10 Best email marketing tips & practices for 2024

On average, your email marketing campaigns are competing with 121 other emails that a person receives in a day. How will you ensure that your email even gets opened?

It is true – with the surge of email users and thousands of brands sending promotional emails, the entire channel has become crowded. The generic good-to-know email marketing tips that everyone is using won’t fetch you the targets you’re aiming for.

So, it’s time to level up your email marketing game.

You might think at this point – is email marketing even worth it? The answer is yes! It is and the ROI rates are only expanding. However, that is only applicable to marketers who are in tune with the latest trends in the industry.

To get you there, we have handcrafted a list of email marketing tips and tricks for braving the competition in 2024.

Many of these you might already know, but it’s worth exploring what has changed and how your upcoming email marketing campaigns can benefit from these!

Email marketing tips and best practices

Email marketing is one of the most important aspects of any marketing campaign. So, it’s crucial that you apply the most effective techniques and improve your marketing efforts. Below we’ve shared top email marketing tips and tricks that you can implement.

1. Have clear and relevant CTAs

If your email marketing goal is to direct traffic towards landing pages or capture leads, you’d want to optimize your CTAs.

According to WordStream, having a single CTA in your email boosts clicks by 371%.

After the email subject line, CTA plays the most important role in email marketing strategy. Therefore, the CTAs need to be written in a clear and targeted way.

The following are the key elements of writing a CTA that will get you more clicks than ever and help you create successful email marketing campaigns.

• Keep the CTA above the fold – Place your CTA in your email body so that it is visible to the user without the need to scroll further. It shouldn’t be hidden at the footer of your content, where the chances of the user missing it are quite high. Keep it on the top or at 25 – 30% scroll length of the email.

• Use captivating words in the CTA copy – The CTA copy is of prime importance as it will catch or lose the reader’s attention. One good practice is to use enticing words in your CTA copy that are descriptive as well as generate prompt action from the reader’s side.
• Use a fallback CTA – Sometimes users might not want to buy from you instantly but will be interested in learning more about your offering. In scenarios where the CTA is demanding a high-effort step, you can compensate for it with a low-effort CTA or the fallback CTA. For instance, “Buy Now” can be supplemented with “Add it to your wishlist.”
• Have enough whitespace around the CTA – The CTA should be visible distinctly in the email copy, for which, you’ll need a healthy amount of whitespace around it. Don’t add too many images, colors, or text around the CTA.

2. Segment your subscribers based on preferences 

Segmenting is done to serve your subscribers with targeted email newsletters and offers. Let’s say you’re an apparel website; you would not want to promote men’s apparel offers to your female customers. List segmentation helps brands improve the probability of conversion and reduce spam emails.

According to Help Scout, email list segmentation can boost Click-Through Rates by 50%.

You can segment lists by a number of methods. The most effective ones are listed below.

• Use existing customer data – Use the customer profile data that you already have such as gender, age, location to create segments in your email list.
• Use historical data – Analyze how the customer is interacting with your brand in terms of buying behavior, search history, and items added to the cart or wishlist.
• Ask for preferences – Use a dynamic opt-in form to capture user preferences for email newsletters and offer promos. 
• Use demographic data – In case the user hasn’t signed up yet, you can use basic demographic data such as age range, location, and affinity categories to create segmented lists.

3. Have a crisp subject line

The subject line is the most read copy of any email newsletter and it’s your first (and probably the last) chance to grab attention.

Just like CTAs, the subject line needs special care as to what words and tonality you’ll use. We have created a list of points that’ll help you improve your subject line. 

Don’t use too many words – An Invesp study shows that subject lines with 6-10 words yield the most number of opens. Anything less or more than this limit will reduce the chances of a successful opening.

Preview text – Preview text appears just after the subject line and offers a preview of what the email is about. It can significantly improve email open rates if supplied correctly. 

Choice of words – Some words such as “Double your income”, “Cheap deals”, “Cash bonus” can be a put-off for the users. Whereas, “How-to”, “Sneak Peek”, “You know what?” can entice interest without sounding desperate. Therefore, be careful with the words!

4. A/B test your subject lines 

A/B testing refers to trying out different subject lines for the same email campaign. It’s one of the best email marketing tips you’ll ever employ because subject lines have a strong impact on the success of the email.

Did you know that emails on iPhone devices only show subject lines up to 32 characters?  

This means if your email subject line contains more than 32 characters, your overall campaign might not receive the expected response from iPhone users. But if you created an A/B test with a shorter subject line, you’d have immediately identified how to get better responses.  

Similarly, A/B testing is critical when it comes to subject lines. You should try several variations for subject lines and test them with your users to understand what works the best.  

A Campaign Monitor study found out that A/B testing subject lines alongside the template and email body got them a 127% rise in CTR.  

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5. Personalize your emails 

Most emails that a user receives are directly addressed to them with a personalized message. About 88% of users believe that they’re more likely to respond to an email when it’s directly addressed to them.

Hence, you need to add personalization to your email marketing strategy.

You can do this by creating a targeted design, messaging, and offering for your list segments. 

Dynamic email templates are a great way to do this. You can use list-based placeholders in your email, wherein a single offer can be personalized for the different target audiences.

More ways to personalize emails include using custom fields for the subscriber’s name, preferences, city, or company name to tell them that the email is exclusively meant for them. 

By implementing a touch of personalization into your email marketing strategies, you can connect better with your email subscribers.

6. Avoid the usage of “no-reply” in the sender’s email address

Ever received an email from no-reply@xyz.com? You might not initially consider it junk but there’s growing evidence that users consider no-reply email addresses as spam.

Moreover, no-reply email addresses were put in place for automated messages. Like the one, you receive for confirming your order or sending you a one-way notification that doesn’t require your response.

When you use no-reply addresses for your email marketing campaigns, you end up confusing your email subscribers.

Instead, you can use friendlier email addresses such as marketing@yourorg.com or sales.repname@yourorg.com, which are easier for your target audience to understand.

7. Understand the process of email rendering

All emails are built up of HTML, CSS, and JS code that gets converted into user-friendly templates by the email client.

This is important to understand because a favorable email experience demands a standard HTML structure to be followed. When you test your emails, you must check if they look the same on varying screen sizes. Your email may look perfect on a desktop computer but might mess up on a smartphone screen.

To avoid this, you must go for an email template editor tool that creates responsive emails. The structure, colors, and alignment of elements must all look re-adjust as per the screen size.

You’re free to tinker with the HTML code yourself but be careful of testing your template multiple times. Putsmail is a software tool designed for testing email templates before you send them.

8. Include your company logo

Users always want to be privy to who is sending marketing emails to them. If it’s a wildly unknown sender or the email looks unprofessional, users won’t bother opening it. 

Hence, you should always add elements of trust in your email, of which, your company logo is of utmost importance. 

It reflects that you’re a legitimate brand and that your offer can be trusted. Other than the company logo, you can always include a personal sender name, company-specific templating, and directly address the recipient with their name.

These small but significant customizations go a long way in ensuring that your emails are taken seriously. 

9. Always automate your emails and follow-ups 

It’s hard to check how many people are engaged with your marketing emails and then take action manually. If your list contains thousands of addresses, it’s simply impractical to measure your email marketing performance. 

Automating your email marketing process using email marketing CRM is a smarter way to handle all incoming responses. You can set up automatic triggers whenever the user takes a certain action. 

This improves your overall email marketing performance by treating every response selectively. Some common examples of email automation are as follows; 

• Welcome emails 
• Onboarding emails 
• Retargeting emails 
• Abandoned Cart emails  
• Follow-up emails 

You can create an automation flow for managing leads and responses accurately. Following is an example of managing a contact using a smart email automation flow with triggers and actions for each step of the process.

10. Always test your email

The last part is one of the most overlooked yet effective email marketing tips – testing your email marketing campaigns.

As we highlighted earlier, emails need to be reviewed and checked for errors before the campaign is launched. More so, testing saves you from killing your own campaign due to a poorly created template or underutilized resources.  

Here’s a quick checklist for testing your emails;

• Test emails on multiple screens – especially on mobile devices.
• Check for image load times and avoid heavy images in your emails.
• Check if the CTA hyperlink is correctly redirecting.
• Check if the email is landing correctly or going to the spam or promotions folder. 
• Check the segment or subscriber list you’re sending.
• Shoot out a few test emails to make sure everything is right.

Conclusion

Just like other marketing channels, emails have a broad room for optimization. You can play with a number of factors to meet your ROI targets and that too by keeping small things in mind.

In this article, we have touched upon email marketing campaign best practices that will help you win an edge over the competition. Remember that no perfect email newsletter is created in the first go. Believe in the power of iteration and keep these best tips for email marketing handy.