The Unwritten Rules of Email Marketing [Infographic]

If you’ve been keeping track of your marketing channel return rates, you might notice that your some of your biggest ROI comes from – surprise – email marketing.

Based on statistics, email is one of the main driver of leads and revenue for B2B marketers, proving to be 40% more effective than social media.

These numbers only prove that email marketing is like ol’ reliable when it comes to marketing channels for your business’s lead generation efforts—if you do it right. Marketing teams monitoring such trends will naturally beef up their email campaigns, which means you’re going up against some pretty stiff competition.

The key is not to flood your prospects’ inbox with emails that have little to no value for them. Instead, you need to stand out from the crowd and lead the way by catching your leads’ attention with email marketing principles and techniques that resonate with them.

Key Takeaways: 

• Everyday people are bombarded by hundreds of emails, so standing out is more important than ever. The key is to find the perfect balance of compelling language without becoming spammy. 
• Automation tools can be a marketers best friend, when utilized right. Remember; personalization is key. 
• Always be sure to A/B test your emails to optimize your lead generation efforts. 

The Issues with Email Marketing

People get sent all sorts of emails on a daily basis. The average office worker receives 121 emails per day, ranging from pieces of promotional and advertising materials to personal and work emails at any given time of the day.

Given the huge number of other senders to compete with, it’s quite easy to see how cluttered a recipient’s inbox can become, which is a challenge for you as you try to stand out from the rest.

A side-effect of this is that people have become a lot more selective when browsing their inboxes. The filtration process involves looking for someone familiar among the list of senders or hoping to see content that’s really interesting or useful to them. But otherwise, most people are quick to send everything else to the trash bin, which is not where you want to be.

The effect is further increased when you consider how selective automated email and spam filters have become. Bottom line, if your email isn’t compelling, it’s never going to get noticed.

That said, you want to project yourself as someone who follows proper email marketing etiquette so you can establish trust with your email recipients. Once you’ve managed to establish trust initially, the chances of getting your emails opened in the future will increase significantly.

Email Mistakes to Avoid

The list below contains examples of common mistakes made by email marketers that usually results in less-than-satisfactory levels of engagement:

1. An Uncompelling Subject Line

Everything starts with the email subject line. It’s the first thing that your leads see, so it makes perfect sense to write something really compelling, and more importantly, relevant. If your subject line doesn’t immediately grab their attention, your email is unlikely to get read at all.

Play on your readers emotions a bit. Create urgency and instill curiosity. Make sure you keep it as personal as you can as well (more on that next).

Try not to be too salesy either. Click-baity subject lines can be great, but be sure not to make any promises that you fail to deliver on once the recipient opens the email.

2. Leaving Everything to Automation

Email automation is a boon to marketers, but some tend to misuse it, especially when it comes to targeted email marketing. Sometimes, marketers fail to segment their marketing lists based on customer personas so that the right emails don’t reach the demographics that actually need them. In today’s online world, email segmentation isn’t just nice-to-do, it’s a must.

Personalization is incredibly important for better engagement rates, and too much automation can restrict that. To avoid sounding like a robot, most email automation tools allow for personalization tokens. Take advantage of this feature and you’ll be able to bring email personalization to new heights.

3. Sending Unsolicited Messages

Nobody likes getting something they didn’t ask for unless it’s something really valuable. In the same way, your recipients won’t have second thoughts reporting your email as spam if you send it to them without getting their permission first.

What’s worse is if you don’t add an opt-out subscription link on your emails, which gains you the ire of your prospects since you’re not giving them an easy way to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Not to mention that according to the CAN-SPAM act, all email marketing is required to include an option to opt-out.

4.  Missing or Unclickable Images

In email marketing, images are an important element, as they are used not only for good visuals but also to direct leads to a landing page on the website, or occasionally, the image contains the entire message itself.

It then goes without saying that when images are missing or not clickable, you lose an opportunity to engage with your prospects and to prolong their engagement.

5. Sending Without Testing

There’s a whole gamut of things to test and check before finally hitting the send email button, including a subject line that matches your email’s content, broken links, and any error messages that might show up due to technical issues.

Customers hate it when they realize they’ve wasted time looking at something that’s full of inconsistencies and bloopers. So, make sure you run a trial of your email marketing process on a test account before getting your email campaign started.

Know the Rules

Email marketing is a simple, efficient, and time-tested strategy that should be part of every marketer’s plan. While you might find it challenging to create emails that are received well by people on your list, keeping in mind the principles to proper email marketing and sticking to the rules might just be the key to getting noticed.

Now that you know the unwritten rules, make sure you optimize the content that goes along with each email. Personalization goes a long way, and creating content that applies to your readers pain points and interests is a great way to stay on that track. Check out our SEO Blog Writing Services or schedule a free consultation to learn more about optimizing your content marketing efforts.