2022 Best Email Marketing Practices

Many people unfortunately think that email marketing is dead. They just think that marketing emails can’t work! But that is a huge fraud…

For starters, we send 102.6 trillion emails every year. And the numbers keep going up, with 126.7 trillion expected to be sent by 2022. The average email subscriber receives 13 commercial emails a day.

Email marketing is now booming more than ever. It is an awesome way to build relationships with your consumers…

And email marketing has 4,400% ROI! That means if you would spend $100 on email marketing you would earn $4,400. That is crazy right?

So when people talk about whether email marketing is dead or not, my answer always is “Hell No!”

But it’s not that easy to be the best marketing email in your reader’s inbox. In fact, that is hard. Really hard!

That’s why I’m going to show you the 10 best email marketing practices that will flood your website with a tremendous amount of traffic…

1. Subject Lines

Email marketing subject lines should be personal, they should arouse huge curiosity, and they should be urgent.

Personalizing email marketing subject lines makes the subscriber feel that you care about them and that the email is written just for them. It makes them feel that they are more than just another person on the email list.

And that is an awesome feeling that will make them open your marketing email.

And that’s always a nice feeling on the subscribers’ part. It helps to establish trust and build relationships.

On top of that, personalized email marketing subject lines can lead to higher open rates—as high as 50%!

Studies also show that personalized promotional emails result in 29% higher open rates. And, multichannel retailers see a 37% increase in unique open rates for emails with personalized subject lines when compared to emails with non-personalized ones.

Another thing your email marketing subject lines should do is…

…arouse curiosity.

For example, the subject line “Did this happened to you too?” will make you immediately open the email, because you wonder what has happened.

Consider which email marketing subject line is better:

“Discover our new product…”

or…

“You won’t believe what happened…”

I would bet you a million dollars to a cent that the second one!

2. Optimize The Email Preview Text

Email preview text is the part of the marketing email that appears right behind the subject line in the recipient’s inbox.

For the reader, preview text provides another layer of information that helps that individual determine which emails to open and which to ignore (or mark as spam.) 

For the sender, it’s an opportunity – beyond the limited real estate afforded by the subject line – to establish relevance, spark interest, and drive engagement.  In fact, studies suggest that preview text can increase click-throughs up to 30%.

You can’t afford to ignore this element of email marketing copy.

The secret to making your preview text increase your open rates is to make the preview text an extended email marketing subject line.

As well as the subject line does, your email preview text should arouse curiosity and be personal, or offer a benefit for reading the email.

This will make the recipients jump on your email and crush the walls just to open it. This simple change can mean a massive difference.

So always optimize it!

3. Curiosity

Curiosity should be your main priority when you’re writing killer marketing emails.

How powerful can leveraging curiosity be for email copywriting? For Copyhackers, powerful enough to drive a 927% traffic increase to a pricing page.

Think about it 927% traffic increase! That is an insane percentage!

Maybe you are wondering how you can apply curiosity to email marketing copy…

Well…

There are many things you can use to include curiosity in your email marketing copy. For example, the whole email could tease the recipient about a new, secret thing you were working on for several years…

You can tell them how astonishing it is and how it can help them…but don’t talk too much. The moment you will tell them too much, you have just crushed the curiosity appeal.

This curiosity step is strongly related to the next best email marketing practice I’m going to show you…

But be damn sure that you always focus on creating huge curiosity when writing marketing emails, whether it is the subject line, preview text, or the email marketing copy itself.

But right now, let’s dive into the next best email marketing practice…

4. The Only Goal Of Email Marketing Is To Get Them To Click On Something…

You should always remember that the only goal of your email marketing copy is to make the recipient click on some link…

So you don’t want to sell them in the marketing email. That would be a huge mistake.

You just want to naturally persuade them to click on the link.

Give them something of value inside the marketing email, educate them, help them to solve some sort of problem that lies on their back…

And then give them a link to the website where you will help them more.

You don’t sell them in the email. Email marketing is mainly designed to ‘recycle’ traffic. You will sell them on your website, but not in your email.

Always remember this step when you are writing killer email marketing copy because it changes the whole way your email will be structured.

Also, you want to make them curious as much as you can. That’s why in the previous step I have said that curiosity is strongly related to this practice.

But now, let’s move on…

5. Never, Ever Purchase An Email ListI say this all the time but I will say it again. Purchasing an email list is wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin.

Legally, it represents a violation of your ISP’s Terms of Service.

Also, owing to the CAN-SPAM act, selling or transferring email addresses to other lists is illegal.

It also represents a violation of the privacy of the people whose addresses are on the list as they never accepted to be contacted by you.

Finally, the study from Convince and Convert shows that email lists that have 10% or more unknown user addresses only have 44% of their emails delivered by ISPs!

A purchased email list is a one-way ticket to email marketing hell.

Even if the marketing emails would be delivered, there is a super-high chance that they wouldn’t be relevant.

And that means that their performance would go down to zero…

So stay away from buying email lists!

6. Always Give Them Something Of Value In Your Emails

This one is especially important. Why?

Because it incredibly helps in the long term…

The moment you will start giving them something of value in the marketing email, the recipient will begin to get excited every time they will see an email from you in their inbox.

So, your open rates will go through the roof! But Filip, what should I give them inside the emails?

Well, keep it simple. You don’t need to offer some premium stuff that you normally sell. All you need to do is to give them some kind of advice that will improve their lives and solve some kind of problem they have.

The advice should be related to some problem that they would kill to solve. How will you know what problems they have?

Study your audience! Without knowing your audience, your email marketing copy will not work. Never!

7. Make Your Email Marketing Copy Readable

Your marketing email needs to be relevant, we already discussed that.

Only send marketing emails to the people that you will genuinely appreciate your content.

When you don’t, you’ll at best be ignored. At worst, you’ll sour any long-term relationships.

Always keep in mind that trust and reputations are very hard to build but very easy to shatter.

A DMA survey from 2017 showed that only 9% of marketers said all of their emails were relevant to their customers. 42% could say that at best some of their emails were relevant.

But your marketing emails also need to be extremely readable…

How do you make them extremely readable? Well here are five tips that will skyrocket your email readability:

Use One Sentence Paragraphs

One-sentence paragraphs are much more readable than normal 3-5 sentence paragraphs.

The normal text would look like this:

“When you will use this tax-saving tactic, you will save 25,000 dollars every year! It is awesome, isn’t it? And it works like magic! So, don’t forget to use this tactic.”

It is one big chunk of text. This one is not so hard to read, but it could be a hundred times more readable by using one-sentence paragraphs:

“When you will use this tax-saving tactic, you will save 25,000 dollars every year!

It’s awesome, isn’t it?

And it works like magic! So don’t forget to use this tactic.”

Do you see how readable it is now?

Use Commonly Used Colloquialisms

When you use colloquialisms, you draw your reader closer because you appear more familiar, more friendly, more up close and personal instead of distant and at arm’s length.

Use colloquialisms that are understandable to most people who have a reasonable familiarity with the English language.

Why?

Because the Internet is international, some colloquialisms such as “table a proposal” (postpone the discussion) or “the presentation bombed” (the presentation was a complete failure), which are generally known to most Americans, may mean something completely different to non-Americans.

And that can result in a huge misunderstanding…

Remember: A Confused Prospect Always Says “No!”

Use Contractions

When people talk they frequently use contractions. It’s intimate, and it increases readership.

Use “I’ve” instead of “I have”, and so on.

Writing the way you talk is one of the most important things in email marketing. If your emails won’t be structured like this, the readers will be absolutely unfamiliar with your emails.

That’s how it is.

8. Sense Of Urgency

There’s no doubt about it: if you want to improve conversions in your marketing, urgency’s one of the most important tactics to master.

We all know it works. Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales bring huge returns – more than $50 billion in 2017 – because once those deals are gone, it’ll be at least a year till something just as good comes along.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy trick to optimize your conversion and click-through rates, urgency is a great place to start.

The reason why we all feel the urge to grab those deals is psychological. There are two factors at play.

First, urgent situations push us to act, either to prolong positive emotions or reduce negative ones. That’s just the way we’re wired.

Second: Urgency also evokes loss aversion, which marketers call the fear of missing out. We don’t want to miss a great opportunity, especially if others are grabbing it.

Ok if you want to (and you should) use urgency in your marketing emails, here are the best urgency builders:

• Deadline. Create limited-time offers. Urge them to respond in some period, and tell them that if they won’t, they won’t get a second chance.

• Limited Supplies. Create such offers as “Only 1,000 books available!” and you have created a great sense of urgency. Also, this device makes the offer exclusive.

• Bonuses For Fast Response. Offer them bonuses for responding in a certain period. For example: “And I’ll also give you FREE copywriting secrets report if you’ll respond by May 15th.”

• Penalties For Slow Response. This is often used in the seminar business. Tell them that if they’ll respond after some deadline, the price will go up.

• Notification That The Price Will Go Up Soon. Tell them that the price will go up soon, and they will do everything to get what you’re offering at your current price.

These are awesome tactics. Always use them in your email marketing if you can!

9. Don’t Use Red Font In Your Marketing Emails

The same goes for using invisible text, i.e. a white font on top of a white background. These are common tricks that spammers use, so it’s an instant red flag for spam filters.

In fact, people don’t like when marketers use irregular fonts, font sizes, and font colors at all in marketing emails. In the same study by the Radicati Group, out of the top 10 objectionable email trends, four revolve around fonts.

Over 60% of respondents considered it unacceptable for email marketers to use different font sizes, irregular fonts, and different font colors. Nearly 70% of respondents prefer fonts to be one size.

That means that you should keep the marketing emails simple, and with no such thing as a red font!

10. Include A Signature At The End Of The Marketing Email

This one is short.

Including a signature at the end of your marketing email makes the email more personal and makes the recipient feel more important.

As you already know, personality is absolutely necessary when it comes to email marketing. The more personal the email is, the more it will convert.

And the signature helps you to do that. So always try to use a signature at the end of your marketing email.

Conclusion

Over 102.6 trillion emails are sent out every year, and that makes email marketing more important right now than it was ever before.

That’s why you want to make your email marketing as effective as possible. To do that you need to do many things.

You need to write effective subject lines that will make the reader open your marketing emails.

Subject lines arousing curiosity and subject lines that are personal are the best working ones. You want to use them.

Also, you want to write preview text arousing curiosity. The preview text should always be written like an extended subject line. That will make it even more effective.

You need to arouse curiosity in the marketing email as well. That will make them click on the link redirecting them to the desired page. Curiosity is one of the most important elements of email marketing.

If you have ever thought about purchasing an email list, forget it right away! It is violating the law, hurting your email deliverability, and even more, it is hurting your click-through rates.

The next thing you need to do is to give them something of value in the marketing email so that your recipients will open and read every word of your marketing email when it appears in their inbox.

And to make that easy you need to make your emails easily readable. Use one-sentence paragraphs, common colloquialisms, and contractions.

And don’t forget to make the email as urgent as possible. That is the thing that will make them act now!

Also, avoid using the red font in your marketing emails. But you want to use a signature at the end of your emails every time possible.