you don’t offer something that a reader can take away from going through your e-mail, they aren’t going to deign your next e-mail worthy of their attention.

Consider all the topics that your audience is engaging with online that have even the slightest relation to your business and offer content on the same topics occasionally so that you become their ultimate source of information. The more they come back to you for information, the more favorable opinions the build, and the higher the probability of them converting.

Make analytics and reporting the core of your strategy

Your campaign could be optimized for mobile devices while using the best content you could come up with, and could still yield utterly subpar results. Why? Well, that’s for you to find out. Maybe your content wasn’t good enough? Did you consider the right target personas? Did you make a crucial mistake with your profiling? The only way to find out is to analyze and fix your mistakes.

Make no mistakes, no one nails the right e-mail strategy in their first try, and it would be on the foolish side of optimistic if you think you could be the exception. This is why it is important to consistently A/B test your e-mails and track the performance for every segment closely.

Apart from the conversions, track the engagement rates that your e-mails have been able to generate. Use these metrics to understand what your readers are clicking with the most, what more would they be most interested in reading and where and why the unsubscriptions are happening. The more engaged your audience remains, the longer you can retain them and higher your chances of monetizing them.

The truth behind e-mail marketing is that different things work for different types of businesses, and all you can use are general guidelines to help you as you slowly figure out what would work best for your business.

But on the other hand, some practices feature consistently good results and are characteristic of successful e-mail campaigns. For example, it will never not be important to understand who you’re addressing and how you can add value to them if you want to be able to strategize an effective marketing campaign.

Similarly, another universally positive practice to keep in mind is to keep optimizing your strategy for better results and not stagnate on any one concept – be it changing the template, the content or the call-to-actions; experimentation is the key to success.

What other e-mail marketing practices do you think business marketers should follow closely? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject!