10 Email Marketing Best Practices You Need to Use in 2024

Do you know the medium email marketing ROI is 122%, which makes it four times more productive than any other digital marketing channel? It is now the default marketing channel for every brand working to boost website traffic, establish a brand voice, and improve communication with the target audience. But over the years, this particular channel of digital marketing has become a double-edged sword. Ignoring the best available email marketing practices can lead to poor engagement, a damaged sender reputation, and high unsubscribe rates.

On the flip side, the best email content written with data integrity and best practices can help you secure higher click-through rates, earn robust customer Relations, and maximize your revenue. Kijero’s Email Marketing team has written this comprehensive piece, offering you the industry’s best insights, effective strategies, and result-oriented email practices. This blog is certainly your one-stop resource, covering everything you need to launch an effective marketing campaign. From how to write compelling content to email design, this blog explores the evolving email-driven marketing landscape in 2024 and beyond.

Ready to learn some actionable tips and elevate your digital marketing experience to the next level?

Here are some important things you must know before we break down the best practices that define success in 2024.

We first start with understanding the basics of email marketing campaigns.

Understanding Email Marketing:

As the name indicates, it is a form of digital marketing where emails are sent to target to sell services, products, and foster relationships with the customers. No matter how advancements have been made in digital marketing, email-based marketing is still the most effective way to communicate with the target audience.

Marketing firms employ various kinds of emails to drive the campaign and enhance customer engagement. For instance, they can use these emails for this end.

• Promotion emails
• Newsletter emails
• Transactional emails
• Abandoned cart emails
• Reengagement emails
• Feedback and survey emails
• Product updates emails
• Onboarding emails

Over the years, precision has become a key to drive email marketing campaigns. Emails are no longer generic in nature, big data and other AI tools have now allowed marketers to come up with personalized emails that are relevant.

How Significant is Email-Based Marketing in Reaching Target Audience:

Multiple studies show that email-driven digital marketing is the most effective way to reach out target audience. It helps businesses in targeting their desired audience through various means, such as:

#01: Personalized and Relevant Email Content:

You can better communicate with your target audience because various email marketing techniques allow you to send personalized and relevant content. Various tools available help marketers to segment audiences based upon demographics, behavior, preferences, and interests. You can thus write content that mirrors the audience’s needs and values.

When email marketers send emails having personalized and relevant content, this automatically leads to better clicks, engagement, impressions, and other desirable outcomes.

#02: Measurable Insights and Analytics:

Email-driven digital marketing features an extensive range of advanced marketing channel analytics. When you launch the campaign, you end up having a huge amount of data giving you invaluable insights. Digital marketing firms employ this data to launch targeted email marketing drives and make data-driven decisions.

These easily accessible and measurable insights and analytics play a significant role in reaching out target audience because you will have enough data to run a precision campaign.

#03: Fostering Customer Relationships:

Building sustainable and long-term relationships with customers is another reason why this form of digital marketing is used to reach out target audience. When you receive emails with relevant and highly personalized messages, it telegrams the signals that you care about your customers. Needless to say, it leads to better customer loyalty and trust.

#04: Enhanced Conversion and Improved ROI:

A strong understanding of customers’ needs, personalized content, and direct communication allows you to approach the audience more holistically than other marketing channels. It helps you increase your conversion rate because any email designed for a particular customer has a fairer chance of getting clicked and opened.

You just need to focus on insights and analytics and design email outreach tips accordingly. This will undoubtedly improve your conversion. On top of that, targeted email-based marketing campaigns are going to increase your ROI over time. Sending the right person at the right time is a sure way to enhance your ROI.

All leads to better engagement and retention of the target audience, the very basic aim of every digital campaign.

#05: Automation:

Email marketing platforms feature automation capabilities. Email-based marketers employ automation tools and capabilities to set up automated email sequences. You can peg them with triggers such as newsletter subscriptions, website visitors, purchases, and sign-ups. Automation can help you save both time and resources while helping you make contact with the target audience with ease and precision.

Now that we have established that email-based digital marketing plays a key role in lead generation and customer engagement, it now time for you to know what constitutes email marketing best practices.

Key Components of Effective Email Marketing:

Though no fixed formula guarantees the success of your email marketing campaign, here are some components that you must practice to run a successful digital marketing campaign.

#01: Attention Grabbing and Relevant Subject Line:

The subject line is what recipient see the first when they receive emails or visit their inbox. Therefore, the subject line must be compelling enough and give reasons to recipients to open it. The line must be attention-grabbing and relevant to the content.

The subject lines must be written in a way to arouses the curiosity of the receiver, creating a sense of urgency and enticing them to go through the email content. You must keep the subject line short. It must be somewhere 30 to 50 characters long, covering everything in a short and sweet way.

More importantly, you must avoid stuffing keywords or key phrases such as spammy words including “limited time offer” or “buy now” etc.

#02: Segmentation and Suppression List:

Strong segmentation and suppression are key ingredients of any effective email marketing strategy. These components make sure that you send emails to the right persons and offer real value.

Segmentation is categorizing people depending on their demographics, interests, browsing history, and shopping behavior. It is using CRM or databases to group people and send emails to them, therefore, ensuring personalized email content.

Suppression is the opposite of segmentation. It concerns how to stop people from receiving emails. You can use automation tools to create a list of people who don’t want to receive a particular email. You can create suppression lists in many ways. For instance, you can create a negative list of people who don’t want to engage with you. You can also create a list of those who have already seen your content already. Therefore, there are many tools available that allow you to create segmentation and suppression lists.

#03: A Clear Call-to-Action:

No need to say that the purpose of sending emails is to increase engagement with users in some way or another. The level and type of engagement will be determined by the content of the email. Usually, senders wish to convince receivers to complete some tasks such as clicking a link, completing a form on landing pages, signing up for an event, or simply replying. In order to achieve these ends, a clear Call-to-Action or CAT must be added.

The CAT should be clear and remove any irritation in a smooth user experience. You must first understand the purpose of sending an email, this will go a long way in helping you come up with convincing and confusion-free CATs.

You should note that any email should have one CAT, it can be a link, in-text instruction, a button, or the like. You can bold or underline CAT so that users can easily click the link after reading the body content.

#04: Eye-Catching Design:

Email design is also an equally important component of emails. The design must be eye-catching so that it can be aesthetically appealing. You need to make sure that you choose a clean and uncluttered layout with a lot of whitespaces.

Design must have a clear information hierarchy. The color and font size should also reflect your brand identity. You can also an images or graphics to further add to the aesthetics of body content and reinforce your text. And more important, choose a design that is mobile responsive as more than half of emails are now opened on mobile phones. The mobile responsive design allows your recipient to navigate the emails and read content, enabling you to launch successful email campaigns.

#05: Engaging and Compelling Body Content of Emails:

There is no clear answer as to what should be the length of the best email. It depends upon the type of email and information you want to share with your recipients. As a thumb rule, you must strike balance between length and necessary information.

But it would be better if you keep the length short and get to the point rightly because you have to complete it in the inbox that will have other emails as well. The shorter the better because attention span is shrinking. If you add some video content, it would be another advantage.

One important thing is that you must keep the content free of any grammatical errors. If the content of an email has errors and complex sentence structure, no matter how long and short it is, it will not attract the attention of your receivers.

We have discussed in depth how important it is emails for your business promotion and growth, but one question needs our answer: how do you build an email list from scratch? Needless to say, maintaining an updated email list is key to any campaign.

Let’s learn some actionable tips to develop an email list.

How to Build an Email List in 2024:

Building an email list seems daunting, especially if you are planning to launch a marketing campaign fast and efficiently. But you must understand the email list is worth your efforts early on since it is the most important part of any email marketing strategy.

Here are some sources and ways to build and grow your email list:

#01: Giving Audience Incentives to Sign Up:

First things first, people are not going to provide their email addresses for nothing. You must provide a reason why people sign up and give their email addresses. You need to entice them, simply creating a signup form would not be enough, it would have low conversion rates.

One way to entice people is to give incentives. Creating a load magnet would do a great job when it comes to collecting email addresses. Some incentives you may offer are as follows:

• A free template or worksheet
• A cheat sheet
• Blog post in PDF version or a checklist summarizing key points of a blog
• A coupon
• A webinar registration

These are some of the many incentives you choose to attract your audience and convince them to sign up. Usually, a combination of incentives delivers optimum results. Studies also show that updating content along with evolving marketing strategy is also a great way to build an email list.

#02: Incorporating Exit Intent Pop-Up Form to Your Website:

The second way to compile email addresses is to incorporate exit pop-up forms. The appearance of pop-up windows has proven to be the most effective way to build an email list and update it. This also helps in enhancing conversion rates.

A study by Beeketing shows that eCommerce businesses can save up to 35% of otherwise lost visitors if they add exit pop-up windows when visitors are about to leave websites. But you must be sure that pop-ups don’t ruin the user experience. You can create a pop-up when visitors spend some time on a page, alternatively, you can add it when they scroll and interact with other pages.

#03: Using Social Media Platforms and Email Signature:

Social media platforms have also become an important source to grow email lists. You can share and promote your newsletters through social media posts. Moreover, you can also link your sign-up forms to social media posts.

There is also a growing trend of adding sign-up CTA in email signatures. This has proven effective if you carry out email campaign optimization.

#04: Employing Referral Marketing Programs:

Referral marketing which is incentivizing your customers to promote your products and services to their friends and family has become one of the most effective ways to build an email list. The words of mouth of customers carry huge marketing value because they can easily gain leads from other people. You can enjoy a high degree of trust and continue enjoying a growing email list. They can also play a role in increasing customers’ loyalty because existing customers feel more invested in your brand.

You should make sure that your rewards are worthwhile for your customers. Furthermore, your referral programs should be easy to follow and clear.

#05: Creating a High Converting Landing Page:

When exploring options for building an email list, it is always important to look for other options rather than making changes to home pages only. One such option is directing your visitors to the landing pages and offering them various incentives for sign-up.

You can link your landing pages or page directly to Facebook or LinkedIn ads. You can offer free shipping, exclusive access to some blogs, and something like that. It would work, there should be no doubt about it. All you have to do is to create a seamless user experience. Here are some ways that help create a highly convertible landing page:

• A well-crafted and compelling headline, showing the benefits of subscription.
• The compelling and enticing copy that could capture the attention of users
• A high-quality image to reinforce the message

Having discussed the basics of an email marketing campaign, let’s dive into the heart of our debate: strategies to make the marketing campaign successful.

Best Email Marketing Practices and Tips That Drive Results in 2024:

Here are some best practices that constitute part of any successful and result-oriented email marketing campaign, ensuring that you can deliver emails that are engaging, effective, and impactful.

#01: Never Buy Email Addresses:

Before you launch the campaign, you must bear in mind that the purchased email address list would not work for you. It is due to some reasons. For instance, in many countries and jurisdictions, sending emails to people enlisted in marketing email lists is illegal. It can cost you substantially, rendering your entire campaign counter-productive.

Second, it is very likely that your purchased subscribers would not have opted to receive your emails. Consequently, they will list your emails as spam and will end up complaining to their email clients. More importantly, receivers in the purchased email list would not have heard the name of your brand, they would naturally treat your email as unimportant. Therefore, you need to build your email from scratch as we have mentioned in the above paragraphs.

#02: Personalize Your Emails:

This is another trick that always works when it comes to running a result-oriented marketing drive. Though personalization is not new, it has been there in previous years, but the explosive growth of AI and Big Data has added an unprecedented impetus to this trend.

There are many ways to personalize the email content. Data is key to personalizing the emails. You can name a recipient, segment your audience based upon various criteria, send behavior-based triggers such as follow-up emails after purchase, offer a personalized recommendation, or choose a design and content that reflect recipients’ values and shopping behaviors.

#03: Measure Performance Through Analytics and Insights:

Measuring the success of your marketing campaign is a key to drive results. You can access them in various ways. For instance, your email marketing platform is your go-to resource in this regard. They can provide you with vital stats such as click-through rates and open rates.

Secondly, you can use various Google Analytics plugins for monitoring the performance of your website and email marketing efforts. They will allow you to know which emails resonate best with your target audience and which content triggers your interest. Understanding these stats would help you further design and implement marketing best practices.

Key Metrics to Monitor to Assess the Effectiveness of Email Campaigns:

Here are the metrics that you need to know:

• Open Rate
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
• Conversion Rate
• Bounce Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate
• Forward/Share Rate
• List Growth Rate

#04: Practice Best and Mobile Design and Layout:

You know internet users spend more than 56% of their online time on mobile phones. Mobile-based internet usage is to increase further. Therefore, if you are looking forward to tapping the lucrative email-based marketing potential, never ignore the significance of employing mobile-first and responsive design and layout.

• You can undertake the following measures to achieve this goal:
• Using visuals such as videos, images, GIFs, graphics, and animals.
• Adding alt text for your email images, videos, and GIFs.
• Deploying mobile-first design for your 2024 email newsletters.
• Using dynamic content to personalize email design.
• Offering consistent and on-brand experience by using web-safe fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Verdana.

New trends that are emerging in 2024 include experimenting with 3D design, the inclusion of interactive-like features, and supporting dark modes.

#05: Write Engaging Subject Lines:

The first impression is the last, everyone knows this. The same applies to emails. The subject line is what stands out an email from a crowded inbox. The subject line should be an attractive one as we have already discussed above. Some interesting examples are listed below:

• We Saw You Checking Us Out!
• The Deal that Makes You Proud!
• Watch Out for This Amazing Phishing Scam.

These are just a few examples. You can give an angle to the subject line whatever you like. You must make sure that they attract the attention of receivers.

#06: Optimize the Landing Pages of Your Websites:

The landing pages should be easy to navigate otherwise you will not be able to fully exploit the potential of email marketing. The visitors who land on your websites as the result of the campaign should not be confused, they must be provided with a seamless user experience.

One way to make sure that headlines echo the messaging of email subject line and body content. This will make visitors stay on your website for a longer period, allowing you to direct them to other desirable tasks such as subscription, completion of shipping cart, and the like.

#07: Maintain a Healthy Email List:

This is very important, in fact heart of any emails-driven marketing campaign. The email list be updated and reviewed periodically to remove inactive users. If your emails are landing in the inboxes of inactive users, it would adversely impact your rating on email clients and various email platforms.

You must also remove email IDs who have unsubscribed you because in some jurisdictions it is illegal to keep sending emails to those who have refused to remain your subscriber. You must note that not cleaning your email lists regularly would cause the landing of your marketing emails in the spam folder, adversely impacting email engagement rates and deliverability.

#08: Show Compliance to Email Marketing Regulations:

The fullest compliance with applicable regulations governing this digital marketing technique is crucial. Needless to say, it will help you avoid legal actions, litigation, damage to reputation, and loss of trust. Various regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, applicable in the EU and European Economic Area, and the CAN-SPAM Act, applicable in the USA, should be adhered to fully. These regulations stipulate that email marketing firms must practice explicit consent, lawful purpose, data accuracy, accurate header information, clear subject line, disclosure, valid physical address, and opt-out option. In short, if you want to make your digital marketing campaign a roaring success, do follow these regulations to the fullest extent.

#09: Using Social Media Buttons:

Sharing social media buttons is another way of making your campaign a success. Social media buttons allow your subscribers to share your content on social media, enabling you to target a broader audience.

On top of that, when you get recommendations from your subscribers, you will get a fairer chance to attract more audience. It is due to the fact that they are trusted people. A report by Todd Patton shows that 82% of Americans trust only those recommendations that come directly from friends and family.

#10: Employing Trigger Marketing and Automation:

Last but not least, trigger marketing and automation are two effective strategies to turn around your digital campaign.

Trigger email-based marketing is using automated email software that allows marketers to perform tasks such as analyzing actions undertaken by prospects or customers. Trigger marketing gives marketers tools and insights to respond instantly and offer a personalized experience to prospects or customers. For instance, marketers can analyze triggers such as form conversion, email opens, number of pages reviewed, and cart abandonment.

Automation is part of this form of marketing. When trigger events happen, pre-designed email sequences are sent automatically. This not only improves efficiency but also saves time and effort, enhancing the productivity of email marketing as well.

Bottom Line:

There is no denying that email marketing is one of the most effective ways of running a digital marketing campaign. It helps businesses communicate directly with prospects and customers, allows email marketers to undertake data-driven decisions, and enhances revenue and growth. But running a successful campaign demands some well-deliberated steps. Building a healthy email list, employing analytics tools, personalization, and segmentation, adding clear CATs, using video and other multimedia content, and addressing recipients with his names are some of the many actions. By following these measures, you can build a campaign that can lead to enhanced ROI increased revenue, and sustained growth of your business.