10 tips for effective email marketing

We all get bombarded with marketing emails. Sometimes it feels like every time we open our emails, most of them are from people we don't know, about things we're just not interested in.

So what makes a good business marketing email stand out from the crowd? Here are some top tips to help you get your emails noticed.

Set one aim for every email

Do you want recipients to register for an event, visit a specific web page or make a purchase? Be careful to only have one strong call to action that is immediately apparent as soon as you view the email.

All too often it's easy to add just one more link to that email and before long, it's so busy you just don't know where to look first.

Don't forget the subject line

This could be the only thing people see – it's so easy to focus all of your attention on the creative aspects and messaging within an email and then just dash out any old subject line.

The subject line is what makes a recipient decide whether to open the email or not, so consider this as much you do the main email message.

Carefully consider the sender name you use from the outset

Try to make it sound 'human', like a real person is sending the email, rather than a generic email address such as 'info@company.co.uk'. Instead, why not try 'jane@company.co.uk'?

Decide at the beginning of the process who you're sending your email to

Don't always send every email to everyone in your database. Instead, consider targeting different segments with different messages.

By doing this, you'll have a strong, targeted message, appropriate to the group of people you're sending the email to, thereby increasing your response rate and return on investment.

Test personalisation within your emails

It's so much friendlier to read 'Dear Fred' at the start of an email rather than 'Dear Customer'. If you're able to, try to personalise the subject line, perhaps with the location of the recipient, or other data that you may have collected that makes the email more personalised.

A/B testing can have a massive impact on the end results

Only ever test one thing at a time so you can be sure what variables have affected the results. Unless you have a huge database to which you're sending the email, it's best to test one thing per email. Consequently, it can take time to determine the best combination of variables.

Things to test include:

• subject lines

• HTML versus plain text

• personalisation

• imagery

• headlines

• copy

• design

Test the day and time of sending

The day and time you send an email can have a huge impact on the open rate, click-through rate and response rate so test this until you're confident you have the best combination.

If it's an email to other businesses, then sending Monday morning at 9am is probably not the best time to stand out from the rest of the emails that the businesses have received over the weekend.

Always check how your message looks in different email clients

All too often, an email looks great in Outlook and it's sent to the recipient list only to find that in Gmail the images don't render correctly and the flow of the email is lost completely.

Most email broadcasting software has functionality to allow you to quickly check emails in a wide variety of clients, so be sure to find out how to do this.

You must include an unsubscribe link within each email you send

Make sure you test the process so if someone does click on this link, they are unsubscribed quickly and don't have to jump through hoops.

Do as much as you can to make sure your email doesn't end up in spam folders

There are so many guidelines around how to do this that they could warrant a blog in their own right, mostly because they change so frequently. So check with your email broadcasting software provider, as they are likely to have built a number of methods into their software already.

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You can see from this top level list that there are a lot of things to consider when planning email campaigns, but don't be scared. If you can get them right, email marketing can be a really cost-effective, quick way to target your audience.

Relevant resources

• Five reasons to have an email newsletter

• Choosing the best platform for your email newsletter

• Eight ways to promote your email newsletter