Best Practices for Email Campaigns/Blasts

Best Practices for Email Campaigns/Blasts 

By: Operate Beyond

What is an email blast? How does it work? How can it help me? Email blasts/campaigns are a great way to reach your targeted audience to deliver important or newsworthy information fast. Blasts can be used for a wide variety of reasons but should always be considerate of who will be reading them. The benefit of using an email blast is that it is fast, informative, and easy to judge engagement. So, what does it take to have a successful email campaign? Maximize your responsiveness with specific audience lists, concise content, and a well structured email. 

The Audience

A list of contacts is required to begin reaching your audience through email. You likely already have one, but you can obtain these contacts through person-to-person sign ups or a “subscribe to emails” feature located on your website. The first thing to know about email marketing is that your contact list needs to be up-to-date and specific. 

Cleaning Your List: All emails contacted should have previously given you permission to reach out. This means, do not purchase a pre-made list of contacts or continue contacting those who have unsubscribed. Any email that bounces back or has sending issues should be removed entirely from your list. Should you notice that a particular contact has a low click rate or doesn’t open your emails, consider sending a “would you still like to receive these emails” message to test for engagement. If they are no longer interested or unresponsive, save yourself time and remove them from your list as this clearly isn’t the best method for contacting them. 

Lists: To get the most out of your email marketing campaigns, create multiple lists as necessary. This process is called segmentation and its goal is to email users based on their personal preferences. As mentioned previously, you need to be specific about who you’re contacting and with what information. You may not want to send the same content to everyone on your list, especially if it only applies to X number them. 

When building your lists, determine who wants to receive updates, newsletters, blog post reminders, etc… This will help strengthen your relationship with recipients and provide them with only the information they want and need. 

Content

The meat and potatoes of your email is going to be the subject line and body text written. This content needs to be mindful of it’s audience and avoid spam-like text to prevent unsubscribes. The subject should be engaging and influence users to open the email. From there, the body of the email needs to be concise, informative, and fulfill that subject line. 

Your Brand and Message: With every email you send, keep in mind that this is an extension of your company/organization’s brand. Include your logo to help familiarize recipients with your brand and steer towards colors and fonts that coincide with that of your business. The goal is to help readers understand and remember who you are as soon as they open the email. 

Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks can be useful to include in your email blasts for readers wanting more information. They can also encourage readers to follow your advice or the “call to action” found in your email. Whether that be signing up to receive a newsletter, filling out a survey, or checking out your seasonal sales, link out to those resources most necessary to your readers. 

Length: I’ll keep this short and sweet, and so should you. Emails with too much info or overbearing paragraphs can lead to unresponsiveness. A large percentage of your recipients will read your email on a smartphone and large chunks of text may intimidate them into clicking away. It’s best to simply stay focused, say what you need, and move on. 

How to Build My Perfect Email

1. Introduction: Briefly describe your business and your products or services. 
2. Preview: Mention what your audience is to learn or gain from your email. This is crucial and can help them decide to continue reading or not. 
3. Information: This is the purpose of sending your email and what you’re informing the audience on.
4. Call to Action: Every email should have some call to action, direction, or next steps to be taken. After reading your email what actions do you want your audience to take moving forward and how. 
5. Contact: Should your audience need to contact you, locate your social media, sign up for a webinar, etc… Include all this information at the bottom of your email for their convenience. 

Appearance: Your email should include some visual element like a photo or other media. It is standard for your email to contain about 80% text and 20% visuals.