15 essential email marketing best practices for 2024

Effective email marketing pivots on the blueprint of best practices and data integrity. Ignoring these elements can lead to poor engagement, high unsubscribe rates and damaged sender reputations.

On the flip side, a well-maintained email strategy fosters robust customer relationships and bolsters brand image.

In this guide you’ll learn industry-leading insights, robust strategies and email marketing best practices to help you maintain pristine email data and optimize your email marketing endeavors.

6 email marketing best practices to keep your data clean

Keeping your email marketing data current and accurate is an important part of any email marketing strategy. Here are six ways to maintain clean email data.

1. Observe good list hygiene

Engage in regular maintenance, like removing hard bounces immediately to avoid negative impacts on deliverability rates. Hard bounces occur when emails are sent to invalid addresses and should be added to a suppression list to prevent future emails from bouncing.

Most email marketing platforms offer list cleaning automatically, but in order to protect your ESP (email service provider) platforms’ sending reputation, we highly recommend also making sure that your backup data is cleaned regularly so that there are no invalid emails in your list.

Make sure to set up a schedule for cleaning your lists every three to six months.

The provider then shares the emails with anti-spam organizations. If you have inactive email addresses in your list and you continue to send emails to them, this service will place your domain and IP into a blocklist and your delivery rates and deliverability will be impacted – your emails may land in the spam folder or not be delivered at all).

2. Send out re-engagement campaigns

Even if your clients have subscribed to receive your newsletters, there might come a time when they stop opening your emails, the information is not relevant anymore or perhaps your emails are simply not engaging.

Don’t pay extra for the contacts who aren’t engaging with your content. Instead, set up a re-engagement campaign.

For example, you could create a segment containing subscribers who’ve not opened your emails in the last three to six months and create an engaging campaign to try to win them back. If they don't engage, you can remove them from your list.

3. Set up double opt-in

Double opt-in is when a contact signs up for a subscription and then verifies their subscription in a subsequent confirmation email they receive. You might not get as many subscribers if you use double opt-in, but the ones that go through the process are more likely to engage with your campaigns, increasing open rates.

Double opt-in will also prevent you from unintentionally collecting fake and misspelled emails that could generate high bounce rates and damage your reputation in Google – one of the things Google tracks is the volume of incorrect emails you’re trying to reach.

Use double opt-in emails to help keep your database clean.

4. Segment your lists

You might have a huge database with a variety of contacts, all of whom have different needs and interests. Create segments based on criteria like purchase history or engagement level.

Using a targeted approach ensures that your emails are relevant and engaging to each specific group.

5. Don’t use purchased lists

If you have a chance to buy a subscriber list, don’t. The seller might make it seem like a tempting offer, but the only things you’ll be buying are problems.

Purchased lists often lead to poor engagement rates, damaged sender’s reputation and deliverability issues. They can also violate an ESP’s terms and conditions. Many ESPs don’t even enable you to use these lists, so if you find one that does, be suspicious.

Email marketing is not a shortcut to selling something, it’s a channel where you have to develop a relationship with your subscribers and build trust. Focus on organically growing your email list with sign-up forms, pop-up forms, landing pages, social media and more. Create a community and respect it.

6. Use cleaning services

In order to keep your lists clean, consider using a cleaning service like Zerobounce, DataValidation, Bounceless and Kickbox to remove invalid or risky email addresses and enhance your list’s quality and deliverability.

These services weed out invalid email addresses, spam traps, abuse, toxic and catch-all emails so you can focus on making sales with your campaigns.

6 email marketing best practices to manage unsubscribes effectively

1. Maintain regular email frequency

If you send newsletters to your contacts every day, they might get tired of you and reach for the unsubscribe button. On the other hand, sending a newsletter every three months might mean your contacts don’t even recognize you or understand why you’re sending them emails.

They might even report you as spam and, based on new Gmail and Yahoo requirements, abuse rates can’t exceed 0.1%. When they subscribe, tell them how often you’ll send them emails and what kind of emails they can expect from you.

2. Craft consistent email subject lines

You don’t want to use a subject line about “cats” when the email is actually about “dogs”.

Ensure that your subject lines accurately reflect the content of your email to maintain subscriber trust and avoid misleading them, reducing the risk that they’ll unsubscribe.

3. Optimize emails for mobile

Companies prioritize mobile device optimization. Why? Because more and more people are using their mobile to open emails. In fact, according to Litmus, 46.3% of all emails were opened in the Apple Mail app on the iPhone.

When you create a campaign make sure you optimize it for mobile, otherwise, although it might look good on the web, it could look out of proportion on mobile devices – this experience isn’t comfortable for a mobile user and might cause them to unsubscribe. So make sure to optimize your email for both web and mobile devices.

4. Personalize your email

It’s pretty simple to create an impersonal email, but it doesn’t take much effort to make it personalized. The email can speak to the recipient directly thanks to personalized merged tags that pull their first name, last name, job position or even their last purchase into the body and subject line of the email.

Personalizing your email will help you build connections with contacts and decrease your unsubscribe rates. We recommend using automation tools to make it even simpler.

5. Try marketing automation

Use marketing automation software to segment and remove inactive subscribers, or those who’ve not engaged with your content over a set period.

You can set up an automated email sequence to try to win them back, but if they’re not engaging with your emails after a specific period, adjust the automation sequence so that unresponsive contacts are automatically unsubscribed.

It might take longer to set up the automation, but it will save time in the long run. Plus, you’ll potentially decrease your contact list’s unsubscribe rate.

6. Include visible unsubscribe options

Sometimes, no matter the effort you put in, the contact won’t be interested in receiving your newsletters.

So make it effortless to unsubscribe (and potentially avoid generating abuse rates). Include an easily accessible unsubscribe link in your emails to provide a clear opt-out option for your subscribers – whether they’re using desktop, tablet or mobile devices.

Remember: from 2024, Google and Yahoo will “require bulk senders to authenticate their emails, allow for easy unsubscription and stay under a reported spam threshold”.

3 email marketing best practices for avoiding abuse reports

1. Add a permission reminder

Sometimes your contacts might not remember how and when exactly they subscribed to receive newsletters from you, especially if you start sending emails to older databases (older than 6 months).

In this case, include a note at the top of each email reminding subscribers how they were added to your list to enhance transparency and trust.

2. Make sure your campaigns look legitimate

Mix email copy with visually appealing elements to create engaging emails that are less likely to be mistaken for spam. Also, make sure your sending email domain is the same as, or at least the sub-domain of, the main domain your clients signed up to receive emails from.

People might get confused if they signed up to receive newsletters from the company www.example.com, but they are receiving emails from [email protected].

3. Avoid spammy subject lines

“Offer expires”, “Money back now”, “Deal ending soon” and many more – subject lines like these don’t sound professional, and you can understand subscribers who report these emails as spam – because, well, the subject line is spammy.

Subject lines like these could also trigger spam filters, landing your email in a spam folder.

Craft email subject lines that are engaging and increase conversions. As well as observing email subject line best practices, you can also include a call to action that helps drive conversion.

Also, we suggest testing out some online AI tools to generate suggestions for good subject lines – some are free and made especially for subject line generation.

Email marketing best practices: what the experts have to say

Over the years, email marketing has evolved into one of the most cost-efficient forms of digital marketing. However, learning the ins and outs of this marketing tool is often harder than most marketers anticipate.

Some things may work for one business but be a total failure for another. The only way to really learn what works best for a certain business is to test your approach repeatedly. Eventually, your efforts will show you where to improve and what your customers love to read.

Having said that, some email marketing practices are universal for most industries. These practices have been shown to work repeatedly across different types of businesses.

In this section, we have gathered insights from several experts with a proven track record of email marketing success, sharing their opinions on the practices that can help you send successful campaigns every single time.

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael is working to solve the world’s biggest problem: Untapped human potential.

Tell stories, especially yours.

Before people will listen to or buy from you, they need to understand that you know how they feel, what they’re going through and that there is a way out.

Your story is the thing that will connect them to you and is your competitive advantage. The more vulnerable you are, the better. People don’t want to learn from the perfect person because they’ll think you don’t understand them and what they’re going through. Except that you do. Because you’ve been through it. But they don’t know that until you tell them.

Make them feel that you understand them, then they’ll take the actions you want them to take. #Believe

Warren Whitlock

Warren Whitlock advises companies on strategies for leveraging digital media tools and online opportunities to drive growth and profits.

There are two things over the last 38 years of using email that stand as life-changing.

Getting rid of spam

Modern accounts shouldn’t have a problem but if you have it, take a look at better software and accounts to fix it. Email is communication not a daily weeding job to find important messages.

Practicing the philosophy of 'zero Inbox' and ending each day with zero messages in my Inbox.

I read/process all the messages I get and can now mail to thousands with my own return address and encourage them all to reply.

If you have thousands of emails in your inbox, you are wasting time every day. Just archive everything older than 30 days and get started. Search will let you get to an old message faster than scrolling. Then quickly go through the rest. I’ve been doing this for years and get up to a few dozen every so often. I just have to go through and decide where it belongs outside of email. If not, I archive it and know I can find it if ever needed.

Email remains the most universal way to carry on a personalized conversation. Text and messenger apps are great but not anywhere as universally used as email.

Erik Qualman

Bestselling Author and Keynote Speaker Erik Qualman has performed in over 50 countries and reached 30 million people.

His Socialnomics work has been featured in 60 Minutes and the Wall Street Journal and is used by the National Guard and NASA.

His book Digital Leader propelled him to be voted the 2nd Most Likeable Author in the World behind Harry Potter's J.K. Rowling. You can connect with him through Equalman.

Start with the the subject line. Most email that isn’t read is because it was never opened in the first place. Don’t trick people into opening it with the subject line. This works, but it only works once, and people will unsubscribe.

If the subject line is too difficult to create then most likely the content of the email itself needs work. In sum, when drafting your email you should think of the subject line first before anything else.

The subject line should help you write the email, not the other way around. Most of us do the exact opposite and treat the subject line as an afterthought.

Ian Brodie

Ian Brodie is a marketing consultant and author of the bestselling book Email Persuasion. You can connect with him through his website.

I would put my focus on just one thing: Deliverability.

That’s painful for a marketing person to say. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter how engaging your email content is, how enticing your subject lines, how compelling your calls to action: if your emails don’t make it through to your subscribers’ inboxes then it all counts for nothing.

And of all the areas in email marketing, the one that’s changing the most is deliverability.

If you could write great emails in 2015 or 2018 or 2005, your emails will still be pretty great now. But what’s changing significantly is the algorithms the big email service providers use to decide where to place your emails. All of them, and in particular Gmail which powers by far the biggest number of inboxes, are getting tighter and tighter on what they allow into the inbox versus what they push to spam or promotions.

And the days when you could keep out of the spam folder just by avoiding ‘trigger words’ or by playing games like saying ‘f.ree’ instead of ‘free’ are long gone.

So even though it’s not a sexy marketing topic, I would advise getting to grips with deliverability.

That means understanding how to get your subscribers to whitelist your email address. Keeping your mailing lists clear of spam-traps and dead addresses. Regularly monitoring your inbox placement using tools like Glockapps.com, and managing engagement so you send only to people who are actively reading and taking action on your emails.

This one area can have a much bigger impact on your success with email than any tweaks you can make from a marketing perspective.

Jacob Cass

Jacob Cass is a prolific graphic designer who runs the popular design blog, Just Creative, which doubles as his award-winning graphic design and branding firm.

Jacob’s clients include the likes of Disney, Jerry Seinfeld and Nintendo. Jacob has spoken at TEDx, been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur and has been awarded LinkedIn’s exclusive ‘Best of’ for graphic design.

Set your goals, proactively grow your email list, use triggered emails, optimize for mobile, automate with autoresponders, workflows and segmentation, use email marketing in combination with social media, use a tracking pixel, time your campaigns and track and test your campaigns.

Dennis Yu

Dennis Yu is the Chief Executive Officer of BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing agency that provides students with real-world experience by managing ad campaigns for companies like the Golden State Warriors.

My number 1 tip to make your emails effective: write them like social media posts.

Why?

Because 80% of emails are opened on a mobile phone. That means people are on the go, scrolling fast (140% faster scroll on mobile than desktop), and need you to capture their attention immediately.

That means your headline is even more important – and not just because the average user is inundated with 200+ emails a day. I happen to get 900 emails a day, so you can imagine how hard it is to get into my inbox and also get my attention.

This means writing simpler copy using nearly all text and short paragraphs like you see here. Having a lot of formatting makes your email look like an ad. Reading long paragraphs on a phone only two inches wide presents a reading challenge that most users will decide to skip.

Social media posts, especially LinkedIn, are all about the copy. So learn to teach, inspire and entertain – selling only 10% of the time.

Tim Hughes

Tim Hughes is ranked Number 1 as the most influential social selling person in the world. He is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Leadership Associates.

Ivana Taylor

Ivana Taylor is the publisher of DIYMarketer, a resource for entrepreneurs who want to do less marketing and make more money. In 2010 she ranked number 21 out of 30,000 influential people on the internet.

She is the book editor for Small Business Trends, a contributing author to AMEX Open Forum and has appeared on MSNBC.

The most important thing about email marketing is to first and foremost decide what role email marketing will play in your chosen marketing strategy.

For example, if you choose a content marketing strategy, you can use email to engage with your email list and drive them to content that will ultimately lead to a call to action.

If you’re running a direct marketing strategy, then email is your primary form of contact with your email list and each email will contain a call to action.

If you want to use email marketing as a support to your marketing strategy, then your first step is to make sure that you start with who you’re selling to and how they want to communicate with you, what you’re selling and the best way to move potential prospects through their buying journey.

Don’t ‘do’ email marketing because you heard it was something every business should do. Choose email marketing as a supporting tactic to the marketing strategy you choose.”

Shane Barker

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the co-founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency.

He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-list celebrities. You can connect with him through his website.

When it comes to email marketing, here are the best practices in my experience:

Be consistent. It’s the key to growing your audience and engagement too.

Don’t underestimate the power of your welcome emails. Use them to build strong relationships.

Find the right times to send the email for maximum impact. This method works very well for me.

Be authentic and seek their feedback. It helps you understand what your readers want.

Adam Connell

Adam Connell is a content strategist with a background in SEO and email marketing. He used to manage the content marketing efforts of international brands. Now he teaches bloggers how to get noticed at Blogging Wizard.

Get to know your audience

The results you get from email marketing are proportionate to the value you deliver to your audience. Survey your email subscribers to find out how you can serve them better. This can be done easily by using your automation sequence and a survey tool like Typeform.

Use an email verification tool to improve deliverability

Email deliverability is a huge challenge. Spam traps and incorrect emails can have quite an impact. A tool like Mailfloss can filter these out automatically, so you don’t have to lift a finger.

Let your subscribers know what they’re signing up for

Whatever list-building tactics you’re using, be transparent about what people are signing up for. If they need to join your newsletter to get a free download, let people know. Include it on your forms, confirmation email and thank you page. And, of course, make it easy for people to unsubscribe.”

Dan Scalco

Dan Scalco is the founder and marketing director at Digitalux, a digital marketing agency in Hoboken, N.J.

The number one email practice I would recommend would be to automate your email personalization as much as possible. Digital marketing is becoming more and more tailored to the recipient due to the increase in the volume of marketers/businesses making the shift to digital marketing.

Personalization through email tactics such as Browse Abandonment, which reminds customers about products they recently viewed, helps keep marketing tailored to the individual buyer. In an ever-growing world of general mass e-newsletters, personalization is what will help you stand out and increase conversions.

Joe Williams

Joe Williams is a Digital Marketer and SEO trainer. He’s on a mission to make SEO easy, fun and profitable.

Two things that work great for email marketing are creating compelling lead magnets and segmenting your email list.

For a lead magnet, it could be a valuable PDF, but I’m moving more towards creating a mini email or video class series.

For email segmenting, it may be by their industry knowledge of the product or service that you offer. Typically, I’ll segment them into three or four buckets through a drop-down form on email capture and tag them in my email autoresponder. Then, I can market to them in a much more personal way, and this will lead to hyper-targeted messaging when I make my sales pitch later down the line.”

Ashley Faulkes

Ashley is a recovering WordPress designer turned Affiliate Marketer who loves ranking stuff on Google. He spends way too much time in the Swiss Alps and tries to get some work done in between. You can connect with him through Madlemmings.

These days, I’m less worried about following all the advice and rules and more interested in creating real relationships with my readers. The same applies to email.

So, what does that mean in practice? I like to provide oodles of value to my email list before pitching them anything. Like trusting a friend when you buy a new car (or anything of value), it’s usually not something you do lightly. And expecting your email list to be open to buying from you or via your affiliate links before you have established yourself is the same. Trust comes first, even online.”

Jordie van Rijn

Jordie van Rijn is an international email marketing expert and helps people select MarTech as the founder of emailvendorselection.

Put your content to work for extra opt-ins.

As far as conversion is concerned, asking for that all-important email opt-in is crucial. All email lead nurturing programs start after the first opt-in and email address are given. It is a turning point.

Research on consumer email marketing attitudes and behavior showed that people are most likely to exchange their opt-in for a tangible monetary benefit, such as free shipping, a $ $5 gift card or 10% off.

But what about brands in B2B or brands that have mostly content?

Some list-building techniques that sound like a bad crime movie are bribery, extortion, content-gating and all sorts of mischief. Think about creating one solid piece of content that has done all the selling for you (because it is so good). Then you just ask if people want more.

You can offer a content upgrade (e.g. a downloadable checklist to accompany a how-to article). But it can be even simpler. If you do a blog series, add a ‘receive the next part once it comes available’. The whole thing can be as simple as a paragraph of text pointing to your normal sign-up, no extra work needed.”

Ben Matthews

Ben is a social media and press consultant specializing in technology, media, government and charity. He offers senior client consultancy and trusted counsel, sets strategy and ensures well-executed implementation for campaigns at all levels. Connect with him through Montfort.

He is a regular speaker and well-connected to the London media scene, influencers and blogging communities.

Try plain text emails.

These have been shown to work more effectively than image-heavy emails, as they have higher deliverability rates, load quickly on mobile and allow readers to get the message straight away without having to scroll down.

Fewer but better.

Try sending fewer emails but put more time into making the content much better. If you’re known for sending low-value emails, your readers won’t open them. Better to become known for sending valuable emails, even if that’s slightly less frequently.

Minuca Elena

Minuca Elena is a freelance writer specializing in creating expert roundups. Her posts provide quality content, draw huge traffic and get backlinks. She also helps bloggers connect with influencers. You can connect with her on MinucaElena.

The best email practices depend on the goal that you have. There are two possibilities, Email marketing and outreach.

To your subscribers, you should always send out new content (an email about each new post you publish), updates about changes that are happening in your company and special offers and promotions from time to time.

People love getting discounts and great deals, but they don’t like being sold things. So, your sales emails should look and feel like you are offering them an amazing opportunity, not like you are trying to sell them another product.

If you are busy and don’t have enough time to publish regularly, you should also send your subscribers your latest media features, such as interviews and podcasts in which you were a guest. This way, they will see that you are a respected and successful person in the industry.

For outreach, my best advice is to personalize your templates as much as possible. You will spend more time on this, but it will be more efficient and you will have better results.

Marcus Miller

Marcus is a digital marketing strategist at Bowler Hat, where he helps small businesses get big results from SEO, Google Ads and Facebook Advertising.

Tip 1:

Something that gets overlooked with email marketing is ensuring you have implemented DMARC and DKIM authentication for your emails. This improves deliverability and ensures your marketing messages reach your prospects.

Tip 2:

The most important factor in email marketing is to add value. Make your email so valuable that the recipients make time to read it.

There are many ways to do this, and the specifics will depend upon your audience. One great example of a marketing email is a two-minute summary of Google Webmaster Hangouts. I don’t have time for the whole 90-minute webinar, so I actively look out for and read the key takeaways summarized in a two-minute email.

Dela Quist

Dela Quist, founder, and CEO of leading email marketing agency Alchemy Worx, isn’t one to hold back. Passionate about email marketing, Dela has all the research and statistics at his fingertips to prove his arguments. Dela is an entertaining and convincing writer and speaker – well worth following.

Test Test Test.

Testing is a proven way to ensure that each email you send engages as many people as possible. What many people do not realize about A/B testing is that testing two subject lines at a time will yield fewer results than testing more subject lines.

Research we conducted into the effect of the number of subject lines (variables) you need for success shows marketers can improve their chances of success by 7x if they test three subject Lines, 10x if they test four and 30x if they test ten subject lines!

Now, I accept that not everyone has the resources or the necessary amount of subscribers to write and test 32 different subject lines every time they send an email. What I would recommend to everyone is to test at least four subject lines at a time. A four-subject line test is likely to result in a 33% lift. To compare, a classic A/B test is only likely to give you a 3% lift.

But help is at hand.

Email marketers and copywriters who are serious about improving the performance of their email campaigns can only do so by increasing the number of Subject Lines they test.

Harris Schachter

Harris Schachter is the Director of Marketing at Home Care Delivered, Inc. and the Founder and Owner of OptimizePrime, LLC.

My best advice for email marketing is to provide value in an informational sense, not just sell stuff.

This is especially crucial for the first couple of emails sent to a new subscriber when they’re more likely to open the email (and more likely to unsubscribe after possibly rethinking their decision to sign up).

These first few communications will set the tone for your emails in general, and it is much more effective to stoke a slow-burn approach to warm up those leads rather than cranking up the heat right off the bat.

Email is a free channel, so don’t waste it! Test out your sequences by combining informational and conversion-oriented messaging, and don’t forget to segment based on audience/persona or product interest.”

Ruben Gamez

Ruben Gamez is the founder of the electronic signature app Signwell, which helps get your sales document signed twice as fast as anything else.

Email is now something that’s used by most companies to nurture and convert leads into customers.

Because of this, it’s more important to stand out and do a great job of onboarding readers into your email list. Just like software companies have been doing, paying attention and actively working to increase engagement in the first few touch points will go a long way.

This means that the first couple of emails are critical, and you’ll need to test to make sure you nail that experience.

Janet E Johnson

Janet E. Johnson helps business owners grow their businesses with strategies, including branding and social media optimization. She focuses on specific ways to convert customers from fans or connections to sales. Her services on her website include training, consulting, speaking and management.

Be consistent.

Your list will forget about you if you don’t get in front of them consistently. This can be weekly, 2x per week or even daily. Some brands choose to send out emails monthly, but I would suggest more than that. It also helps to send on the same day and time of the week. This sets the expectations for your list.”

Lolita Carrico

For over twenty years, Lolita has worked with startups, emerging brands and Fortune 500 companies to develop marketing and business development strategies that increase brand awareness and ultimately drive growth and revenue. You can find her on her website.

Email marketing is an effective method (based on ROI) to communicate to loyal fans and incite repeat purchases.

Use advanced segmenting and automation

The primary thing to remember is that email marketing platforms allow you to segment and automate. With these functions, you can truly customize your emails for a better user experience.

Rather than blasting the same message or offer to all your subscriber, tailor the messages by segmenting your lists based on buying behavior, last purchases or actions. The more you can micro-target your emails, the greater conversions you’ll see.

Keep it short and engaging

The Twitter and Instagram eras have conditioned consumers to respond best to short-form and visual content. Email should be no different! Keep your messages concise and on-brand, with a tone that resonates with your audience and is visually stimulating.

Finally, keep in mind that on social media, there is no need to share your email address to follow a brand. When a consumer subscribes to your emails, they’re giving you more access to them. Use it wisely to avoid the dreaded unsubscribe.

Daniel Ndukwu

Daniel Ndukwu is the founder of KyLeads, a platform that helps websites turn more visitors into subscribers and then customers.

There are many things you could do with email marketing, and they’ll increase your open rate, CTR and engagement.

If you were to boil it down to one or two, then I’d focus on:

1. Segmentation

Every market or business has multiple customer segments they cater to, whether they know it or not. Each of those segments wants something different from your products and services. Segmentation, psychographic and behavioral segmentation specifically, makes it possible to tailor your message to the goals of individuals rather than using one-size-fits-all messages that the whole world can relate to.

2. Personalization

This isn’t about putting someone’s name in the subject line or body copy, not really. This is about reacting to their needs as an individual. For example, someone visits a product page four times or stays on a long-form sales page for 15 minutes but doesn’t end up buying. If they’re a subscriber, you can send a message that takes that into consideration. Maybe your customers need a discount or more information before making the purchase. Give it to them.

Kath Pay

With a wealth of knowledge gained from being an industry veteran of 19 years, Kath is an author, blogger, expert contributor, international conference speaker and trainer.

As CEO of Holistic Email Marketing, she devotes her time to developing customer-centric e-commerce journeys using a holistic, multi-channel approach.

1. Lead with Strategy and not with technology.

When we let technology drive our decision-making, we can end up creating a disconnected experience for our customers. We can avoid that by creating a strategy first and then applying technology to carry out the strategy. Avoid creating a program around a tool or a feature.

2. Test to continually optimize your campaigns and email program

Testing has three goals: gain an uplift, learn something about our customers and share learnings with other team members and channels.

You’ll get the best results when you adopt a scientific approach that incorporates a hypothesis tied to your campaign or program objective. It’s easy to do simple A/B testing on a subject line or call to action, but those results likely will apply only to that campaign. Aim higher, testing over multiple campaigns to gain statistical significance and long-term gains.

3. Be subscriber-oriented in your reporting.

Think beyond the campaign. Use metrics that focus on customers and subscribers. We shouldn't limit ourselves to making decisions only based on campaign metrics. This helps us to measure success using the correct metrics and make strategic decisions that will keep us focused on our objectives.

Rachel Andrea Go

Rachel is a content strategist, SEO writer and inbound marketer for e-commerce and SaaS clients. She loves writing about remote work, productivity and marketing strategies. You can find her on her website.

1. Use custom graphics or no graphics at all

Using custom graphics is nothing new, but it’s definitely a best practice for a reason. Avoid stock photography, which is boring at best. Custom-designed graphics in your newsletters help keep your images relevant and help to convey your message.

If it’s between stock photography or no image at all, do no image at all. Plain text emails have been making a comeback as busy readers get tired of highly designed, loud marketing newsletters and sometimes, plain text with just the facts can be refreshing.

2. Summarize your newsletter at the beginning

Think about your mobile viewers here. People who open their emails on their phones don’t have time to scroll through a barrage of images, so summarize your message and highlights in a few paragraphs at the beginning of your email before any graphics/images. I also recommend putting your logo at the bottom of the email, not the header (which readers will have to scroll past).”

Scott Miraglia

Scott is the CEO of Elevation Marketing. He is a balanced risk-taker with nearly three decades of experience starting and growing advertising and marketing agencies.

Many marketing trends are shining in the spotlight. Voice search, evolving AI and a view beyond millennials to Generation Z are driving conversations. What can get overlooked amid the hype are reliable strategies that should be a cornerstone of any marketing plan.

Take Email. This tactic still has the potential to deliver a high ROI to those who leverage it correctly. So let’s cut through the noise and look at the best email practices.

1. Boost your open rates with split-testing

This should be a pillar of every email strategy. Can’t figure out which campaign to settle on? Split testing will tell you which subject lines will be most eye-catching, the type of CTA to use and the most optimum content. In short, it will help you avoid mistakes before you make them.

2. Personalization

The other pillar of email is personalization. Dollars to donuts, your split testing will reveal that the most engaging subject lines are personalized. Do this by utilizing all the data at your fingertips: browsing and purchase history, demographic info, lifestyle, etc. Invest in AI platforms to automate data harvesting on a massive scale, tell a story with your email content and always incorporate the recipient’s name whenever possible.”

Brenda Stoltz

Brenda Stoltz is the founding partner of Ariad Partners, a growth agency that specializes in helping companies improve their marketing, sales and brand loyalty. She also shares her expertise on B2Community.com, AllBusiness.com, FoxBusiness.com and Eloqua.com.

Three primary email practices are crucial for marketers. Effective email marketing is about proper targeting, messaging and deliverability.

1. Segmenting and Targeting

No matter what your message says, your email list will fail if it is not properly segmented and targeted to your content.

2. Messaging

If you’ve targeted the right people, the next most critical factor is your message. It needs to be short and to the point, relevant, lead with the benefit to the reader with an offer that is compelling (easy peasy, right?) People are busy, don’t waste their time.

3. Deliverability

In addition to listing management best practices, familiarize yourself with DKIM, SPF and DMARC. These authentication practices won’t save you if you’re not using best practices for list management and sending, but they will help you protect your domain and improve deliverability if you are.

There is money in email marketing. A good email program is gold. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Follow these best practices, test, test, test and reap the rewards!

David Krauter

David first worked in direct response marketing in 2007. After realizing that principles and strategies implemented offline have an even more profound effect online, he quickly steered his expertise to digital marketing.

Over the years, David shaped his company Websites That Sell, into one of Australia’s leading digital agencies that companies can trust to generate meaningful and impact results via their website and Google.

Consistency, consistency, consistency.

Consistency is the key to getting a good return on email marketing efforts.

It doesn’t matter if you email once a day, once a week or every month, it’s consistency that will ensure you get results.

Why? Because your readers get used to you in their inbox, you’ll get better open rates, they’ll get to know you, you’ll get better conversion rates and they’ll get more of you, more often.

Sporadic mailing will trigger more spam complaints, delete buttons and jeopardize possible sales.

If you’ve gotten someone on your email list, you’ve done the most expensive part – paying for SEO, PPC or Social Media to get them there.

By not being consistent and staying in front of your readers consistently, you’re dramatically diminishing the returns on your marketing spend.

A final little bonus…

How do you get consistent (even when mailing daily)?

Learn how to tell stories, piggyback media/news events, teach and, of course, sell.

Syed Irfan Ajmal

Syed Irfan Ajmal is the owner of a digital marketing agency, an international speaker and a podcaster. His bylines and citations include Forbes, the World Bank, SEMrush and hundreds of others. Connect with Syed on Gigworker.

Your audience is probably overwhelmed by a massive stream of incoming emails. You can use power words in the subject line to increase your email open rate.

New, free, imagine, limited offer: all power words that trigger emotions, arouse curiosity and may even build trust.

1. Segment your list

Do you know that 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates?

So start segmenting your list into groups based on the form your readers opt into.

2. Get personal

Personalized emails improve conversion by 10%. Use the subscriber’s name in the subject line and the body of the text. Imagine you’re having a conversation with them in person.

Use a text email rather than using shiny banners.”

Brian Massey

Brian Massey is the original Conversion Scientist, and he has the lab coat to prove it. His company, Conversion Sciences, founded in 2007, was one of the first agencies focused exclusively on website optimization.

Brian has learned what works on the web through thousands of website tests. He has seen it all.

How much is an email subscriber worth to your business?

Few businesses calculate this value, but it can really help you decide whether to optimize to grow your list or optimize for leads and sales.

The easiest metric to calculate is revenue per recipient (or RPR). This is the revenue generated by your email traffic divided by the total number of emails sent. It can be easily calculated for any time period.

You can also calculate the leads per recipient (or LPR) and convert them to RPR by multiplying them by the lead's value. How does this affect your business?

See if your RPR is higher than your average session value for mobile visitors. If it is, then you may want to optimize your mobile website for email subscribers instead of asking them to buy on the mobile device. The same goes for lead generation. Let RPR guide your decisions.”

Dennis Seymour

Dennis Seymour is a Full Stack SEO and SaaS entrepreneur. You can also connect with him through Seriousmd.

Today, it’s all the more important to capture attention with all the noise available to people.

Here are my go-to practices.

1. Determine the purpose of the email first.

If you don’t know the purpose of the email, you’ll likely write a long email that people will trash or a short email with no results. Understand the main purpose first. That way, you can plan how many emails you need to send for the campaign and write copy that will matter to the receiver.

2. Segment the people you email.

This used to be a pain in the butt back in the day. Today, you have absolutely no excuse. It’s super easy to segment your emails. That way, you can write targeted copy for your email campaigns

3. Use tools that can customize the actual content.

Depending on the campaigns I run, I use tools like Bonjoro or Lemlist. These tools will also help you track your opens and conversions. Give it a try; you'll need to experiment to see what best fits your niche.”

Kulwant Nagi

Kulwant Nagi is a blogger, affiliate marketer and international speaker. He runs the digital marketing company Afflospark, which focuses on providing content writing services to clients in many niches. Follow him to improve your blogging and content marketing skills.

The best email practice is showing up more. The internet is filled with so much noise and so many experts that getting lost is so much easier now.

If you don’t remind your subscribers from time to time, they’ll forget you and ultimately unsubscribe you.

So maintain email frequency and keep sending them different emails so they don’t forget you.”

David Hartshorne

David Hartshorne is a freelance writer working with business owners and marketing teams to create detailed, actionable content that resonates with their audience. When he’s not writing about digital marketing and technology, you’ll find him chilling with a thriller. Connect with him through Azaharmedia.

Latest figures from Statista ​show the number of emails sent and received each day will continue to rise to 333 billion.

The question is: are you sending the right type of email?

While most marketers are familiar with marketing emails like newsletters and promotions, another type of email is equally important.

Transactional emails give you a chance to personalize your message and get higher open rates because they’re sent one-to-one rather than marketing emails, which are sent one-to-many.

The primary objective of transactional emails is to keep your existing customers informed. Typical examples include welcome emails, e-commerce shipping confirmations, cart abandonment reminders, account updates, invoices and receipts.

Using automation software where you can send highly personalized transactional emails based on an individual’s behavior or actions at the right time. And it’s this type of email that customers prefer most because they know it’s unique to them.

So if you want to retain your existing customers, keep them happy by sending personalized messages that are relevant only to them.

Patrick Chen

Patrick Chen is the Co-founder of ContactOut, an email finder tool, and Conscioused, a self-development blog.

Outreach is still one of the best email marketing practices for businesses.

It should be a part of any revenue-minded marketer’s toolkit. However, there’s an increasingly obvious distinction between blanket email spam and genuinely thoughtful outreach that will interest your customers and prospects.

This, in turn, will help keep your all-important email deliverability and reputation pristine. Here are my best practices when reaching out to potential influencers and customers to help grow your business:

1. Don’t get cute with email subject lines. Nobody likes clickbait on social media so why do it in someone’s inbox? State clearly what the email is going to be about. If you’ve done your prospecting properly, your ask should naturally be interesting to them anyway.

2. Create a transparent pitch. Say who you are, how you found the person and what you want.

3. Keep it short and use simple language. To reiterate the above point, the best emails say those three things in a maximum of one to two sentences each.

4. Make it easy to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’. If the person can’t answer your ask in one sentence, you’ve made too big of an ask.

5. Personalize.

We stick to two bits of personalization, where you come across the person’s work and a specific compliment on something they’ve said or written.

Again, if you can’t even find these two bits of information, you haven’t done your research properly.

Final thoughts

Successful email marketing is about precision and respect. By adhering to B2C and B2B email marketing best practices and maintaining clean email lists in your email marketing tools, you can significantly enhance engagement rates, build lasting relationships with your subscribers and achieve a strong ROI from your email campaigns.

In short, the top three email marketing best practices by the world’s best marketing experts are:

1. Use email marketing to create relationships

2. Segment your email lists

3. Write authentic and engaging email copy

Remember, the quality of your interactions is what truly matters, not the quantity of your email list. For more B2B marketing tips, check out our articles on CRM, cold calling and cold emails.