Email Marketing Best Practices: How to Avoid Creating an Annoying Campaign

Email marketing best practices and mistakes to avoid

If you want to start spreading your company’s message via email marketing campaigns, follow these best practices to ensure you don’t alienate current or potential customers by coming across as a nuisance.

Don’t flood your customers’ inboxes.

Inundating subscribers with your messages can alienate them quickly. Marketers send billions of emails daily and many go unanswered and unopened. If you send too many messages in quick succession or emails that aren’t relevant to your audience’s needs, you’ll likely bore them and risk losing them altogether.

A consistent release schedule ensures your messages don’t go out too frequently. Most email marketing platforms allow you to set customizable timetables that vary by message type, helping ensure a reasonable number of emails arrive in your recipients’ inboxes.

“We don’t usually send more than one of each a week unless it is a large holiday where there is competition for our customers’ inboxes,” noted Jennifer Neylon, SEO strategist at Best Price Nutrition. “We also make sure that customers don’t accidentally receive multiple copies of similarly targeted emails by excluding certain email lists and segments while scheduling emails.”

Ensure your email marketing messages appeal to your subscribers.

Engaging email subscribers is crucial. Whether through targeted prose, thoughtful images or a combination of elements, your emails must grab subscribers’ attention. If they don’t, your content could end up in the spam folder or the trash.

Understand who your audience is and tailor your marketing strategy to their preferences. For example, an appealing marketing strategy for teens will likely differ significantly from one that targets businesspeople.

Avoid weak subject lines.

Finding the right subject line is a common email marketing challenge. It’s the first thing people see when they interact with your brand, so it should make sense and not seem like clickbait. According to copywriter and marketing consultant Polly Kay, failing to craft a good email subject line is akin to stumbling at the starting line.=

“There’s a fine line between incentivizing the opening of an email with a teaser and seeing your email and any subsequent offerings channeled immediately to the junk folder, as it comes across as clickbait,” Kay explained. “A subject line that is misleading, vague or weak won’t incentivize opening, and any subject that doesn’t make it clear what is inside and why your prospect should care is pointless — and annoying.”

Don’t use too many graphics or stock photos.

It’s crucial to use straightforward text with only thoughtful and chosen images or graphics in your email body carefully. While you want to engage your subscribers, sometimes less is more. You may be tempted to create a flashy email design full of graphics, stock photos and call-to-action (CTA) buttons, but it’s best to keep the message body relatively simple. 

Make sure your CTA is clear and easy to identify.

Your readers must be able to easily identify your CTA. Consumers have very short attention spans — they want to know an email’s purpose within seconds of opening it. If the primary goal of your email marketing campaign is to have your audience follow through with your CTA, it must be clear and easy to find. 

Add a personal touch to your marketing emails.

Recipients may ignore or delete messages that seem like unwanted ads. According to Reese Spykerman, CEO of Design by Reese, you can make your messages more appealing and engaging by adding a personal touch. For example, send brand messages that explain your passion for the company as a small business owner or share customer stories about your product.

“No one wants to read an ad,” Spykerman advised. “Emails that look like ads immediately trigger a mental shutdown in the person reading it and either go into trash or are ignored. Good emails are like successful dating: You need to woo the reader, care about them as a human and spend as much time giving value to them as you do trying to sell something.”

Be genuine and avoid clichéd messages. 

While adding personal touches like sincere messages is great, you must carefully consider your tone. Attempts at personalization can miss the mark easily and come across as fake or stilted. For example, generic messages about “supporting you through tough times” or “being here for you” can come off as hollow and insincere if you don’t back up the sentiment with meaningful action or offers that directly relate to the customer’s experience.

Nick Farnborough, co-founder of Clavis Social, said it’s become too easy for business owners to reference current events to hook readers. “There is no replacement for offering value first and that is by actually caring and getting to know the people you are reaching out to,” Farnborough advised.

Provide value to each reader without being pushy.

If your message doesn’t offer something your readers don’t already have or show how your offering will improve their experience, recipients have little incentive to keep opening your messages. This becomes even worse if your tone comes off as forceful.

“I think that it’s important for every email to provide value to each recipient so that it’s less likely to be considered annoying,” explained Michael Anderson, manager of organic search at collystring. “Additionally, the verbiage can usually be framed in a certain way to avoid sounding too pushy.”

Instead of asking people to buy your product, Anderson advises that you explain its benefits before offering a discount code. “Ideally, you want the user to think that they came to the decision to purchase something from the business as opposed to the other way around.”

Ensure your email lists are clean and segmented.

Your email subscriber list is a crucial element in your marketing campaigns, ensuring you reach your target audience consistently. Ideally, you’ll build a quality email list organically and keep your data clean, consistent and segmented. Sending messages to old or inactive subscribers is pointless and reaching the wrong people is an exercise in futility. 

“One of the main reasons why people don’t even open your emails, let alone bother to click on your links, is the fact that the offer is not made for them,” explained Jane Kovalkova, a business-to-business marketing expert. “If you market to everyone, you’re targeting no one.”

To ensure your messages reach the right people, consider the following strategies:

• Segmentation: Email list segmentation splits your contacts into market segments based on predetermined conditions. For example, your welcome email goes to new subscribers, while a discount promotion goes to a specific group of current customers. Segmenting your list can help improve your email open rate, deliverability and response rates.
• Drip campaigns: After you collect and segment your list, harness the power of drip campaigns — automated email sequences triggered by specific actions or timelines. The sooner you start sending to your segmented mailing list at a measured rhythm, the better response you’ll get.

“For some reason, many business owners don’t send out any campaigns at all or even segment their lists,” noted Malte Scholz, CEO and co-founder of airfocus. “Then, a time comes up when they want to sell something, and they send a sudden email blast out of nowhere, and they wonder why the campaign flopped. If people subscribe and then they get the first email from you asking to buy something six months later, that just won’t work.”

Scholz stressed the importance of building a relationship with your recipients. “Send an email every now and then and make sure that every new subscriber gets a welcome email first,” Scholz advised. “You wouldn’t ask someone you’re interested in to marry you on the first date, would you?”

Don’t use a no-reply email address.

Email is a powerful way to connect with people, but you should think of it as a two-way street. When sending marketing emails to your customers, avoid using a no-reply email address. While it may be tempting, a no-reply address can hurt your marketing efforts in two ways: reduced deliverability and poor user experience:

• Reduced deliverability: Some users have security settings that automatically send no-reply emails straight to their junk folder. This means your carefully crafted marketing email may not even reach your customers’ inboxes. 
• Poor user experience: A no-reply address can diminish the overall customer experience with your brand. It can be frustrating if a customer wants to reply to one of your emails with feedback (or to opt out of future messages) and receives an auto-response saying their message couldn’t be delivered.

Manage your email campaigns with email marketing software

The best email marketing software can help you create a successful email campaign and avoid annoying your recipients. Several excellent options can simplify email design, automation, segmentation and contact management. 

Consider the following top-rated solutions to handle your email marketing needs:

• Constant Contact: Constant Contact has an easy-to-use interface and robust features at an affordable cost. In addition to a drag-and-drop email editor and an extensive library of email templates, it includes A/B testing, autoresponders and tools that make it easy to improve deliverability and grow your email list. Our detailed Constant Contact review highlights the solution’s automation capabilities, which ensure you send emails regularly based on specific triggers.
• Benchmark Email Marketing: New businesses will find it easy to get started with Benchmark Email Marketing thanks to its free and low-cost plans. With Benchmark, you get customizable templates and A/B testing, along with immediate email analytics that show how your campaign is performing. Our in-depth Benchmark review covers the platform’s ability to create automatic responses, surveys and polls.
• Campaigner: Campaigner excels at email personalization, helping you send relevant messages to your subscribers. Marketers can easily segment their lists, set up time- or behavior-based triggers and send an automated series of personalized emails. Our full Campaigner review explains more about the platform’s customizable features.
• monday CRM: monday CRM incorporates email functionality into its wide-ranging platform. Its CRM tools offer robust personalization options and detailed campaign analytics. Our monday CRM review highlights the platform’s library of email marketing templates that sales and marketing teams can use to generate leads and close sales.

Jennifer Dublino contributed to this article.