7 Email Marketing Best Practices

Email is the most used service on the Internet and, doubtless, most useful. Many people use the Internet only for checking their emails. Email marketing can be useful only if done right. Otherwise, it can get you more harm that benefits. However, there are things you can do in order to ensure that your email marketing campaign is going to be successful. In this article we provide you with 7 email marketing best practices.

Deliverability

Deliverability is probably the most important issue in today's email marketing business. There are many spam emails and many legitimate emails are flagged as spam so they are not delivered. They are not getting thru ISP spam filters. Good deliverability ratio is the first step in successful email campaign because if your emails aren't delivered then you don't even have an email campaign!

In order to ensure that your emails will have good deliverability you have to choose your email marketing vendors wisely. You have to check if they are on "Blacklist" or "Whitelist". There are different organizations like Spamhaus project and SpamAssasin that have their own lists which are used by ISP. If your email service provider is blacklisted your emails won't be delivered! Also, you have to ensure that your domain name isn't blacklisted. In order to maximize your deliverability it is recommended that your email service provider offers Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header.

Using our award-winning Group Mail product, whether it is Personal Edition or Business Edition you can be sure that your emails will be delivered because we have a constant cooperation with ISP.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

Your email newsletter should be CAN-SPAM Compliant. It is recommended that you require double opt-in subscription so that your subscribers have to confirm their request to be part of your email newsletter. Don't add your subscribers without their permission and you should avoid adding them manually even if you have their permission. It is good that they do it using double opt-in method. Also, avoid using pre-checked subscription boxes. One of the products in the Group Metrics software called Opt-In manager will help you to do this easily.

It is essential that you provide your subscribers with an easy way to unsubscribe from your email newsletter at any time, when they want. It is good that you offer one-click unsubscription process with an unique address. This way there will be much less requests from your subscribers that you remove them.

CAN-SPAM Law also requires from email publishers that they include their physical postal address so you should include it, too. Your have to show your subscribers that you are legitimate company which have a presence in "offline" world, too.

HTML and plain-text versions

It is essential to offer your visitors to choose if they want to receive your email newsletter in HTML or plain-text format. It means that you should regularly send both types. Sending HTML newsletters have more benefits than plain-text email newsletters. You can use email tracking only in HTML newsletter with image embedding, HTML newsletters have better click-thru ratio because they look like the real web sites. You can hide long URLs so that they will look professional.

However, some people prefer plain-text versions and reasons are different. They use email clients that don't support HTML emails. Another thing is that HTML newsletter types are larger than plain-text newsletters. Also, one of the reasons why some people don't receive HTML emails is security. In HTML newsletters some people can embed malicious scripts or use them for phishing (when they pretend that they are representatives of one company and when people click on a certain link they are taken to their web site that is designed almost identically like original). It is mostly used in financial fraud attempts.

From and Subject fields

Your From and Subject fields are very important for getting better open ratio and therefore to have successful email campaign. You have to remember several simple rules.

It is important that your From field be consistent. You have to choose one name, whether it will be a company name or personal name and use it constantly. Once you change your From field it is most likely that your open rates will decline.

Speaking about Subject field, it has to be short and catchy, to grab attention of your subscribers. Your email has to stand out in usually overloaded inboxes. It is important that you don't shout so instead of

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