You might be thinking that email marketing is an outdated tactic no one uses anymore, but the truth is it remains one of the most effective marketing tools you can be using to reach your customers.

With the variety of tools and platforms available to businesses today, it’s never been easier to create campaigns and messages that perform, and provide one of the highest ROIs possible for your marketing budgets.

However, with all of its great features and the ability for you to maintain brand visibility with your customers and clients, many people still make several mistakes that diminish the value of their time and investment in email marketing.

Don’t forget it’s a relationship

Just because you happen to collect your customers email addresses does not mean you have the right to send them marketing emails. The rules around email marketing are fairly strict and require senders to follow certain procedures and guidelines. That means the first and most important rule is obtaining permission from your contact list.

Getting permission from your contacts can be achieved in a couple of ways. First, if your website is set up to capture leads through a contact form or other subscription functions, you will need to clearly state in your privacy policy how you intend to use any contact information or email addresses collected through your website. Any subscription form should also include a checkbox for the user to select that indicates they have opted-in to receiving emails from you. This process is known as a “single opt-in” and is generally an acceptable permission standard. An alternate version of this is known as a “double opt-in” in which the user subscribes to your list and they are immediately sent a confirmation email that contains a link for them to confirm their information. Either option is usually acceptable by most commercial email marketing platforms, but achieving a double opt-in is really the gold standard.

Never buy lists

One thing you should never do under any circumstances, is to purchase mass mailing email lists. Not only is this a violation of the terms of use for every email marketing platform, it can have significant negative implications for your brand.

During the last few years there’s been a global crack down on bad actors, and the rules associated with sending unsolicited email campaigns (also known as SPAM) have been tightened. In fact, legislation has been passed in Europe as well as the United States that include serious legal consequences for violating these new rules.

Furthermore, your brand can be put in jeopardy if your website and domain get blacklisted. Email marketing performance is measured by a series of metrics that include open rates, bounce rates, number of unsubscribes, as well as spam reports.

When you’re sending a campaign to a massive list of emails that you purchase from a third-party seller, the performance of that campaign will be very low. It’s also likely that you will receive a significantly higher percentage of spam reports. If this number reaches a certain threshold, your account may be banned by your email provider and you run the risk of your primary domain being added to global blacklists.

If that happens, you’re going to be spending a lot of time on damage control.

Test and segment

Two of the greatest features of email marketing are list segmentation and A/B testing. If you aren’t using either of these features you’re potentially missing a huge opportunity in dialing in your marketing strategy to your key customers.

First, using A/B testing allows you to measure and track the responses and engagement of two separate email subject lines, or even completely different content. This ability gives you a huge advantage when it comes to tracking and refining your marketing campaigns over time. Being able to see what content your customers interact with most, goes a long way to improving your campaigns and gaining efficiency in your marketing efforts.

The second is list segmentation, or the ability to target different messages to different customers. If you are still approaching email marketing as an “one-size-fits-all“ strategy, you’re missing out on one of the key benefits of this tool.

You might think all your customers are interested in the same product or services, but the truth is customers have highly individualized interests. If you collect customer emails at your point-of-sale, or through online forms from your website, make sure you include some way to qualify what is most important to that customer or what they find most interesting. This way, you’ll be able to properly segment your email marketing list by categories, and make sure you’re sending the most relevant content to the right customers at the right time.

Design for all experiences

We all know how important mobile optimization is to website development, but many people fail to apply the same approach to email marketing campaigns. All email campaigns should be designed to provide the best possible user experience across all devices. Furthermore, the content strategy should be designed around the principles of lead generation an inbound traffic to your website

Creating email campaigns that are passive experiences, too content-heavy, or don’t include specific calls-to-action will fail to achieve your marketing objectives and will ultimately lead to drop offs in engagement—or worse, customers unsubscribing from your lists.

Measure and improve

Probably the greatest feature of email marketing when compared to traditional tactics, is the ability to measure performance in real time. Virtually all email marketing platforms provide some form of performance or analytics dashboard that will allow you to see the metrics associated with your campaigns. These key insights include, open rates—or the number of people who successfully viewed your campaign, bounce rates—emails that didn’t get through, social sharing, SPAM reports, as well as people who unsubscribed from your list.

Because of the digital nature of email marketing, these performance metrics start to come in almost immediately after sending your campaign, and provide actual data you can use to improve your future marketing.

Still a contender

Because of the benefits and significant ROI of email marketing, it will remain—for now and in the near future—one of the most effective ways to reach your customers and maintain consistent brand visibility.
Keeping your customers engaged with your business and continuing to build trust can be easily accomplished by following these best practices.