Email Marketing Best Practices to Turn Campaigns into Sales

To help you deal with all the challenges of establishing an engaged audience, creating emails, and running your campaigns successfully, we’ve collected an extensive set of email marketing best practices. You’ll learn the nuts and bolts of turning your email campaigns into sales.

Despite the rise of mobile communications and instant messaging apps, email is still a significant aspect of our life online.

Statistics tell the story. Worldwide, more than 333 billion emails are sent and received daily, and the figure is expected to surpass 375 billion by 2025. 

With more than 4.25 billion users globally, email enables you to reach at least half of the world’s population. This is one of the many benefits of email marketing.

Image Source

How can you build your email marketing strategy and tap into this opportunity to grow your business? You need to have a target audience for your messages first,  which can be one of the trickiest parts of email marketing for small businesses. Then, it’s time to identify your goal, write and design your emails, and plan, set, and track your campaigns. 

So, let’s start with the fundamental step of making sure you build the right recipient base for your marketing activities.

Email list best practices

Whether you’re running a B2B company, a B2C, or an eCommerce business, growing your own email list is vital for your success. The more leads, or email addresses, you have in your database, the easier it is to reach out and communicate with potential customers at scale. 

Here are eight effective strategies to build and maintain an email list of engaged and loyal subscribers whoare willing to buy from you. 

Build your own list

When you’re just getting started with email marketing, this is your primary task. 

Why is it valuable for a business to have its own email list?

An email list is one of the most valuable assets of a business because:

• It can be used to run all kinds of email marketing campaigns suitable for your marketing goals.
• It allows you to build relationships with people who are interested in your products and services. 
• It enables you to reach out to potential customers directly whenever you run a campaign.

How to build your own email list 

There are different ways to go about attracting your own email subscribers. These three options will allow you to generate leads and build your list as visitors interact with your website. 

• Create an opt-in form on your website.
• Offer signup incentives such as discounts or free printable guides or reports.
• Encourage visitors to complete an online form or survey and then ask for permission to send them emails. 

Use a combination of these strategies to accelerate the expansion of your list. This will also allow you to reach visitors that interact with your website content in different ways.

Also, you can build relationships with other potential recipients online, through social media groups, forums, and other communities where people discuss topics related to your business niche. 

Use lead magnets

The goal of a lead magnet is to provide value and encourage people to sign up for your email list. This is a great way to grow your recipient base without having to spend money on advertising or other methods of building an audience like cold calling. 

What magnets can you use? Give away free reports, ebooks, or whitepapers that contain useful information related to the products or services your company provides. 

An example of a lead magnet email best practice

Image Source: HubSpot

However, you can also create other types of content that are valuable to your audience. This can be access to an online course or video series or another resource you create specifically for the purpose of building your email list. For example, if you sell accounting services, you could create a video on how to calculate bookkeeping expenses or an audio recording on how to file taxes.

Use double opt-in

When you’re building a list of customers, you want to make sure that they want to hear from you. And here comes double opt-in. 

An example of double opt-in email marketing best practice

Image Source: Mailchimp

After someone signs up for your list, the email provider sends them an email message with a link that they need to click on before their subscription goes through. It’s a popular way to create an email list because it ensures that the person you’re communicating with has actually requested to receive messages from you.

The benefits?

Double opt-in allows you to verify that the person is who they say they are and that they actually want to be on your list. This helps avoid spam complaints and ensures that only real people are receiving your messages.

Here are some of the top reasons to opt for double opt-in:

It improves email deliverability 

Double opt-in reduces the risk of adding fake email addresses to your list and boosts your deliverability rates.

It builds trust with customers 

If a customer decides not to subscribe, they have the opportunity to unsubscribe right away without ever receiving any messages from you. This gives them more control over the relationship, making it easier for you to build trust and grow their loyalty over time.

It works better for your business 

When subscribers opt-in to receive emails from you, they’re less likely to mark your emails as spam or unsubscribe from your lists. Also, your messages have a better chance of being read by their intended recipients.

Use the thank-you page strategically

The goal of a thank-you page is to continue the conversation with your new subscriber and offer additional valuable content or resources. There are different ways to say “Thank you” after a new subscriber fills out your form and signs up for your list. With double opt-in, for example, the recipient receives a confirmation email containing a link to the thank-you page.

An example of a thank you page email best practice

Image Source: HubSpot

On the other hand, a thank-you page can also be a web page visitors see after downloading a lead magnet or completing a transaction on an eCommerce website. The purpose of this page is to reinforce their purchase decision and encourage them to share their experience with others by leaving a review.

So, how can you use a thank-you page strategically? 

• Make sure your thank-you page reflects your brand design and tone. 
• Personalize your thank-you page, so it looks like it was created specifically for the customer. 
• Include social proof by showing off reviews, testimonials, and case studies. 
• Offer discounts or coupons on products or services to encourage the subscriber to make a purchase right away, but without any other calls to action or distractions that might confuse visitors. This will help increase the chances that they take the desired action. 

Ditch the noreply@ address

A “no reply” email address indicates the address is not actually used, and any replies will be blocked and go unanswered. Ditching this way of addressing your subscribers is imperative. 

Why? There are at least two solid reasons:

• Communication between you and your customers is one of the most important aspects of your business. By using a noreply@ address, you are basically saying you don't care about responding, and this is something you definitely don’t want to communicate to your customers.
• It could make it difficult for customers and prospects to contact you when they need help or have questions about your business. This could lead to a loss of revenue and a bad brand image.

So, how can you ditch the noreply@ address?

The most common solution is to set up a dedicated address for customer replies. For instance, create a contact@, questions@, hello@, or support@yourdomain.com address and integrate responses in your customer support workflow. This way, every email from a customer will go directly into customer support’s inbox, and they’ll be able to respond as quickly as possible.

Segment audiences by interest level

Segmenting your audience according to their interest level allows you to target the right people with the right content, which is essential for building trust and customer engagement with your brand. You can base customer segmentation on criteria like: 

• Demographics (age, gender, and location)
• Psychographics (personality traits, values, and lifestyle choices)
• Behavioral data (what they do online or offline)

Also, you can use sign-up forms. Asking users if they’re interested in specific topics or products before they sign up for an email list helps you provide them with relevant email content in the future. It also means you don’t have to spend time finding out what type of content they want.

Remember, the more specific and better targeted your messaging, the greater chance you have of getting someone's attention and turning them into a customer.

Keep your email list clean

Keeping your email list clean is important to protect your reputation as a marketer and ensure you send relevant emails to the audiences who want to hear from you. It helps prevent spam complaints and decrease bounce rates and unsubscribes. What’s more, maintaining a clean contact list ensures good deliverability rates, and allows you to keep your customers and prospects engaged with your brand. 

How do you determine if your list needs to be cleaned? Keep an eye on the number of bounced messages, complaints, and unsubscribes that come in each month. This will help you understand when you should take an action and remove those who aren't engaging with your content anymore.

Do you see an increase in spam complaints or unsubscribes from previous campaigns? If so, this means that recipients are reporting your emails as spam, which will negatively impact your deliverability rate and hurt future campaigns. 

Also, do your emails bounce back? This indicates invalid addresses in your contact list. 

So, how do you maintain your email list hygiene? Remove inactive or unengaged subscribers from your database. Ideally, you’ll do that every six months, but never wait more than a year for your next clean-up. 

Allow your audience to unsubscribe easily

Your subscribers should be able to unsubscribe at any time, simply and easily.

Why should you provide easy unsubscription?

Because allowing subscribers to unsubscribe easily is one of the most important requirements for GDPR compliance. Also, you have to comply with CAN-SPAM laws as they require that all commercial emails contain an opt-out option. So, if you don't provide one, your emails will be illegal under federal law.

How can you provide easy unsubscription?

Include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email or add an unsubscribe button in the footer of your emails. This makes it easier for subscribers to opt-out of receiving emails from you.

And, as a final note to contact list best practices, keep in mind that your email list naturally degrades by 25% yearly, which means all these strategies and efforts have to become your regular and continuous practice. This is the only way to ensure that you’ll compensate for the normal yearly shrinkage of your list of contacts.

Email design best practices

Whether you're sending out a newsletter or a marketing email, one of the most important elements is visual content. Not only does it help get your message across, but it also allows you to stand out from all other brands and build brand recognition.

Here are some email design best practices that can help you create visually appealing emails that attract and convert.

Use high-quality visuals

What you’re after is an emotional connection with your customers, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, then good photos can help tell your story and connect with customers in ways that text alone just can't do. 

High-quality images can help attract customers by using eye-catching graphics and colors that will grab their attention immediately.

Create email responsive design

With 81% of consumers opening their emails on mobile devices, mobile compatibility is not an option; it’s a must.

Responsive design allows you to create an email that will look great on any device. Not only are users able to view images clearly and easily, but they can also interact with your email content and click through to links within your message.   

Also, the responsiveness of email design increases open rates by over 30%, which means larger audiences will see your message, increasing brand awareness and sales opportunities.

Create a reader-friendly email layout

It’s no secret that consumers are becoming increasingly distracted by the constant influx of content they encounter on a daily basis. So, businesses have to take extra care to ensure their messages stand out from the crowd and are easily understood.

Why is creating a reader-friendly email layout valuable for businesses? 

First, it means that the person receiving your email can easily scan through and find what they need. Second, it keeps them engaged with your content by making it easy to read at a glance or in small chunks. And finally, it helps you avoid the dreaded trash folder. 

Take a look at the following example.

Image Source: An email from Calvin Klein

The short text, the great images, and the color are what make the email appealing and easy to read and understand.

So, how to create a reader-friendly email layout for your emails?

Keep the design simple and easy to scan. Use images to break up text-heavy content so it looks less intimidating for readers who don't like long blocks of paragraphs. This makes it easier for them to scan through faster and find the information that is relevant and useful for them.

Email copy best practices

To achieve your email marketing goals, you need both appealing design and compelling copy. Here are effective email marketing best practices that will help you write emails that work for you and your goals.

Personalize your email copy

People are more likely to open–and read–a personalized email, so they can increase email engagement and click-through rates. So how can you achieve email personalization that will work miracles for you and your brand? 

A good rule of thumb is to add a personal human touch to every element of your email:

• Subject line personalization

Start by crafting a personalized subject line that will nail your reader’s attention. Make sure to include your recipient’s name, as this has been proven to increase your open rate by 50%. 

Remember that generic email subject lines such as "Thank you" or "Checking in" don’t really work.

• Personalization of the email salutation

Next, address your recipient by their name in the salutation section of the email. 

For example, "Good afternoon, George, thank you for accepting my invitation," will do the job.

• Personalization of the email body

Last, include something that feels personal in the email body. If you’ve got your list well segmented, you could include something relevant to the individuals while still being generic enough to be used with the entire group. For instance, if you’ve got a segment of young mothers, you could say something about back to school season, or for a segment of HR professionals, you might mention recent a recent change in employment law or something about office etiquette, etc. 

Adding this bit of personalization to your messages tells your readers that you put some thought into them individually, which is an easy way to score some points for you. 

Use curiosity subject lines

Curiosity subject lines are designed to get the reader's attention and make them read on to find out more. Curiosity is a powerful emotion that drives people to click on those intriguing subject lines. 

Why should you use the mystery tactic in your subject lines?

Curiosity subject lines help you:

• Gain more subscribers for your email list
• Increase engagement with your subscribers
• Increase click-through rates for your emails

Let’s look at some great examples together.

Image source: BLAH

When you see this subject line in the first place, you may think, “What do you care about? Wait, what? You don’t care?” Using contradicting ideas can be a brilliant strategy to challenge your recipient and entice them into opening your message and reading.

Here comes another great one.

Image Source: Airbnb

Every subscriber would like to open and know about what’s new on Airbnb. After all, it’s everything, and curiosity loves new things. Promising to reveal valuable clues and insights your audience is interested in is a powerful way to encourage them to peek into your message. 

And here’s our final example – the dessert! 

Image Source: Ennismore Hotels

The email subject line “What time is it?” is likely to make you take a glance at your watch. Sent at the end of the workday and followed by an enticing image of champagne, this subject line evokes a lot of curiosity and expectations. What’s more, the recipient will be eager to see if their guesses are correct and get further specific details.

How to write good curiosity subject lines 

So, what's the secret? It's all about creating mystery, giving rise to questions, and making the reader want to know the answers. Here are some email marketing tips on how to create curiosity in your subject lines:

• Ask a question that makes your audience feel curious about what’s inside your message or why you sent it to them in the first place. For example, "What happens next?" could encourage your readers to speculate about what’s next and thus entice them into reading your email and finding out the truth.
• Create excitement by sharing the most intriguing piece of information without telling the whole story. You can combine this strategy with using exclamation marks and numbers to create intrigue. For example, "What can you get at 50% off this weekend?" or "50 bestsellers at 50% off this weekend!" will probably make your reader want to know which items are in the sale.
• Say something unexpected and provocative. This is likely to wake your reader’s interest and curiosity. Depending on the type of products and services you offer, you can go for something like, “I have a big secret to tell you,” “My favorite color is purple,” “Do you love to sing in the shower?” or “I don't like chocolate ice cream anymore.” Such unexpected subject lines can trigger curiosity and result in an increased open rate.

If you’re finding it difficult to craft curiosity subject lines, make sure to take advantage of the Copy.AI helping hand. Use the free subject line generator to craft compelling subject lines that grab your audience’s attention.

Optimize the preview text

The preview text helps increase your open rate by providing the user with a better understanding of what they will find in the email.

The purpose of this element is to provide a quick glimpse into your email body, grab your reader’s attention, and make them open your email. That’s why it’s so important to optimize the preview text for each campaign you send out.

Here are some tips to do it right and craft the perfect preview text.

Be clear about the result

Make sure that the sentence of your preview text describes what will happen when your recipient opts for reading your message. For instance, “Get exclusive access to our newest product!” or “Find out why this product is better than its competitors!”

Keep it short and sweet 

Keep the preview text between 40 and 130 characters long so that it fits well in most inboxes and doesn’t get cut.

Note that once you’ve created your great subject line and preview text, it’s essential to deliver on your promises when crafting the copy of your email body. Let’s look at that in more detail.

Deliver relevant content

Providing the right content is important because it helps you connect with your audience and builds trust with them in the long run. 

How can you make sure your content is relevant? Here are a couple of tips.

Build your buyer persona

Fully understanding who your target audience is, what challenges they face, and what goals they follow will enable you to identify the content that will bring them value. To acquire such a deep understanding, create the image of your ideal recipient. 

How old are they? What problems are they struggling with? Why did they even sign up for your email list in the first place? By answering these questions, you’ll get a better idea of your audience's expectations and you’ll be more likely to meet them when creating your content.

Do your research

You can start by making sure you’re answering the questions people are trying to find answers to. This can be done through keyword research, but also by looking at what people are already talking about online. You can use tools like Google Trends or even Reddit.

Write quality content that will keep people engaged

Keeping an eye on your industry and your competitors will help you feel the pulse of the market. This way, you can stay up to date on trends and changes, which will help you create better content.

Write engaging email copy

Writing engaging copy can have a huge impact on your email performance. Failing to do so, you're missing out on a valuable opportunity to connect with customers, grow your business, and boost revenue.

With that in mind, let’s look at some email marketing best practices for crafting engaging copy.

Start with the end in mind

What’s the point of your email? Think about what you want your recipient to do before you start writing. 

Focusing on the final destination will enable you to better understand your reader’s journey and craft the best copy to guide them to the ultimate action you want them to take.

Be human

Don't try to be too formal or professional when writing your email body. Be casual and friendly and write as you would speak. Your readers want to feel like they’re part of a conversation; write like you’re really talking to them.

Focus on benefits

Don't just list all the things your product or service can do. Instead, explain how it will benefit your customer's life in a tangible way. Here's a great example: "Get rid of those pesky dandruff flakes."

Mind your language

Avoid the passive voice and constructions that may sound tentative. Use action-oriented language to evoke emotions and encourage action. 

Don’t get too wordy and lengthy 

The average person reads emails while they’re on the go, walking down the street, sitting on the subway, or in between meetings at work. They don’t want to read long emails when they’re trying to get through their day. 

So keep your email copy about 200 words or 20 lines to increase your chances of getting your message read to the end. 

A winning email marketing strategy involves using email templates to give you inspiration and streamline the process of crafting impactful copy. 

Make your emails skimmable

Typically, you have about 10 seconds to get your reader's attention before they move on to reading another message. Making your emails skimmable allows your reader to scan the message quickly without losing any of its vital points. Readers will be readily able to find the information they need, which could lead to higher engagement rates and conversions. 

Here’s how to achieve “skimmability”.

Use short, easy-to-understand sentences

The shorter the sentence, the easier it is to read. So, keep it between 15 and25 words long. Also, reduce the reader’s processing effort by avoiding complex constructions, dislocations, and unusual word order. 

Breaking copy into smaller and readable chunks

Organize your sentences into short paragraphs. A good rule of thumb is to keep them no more than three to four sentences long. Also, use  H2 and H3 subheadings to break up your content into smaller sections that are easier to scan.

The white space is your friend

If there is too much text on the screen, it becomes difficult to read. Make sure there's enough white space in your email that readers don't feel overwhelmed by text and images. 

Turn data and numbers into visuals 

Visuals are much easier to consume than text because they allow people to process numerical data much more quickly. 

Include a clear call to action (CTA)

A clear call to action is the most important element of your email copy. It's your chance to convince people to take action and move them closer to making a purchase. Make sure it’s obvious what you want your audience to do.

Here are some of the best tips to create clear CTAs:

• Use words like “today” or “now” in your CTA to encourage immediate action.
• Give your call to action strong verbs, such as “shop,” “learn more,” and “sign up now.”
• Make sure your call to action button relates directly to the offer in the email copy.

Also, make sure your CTA button stands out from the rest of the text on your page by making it bold, underlining, or changing its color. Include it at the end of your copy so there’s no doubt what you want subscribers to do next. 

Incorporate the power of AI

AI-enabled tools can save the day and help your email campaigns come through with flying colors. From creating content ideas and generating subject lines, to coming up with compelling CTAs, AI is a game-changer. 

Want to know the name of the game? Just play the video below and you’ll learn how AI will make your life easier and your email marketing more effective.

Email copy best practices

To achieve your email marketing goals, you need both appealing design and compelling copy. Here are some effective email marketing best practices that will help you write emails that work for you and your goals.

Personalize your email copy

People are more likely to open–and read–a personalized email, so they can increase email engagement and click-through rates. 

Use curiosity subject lines

Curiosity subject lines are designed to get the reader's attention and make them read on to find out more, and opening your email is the first step to conversion.

Optimize the preview text

The preview text helps increase your open rate by providing the user with a better understanding of what they will find in the email and encouraging them to open it.

Deliver relevant content

Providing the right content is important because it helps you connect with your audience and builds trust with them in the long run. 

Write engaging email copy

Writing engaging copy can have a huge impact on your email performance. Failing to do so, you're missing out on a valuable opportunity to connect with customers, grow your business, and boost revenue.

Make your emails skimmable

Typically, you have about 10 seconds to get your reader's attention before they move on to reading another message, so making your emails skimmable allows your reader to scan the message quickly without losing any of its vital points. 

Include a clear call to action (CTA)

A clear call to action is the most important element of your email copy. It's your chance to convince people to take action and move them closer to making a purchase. 

Incorporate the power of AI

AI-enabled tools can save the day and help your email campaigns come through with flying colors. From creating content ideas and generating subject lines, to coming up with compelling CTAs, AI is a game-changer. 

Best practices for email marketing campaigns

Email campaigns are an essential part of marketing activities. When it comes to sales and promotions, they could make or break the deal.

Plan ahead for special days

Planning ahead for special days is a great way to ensure your messages are well-crafted and sent at the best times. This will make them stand out among all the other messages in your audience’s inbox.

Know which dates are important to your audience. These can be birthdays, celebrations, and holidays, such as

• New Year’s Day
• Valentine’s Day (February 14)
• Mother’s Day (The second Sunday of May)
• Father’s Day (The third Sunday in June)
• Independence Day (July 4)
• Labor Day (first Monday in September)
• Halloween (October 31)
• Christmas Day (December 25)

Being aware of the important dates for your readers will help you plan and craft your message accordingly.

Also, create an editorial calendar, including all the information you need to write a compelling subject line and copy that will resonate with your audience. The more time you have to craft the content, the better thought-out it will be, and the greater results you’ll see in terms of open rates and click-throughs.

Find the right time to deliver your emails

You shouldn’t assume that one time of day will work best for everyone. Test various days, times, and frequencies and see what works best for your audience. You can even test two different audiences with two different email dates.

A study from Campaign Monitor found that the best day to send marketing emails is Monday with 22% open rate. And the best time? Sendinblue established that it’s 10:00 AM and between 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM.

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So, to hit the bullseye, try sending your emails on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. If you want to receive more engagement from your subscribers, schedule your campaign during their work week rather than on weekends, when most people don't check their inboxes.  

Establish the appropriate email frequency 

Frequency is another parameter that determines the impact and effectiveness of your email campaigns. High email frequency, combined with a low open rate, indicates that your audience’s inbox is cluttered, they’re not interested in your campaign, or they just don’t have time to read your content. Note that flooding your recipient’s inbox excessively is likely to result in their unsubscribing.

On the other hand, if you don’t send your emails frequently enough, you risk letting your readers go cold and losing them. In any case, you need to adjust your email frequency accordingly.  

So, where is the right number?

Maintain the frequency you promised when your recipients signed up for your email. If they subscribed to your weekly newsletter, don’t shoot them a message three times a day.

But if your frequency wasn’t pre-set, determine what works best for your audience by testing different intervals of sending your emails and measuring the results of each campaign over time. A good starting point is to try one or two emails weekly.

Build nurture campaigns

A lead nurturing campaign is an email sequence designed to move potential customers closer to making a purchase. It’s triggered when someone interacts with your website by clicking on a link or opting for downloading a PDF, for instance.

Businesses can use this type of email marketing campaign as part of their overall strategy to get more leads and sales by:

• Engaging with (and keeping) audiences by using lead magnets 
• Building trust by sharing helpful information like tips or how-to guides before making the sales pitch 

Nurture campaigns help you establish contact immediately and automatically follow up at regular intervals. It allows you to increase conversion rates and customer acquisition. 

So, how do you build nurture campaigns? You simply craft your email content for the three stages of the buyer journey:

• Awareness stage, where a thank you email is sent along with the promised resource 
• Consideration stage, where you continue providing educational content to help your prospects make an informed buying decision
• Decision stage, where you send emails that include discount offers to nudge your prospects gently to buy from you

Nurture campaigns are a great way to combine your email strategy with your content funnel to further increase your revenue and brand awareness.

Build drip campaigns

Similarly, sending a series of related emails to your customers over a period of time is called a drip campaign. These drip emails are designed to educate your target persona, lead them down through the sales funnel, and entice them to take action.

Drip emails can be sent weekly, monthly, or quarterly, whatever works best for your business. Something important about drip campaigns is that they don’t have any hard-and-fast rules. They should be tailored to the needs of your customers and prospects. 

When done properly, drip campaigns can turn cold prospects into warm leads, increasing engagement, customer retention, and sales. They also help you maintain your relationships with current customers, improving brand awareness and building loyalty. 

Need some more details on how to build a drip campaign? Check out our dedicated article on writing an engaging drip series, where you’ll find a useful video tutorial and inspiring examples.

Build a schedule

A schedule is simply a list of email content that you plan to send over time. You can build your email campaign schedules in order to:

• Plan ahead so you have time to write, design, and test each campaign before sending it
• Schedule sending emails at different times during the year
• Schedule different types of content, like promotional and educational, for different audiences

Benefits of scheduling your email campaigns 

If you plan out your emails in advance, you can save yourself time in the long run. Scheduling your email campaigns brings in a lot of other benefits, including:

• Avoiding the stress of last-minute campaign creation
• Delivering a well-thought content
• Ensuring relevant messages go out at the right time to the right audience
• Maintaining consistent communication

All these advantages will ultimately translate into increasing your open rates, building trust with your subscribers, and reducing the number of unsubscribe requests. 

How to build a schedule

An email campaign calendar can be built with your email marketing tool, such as Moosend, or your task manager, like Trello. It can also be as simple as a Google Sheet with several columns containing the send time, campaign name and status, target contact list, the person responsible for running the campaign, and any other useful details.

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Once you’ve created all of your scheduled emails, it’s time for testing. 

Test, track, and optimize

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of building and sending your first email campaign. But before you hit send, it’s important to make sure your email is optimized for maximum impact. Here’s what you should do.

Test your emails before hitting send

You've written an amazing email and you want to make sure it's going to serve its purpose.

First of all, double-check that the right emails are addressed to the right audience. This is essential for ensuring that your campaign will get through and reach the recipient it was created for.

Then, you need to make sure that your email will be received in the expected way. Sending it to yourself first is a great strategy to get an idea of how it will perform. Check the design responsiveness, skimmability, clarity of the CTA, and the overall effect of the copy.

Now, you can let it go live and track its effectiveness.

Focus on the right metrics

Here are some metrics that can help you measure your campaign performance. They provide an objective and effective basis for evaluating how impactful and successful your campaign is.

Open rate

The percentage of opened emails is one of the most important metrics for any email campaign. The more readers you can get to open your email, the more likely it is they’ll actually read your message and take action on it.

Click-through rate (CTR)

The number of users who clicked on links in your emails. It's often used as a measure of how well-targeted your message is. If your click-through rate is low, you should improve your email copy and/or make sure you’re marketing to the right readers.

Conversion rate

The percentage of your recipients who take action after receiving your email indicates the effectiveness of your email campaigns and whether they actually have an impact on sales. 

Bounce rate 

This is the percentage of emails rejected by mail servers. High bounce rates can mean problems such as invalid addresses or emails that are marked as spam. Make sure to keep your bounce rate below 0.1%.

A/B test best practices

A/B testing is the process of measuring two versions of an email and determining which version performs better. So why should you A/B test in the first place?

The benefits of A/B testing your emails and campaigns include:

• Gaining insight into your audience’s interactions with your email content
• Understanding how people engage with your emails
• Identifying the elements of your campaigns that work best for different segments of your audience (age, gender, etc.)
• Optimizing your future campaigns by investing time in creating and sending content that works for your audience

This means less guesswork and better results. 

Now that you know what you get from A/B testing your emails and campaigns, let's move forward with some best tips on how to do it right:

• You can A/B test any element and parameter of your email campaigns (subject line, preview text, body content, CTA button copy and location, images and design, sending day and time, etc.).
• Make sure to A/B test only one element at a time, as testing different elements at once can lead to confusion among your subscribers and can make it harder for you to understand what's working.

Run A/B testing long enough to get the insights you need. If you're testing simple variables like a subject line or a CTA button, two weeks should be sufficient. However, if you're changing complex elements like copy or images, three weeks might be necessary to really see its impact on performance metrics. 

Conclusion

Email marketing is the go-to for businesses of all sizes and industries. It enhances brand awareness, attracts new customers, improves retention, and boosts sales and revenue. And all the while, you’re staying within budget. 

And still, getting your foot in the door of email marketing can be overwhelming. There are so many details you have to consider and plan, from building your audiences to crafting your message, to getting it across and evaluating its effect.

With the email marketing best practices we discussed, you can address the challenges you face and optimize all elements of your emails and the performance of your campaigns. 

If you still feel like you could use some extra assistance with inspirational ideas and mechanics, the Copy.AI free writing tools can help you grab your prospect’s attention and make them read on. 

The time to reach half of the world’s population and spread the word about your brand is now.

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