InsightIQ Blog

Email Marketing Best Practices

Sep 23 2009

Research shows that people spend more time reading their emails than they do surfing the web. Email is one of the most powerful mediums that you can use to talk to customers and prospects and is an extremely cost effective channel and once the initial investment in infrastructure set up is complete.

In order to maximize the use of email marketing here are some best practices for marketers.

a. Acquire and manage email addresses appropriately

The deliverability rate of an email campaign is directly related to the quality of the email addresses. Ensure that your email collection platforms have standard validation processes to capture high quality email addresses. In the back end, run standard validation scripts to filter out and flag bad email addresses.

b. Comply with anti-SPAM laws

Most Internet Service Providers use rigorous spam protection mechanisms to trap unsolicited email before it gets into their customers' inboxes. Spam filters generally "rank" each email by a number of different criteria, and, if that email rates above a certain level (such as 10 spam points), then it is flagged as spam and deleted. To ensure emails are spam compliant, avoid using questionable language in subject and content of the email. Organizations, as a best practice, should set up mail boxes to report SPAM and email abuse as well as monitor the mail box for SPAM compliance.

c. Offer 1-Click Unsubscribe

Organizations must provide multiple methods to opt-out or unsubscribe from email marketing. As a best practice, provide a link at the bottom of the email to allow for a 1-click unsubscribe.

d. Personalize

Personalization is key for improved click and response rates. Use customer or prospect data to personalize content.

e. Test subject lines and focus on click links

Testing different subject lines and content layouts is critical to consistently improve the performance of email campaigns. As a standard practice, use different text for both content and links and create multiple layouts by re-positioning images and content. Compare the resulting click-through data to analyze the performance of the subject line and layouts.

f. Track and integrate with web analytics

While traditional email marketing metrics like open and click rates are useful, it is important to understand the user behavior on the call to action. Ensure that all click links have a tracking code embedded that allows capture of the user behavior onsite and more detailed web activity analysis in order to be able to track resulting sales or conversions.

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