Best Practice: Email Marketing

Salesforce recently released a whitepaper covering 50 Best Practices for Email Marketers, and below we select a handful of our favorite “must-knows.” Read on to hear our perspectives and tips!

Email Marketing Best Practices:

Determine your KPIs: “Knowing your benchmarks for success up front will influence how you build and send email.” Even if you have beautiful emails or engagement content, you’ll still want to choose what the goal is. For example, if you’re looking to drive folks to a webinar for awareness or increase visitors to your website (“click rate over time”), know what success metric you plan to track before you build.

Recalibrate: “With the data you uncover, point out where there’s room to grow.” We say this all the time when building marketing programs. The approach with emails shouldn’t be “send, then send again,” it should be “send, monitor, analyze, optimize, then send again.” This means making changes based off how the customer engages with that email.

Let the unengaged go: “Stop sending unengaged subscribers the same emails as the rest of your database.” Instead of holding onto contacts in your database that haven’t engaged with any of your material in a specific timeframe (“90 days”), move them to a different audience (“unengaged”) for more personalized marketing (“a win back campaign”) and potentially via a new channel. Also, remember that having an unengaged audience can also add noise to your reporting metrics and make it difficult to parse out what content is underperforming, vs. whether it was just sent to the wrong audience.

Be consistent: “Once you’ve warmed up IP addresses, internet service providers look for consistent sending from each IP.” Having a content calendar for campaigns, and regular (scheduled) sends can help keep you on track—and help you avoid the irregular, one-time batch and blast sends to large portions of your database.

Account for Mobile: “Make sure your email looks great on any device and for every email client.” Remember that many people are mobile-first, so when designing your emails ensure there’s a mobile-friendly version available. Many Marketing Automation Platforms allow this preview option when building your emails; and for robust testing, there are other tools that render your email across multiple mobile clients and scenarios. (litmus, emails on acid, to name a couple.)

Grab their attention: “Short and medium-length subject lines have higher conversion rates.” Which means, get to the point with subject lines but also make it enticing enough for them to open the email. Once they open the email, the rest of the messaging (the body copy, and the call-to-action) should be consistent with what they were expecting. No “special offer inside, instant discount” subject line that once opened still requires the customer to jump through hoops to find their special offer.

Find your sweet spot: “Your product or service type, plus your campaign tracking data, help determine what constitutes too many emails and not enough.” If you are seeing high unsubscribes and low engagement, play with the marketing mix (new filters in your audience segmentation, sending at different times, decreasing # of emails, or introducing new channels (display ad, SMS) or content types in your emails (increased images, video links).

Takeaway: Designing customer journeys (and implementing them in marketing automation platforms) doesn’t have to be overly complex, or require countless resources or budget.

In regard to the platform itself: for reference, the most popular marketing automation platforms ABC has helped stand up, implement, and optimize are Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo (Adobe), and Oracle Eloqua. Each of them have their own pros and cons, though more recently we’ve seen more demand for Salesforce Marketing Cloud architecture and execution support.

If you’re not sure where to begin (or which platform to leverage), let’s chat!

To learn more about designing intelligent customer journeys, watch our video on demand here (where we break this down using Eloqua).

Click here to download Salesforce’s “50 best practices for email marketing” whitepaper.