Email Marketing Best Practices to Convert More Leads 

Email marketing has been any marketer’s go-to sales and communication method for the longest time now. Utilizing it isn’t the most difficult task in the world, but you need a bulletproof strategy in place if you want your campaigns to be successful.

There are many aspects you need to pay close attention to—from building an email list to creating an eye-capturing copy that converts leads reliably and consistently. Once you develop a superb campaign, everything will run smoothly, but it’s the campaign creation process that makes everything complicated.

What worked five years ago doesn’t have to work now—some email marketing methods are simply outdated. There are a few email marketing aspects that never change, though, and they have worked like a charm since the creation of this advertising channel.

To help you acquire the necessary knowledge, we will focus on the evergreen practices in this article—the ones you will be able to utilize for many years to come.

If you want to learn more about email marketing best practices that will expand your customer base, let’s take a look at all of the required steps:

1. Don’t purchase email lists—build them

2. Contact the right leads at the right time

3. Create an email schedule

4. Write enticing subject lines

5. Optimize your email preview

6. Don’t use spammy content

7. Include eye-capturing CTAs

8. Add a signature

9. A/B test 

10. Offer incentives

11. Create drip campaigns

12. Use metrics

Source: Pixabay

Don’t Purchase Email Lists—Build Them

Updated and accurate email lists are not for sale. If you purchase an email list and don’t verify the addresses, your campaign will have increased bounce rates. The bigger the hard-bounce rates, the more likely you are to get blacklisted. Also, sending unsolicited emails is an activity you definitely don’t want to get yourself involved in.

Although you can’t eliminate bounces altogether, you can reduce them by up to 95% through email verification. 

It may sound like it would take ages to build your own email list, but it’s certainly a better option than sending emails to people who never even subscribed to your list. This is going to make you look like you’re involved in shady business, which you should avoid at all costs.

Any excellent email marketing campaign should have a highly targeted audience, which is something you won’t get if you decide to buy a bunch of emails that are irrelevant to your business.

Using Our Email Finder to Build Your Contact List

If you want to find the best prospects for your targeted email campaign, you should check out our email finder. To generate as many leads as you need, all you need to do is upload a CSV file that contains the following prospect information:

• First name

• Last name

• Company name

If you need more business data on your potential customers, you can use our enrichment data software as well. Upload a list with the leads you want more information on, and we will present you with everything you need to know about the company and its employees.

Contact the Right People at the Right Time

Once you build your email list, you need to ensure that you’re contacting your prospects at the right time. If they live in different timezones, you should look for a tool that can schedule emails in line with your potential customers’ local time. You can do all of this manually, but it’s going to take a long time.

The majority of the most popular marketing blogs will tell you that the best time to send an email is on Tuesdays at 10 am. Since that information has become available to everyone, many marketers send emails at that time.

What does that result in? Your potential customers’ inboxes are flooded with messages each Tuesday. This means that they aren’t likely to open ten different emails and pay close attention to each of them.

The smartest decision would be to avoid that time altogether. You will get the best results if you send emails around 9 am on:

• Mondays

• Wednesdays

• Thursdays

• Fridays.

Create Email Schedules

The majority of email automation tools come with a feature that allows you to schedule your campaigns in advance. Use it to your advantage—forgetting to send an email to one of your prospects won’t give you a headache if you utilize the feature.

Source: Pixabay

As soon as you figure out when you should start sending out your emails, create a schedule and stick to it. Consistency is going to improve your click-through rates, which results in increased sales.

Don’t send emails every single day. Everyone hates spammers, so schedule your emails to be sent out every three days instead.

This is going to damage your sender reputation and decrease your deliverability rates. Depending on how much you increase your hard-bounce rates, you could even get blacklisted. To avoid this, all you need to do is verify emails and ensure that the frequency of your email activities is reasonable.

Write Enticing Subject Lines

Your email subject will be the first line of text your recipients see. Based on how interesting they find it, they will either click on your email or ignore it. That’s why you need to ensure that the subject is as intriguing as possible.

You should keep your subject lines between 30 and 50 characters because anything longer than that will be cut off by the recipient’s screen. The ones with the highest open rates come with a sense of urgency paired with useful information on what the email is about.

As tempting as it may be, don’t lead your prospects on. Writing subject lines that have nothing to do with the offer in your email will make the recipients click away because it’s false advertising.

Optimize Email Preview

Leaving a good first impression is any marketer’s goal. That’s why you can’t allow your email preview to flop. The recipient should get an idea of the layout of your email from the preview—if it doesn’t look well put together, they won’t even open it.

If you insert a line that says ‘Can’t see the images? Click here!’ it is undoubtedly going to leave a bad impression. Most marketers think that they will help the recipient go to their website with this line, which is the opposite of what happens.

Keep in mind that most subscribers won’t spend more than half a minute on your promotional email. Taking that into consideration, going to your website just to see some images is out of the question.

You can customize your email previews with certain email automation software solutions. If you don’t have one, but are planning to invest, look for this feature. It’s going to improve your open and click-through rates significantly.

Don’t Use Spammy Content

If you want to get your prospects interested in your offer, you need to avoid spammy content. Inserting too many exclamation marks and writing deceitful content to lure them in won’t cut the mustard.

Source: Pixabay

The majority of marketers have moved past this because it simply does not work. If you want to have successful campaigns, you need to think them through and use a friendly approach that won’t come off as aggressive.

We should also point out that your content needs to be relevant to the recipient. A 41-year-old Thomas from Kansas won’t be interested in a 20% discount for your nail polish line.

If you put in the necessary effort to ensure that your emails provide value to your subscribers, your campaigns will never flop. Letting the recipients know that you understand their needs and issues is going to turn them into loyal customers a lot more quickly than you expect.

Include Eye-Capturing CTAs

Attention-grabbing CTAs are a crucial part of any email marketing campaign. The emails that convert the biggest number of leads are the ones that have eye-capturing CTAs that stand out from the rest of the email.

This doesn’t mean that you should create flashy, overly-aggressive ones, though—they will do the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve. Make them as enticing as possible without coming off as unprofessional.

You need to give the recipient more than once chance to do what you want them to. Make sure to keep the first one above the fold because that position makes more leads convert.

On the flip side, you shouldn’t insert too many CTAs—they will make you look overly intrusive. As you can see in the example below, there are way too many elements the recipient is supposed to pay attention to. Since this image does nothing but confuse them, the prospects click off the email.

Source: Econsultancy

For optimal results, keep your CTAs:

• Concise

• Eye-capturing

• Intriguing

Add a Signature

Adding a signature at the bottom of your email will help you leave a good impression right off the bad. Nobody likes to receive robotic emails that are usually part of mass outreach. Even if you are sending them in bulk, you should ensure that they don’t look the part.

If you insert a signature in all of your emails, the recipients will get the impression that you are a professional, rather than a scammer. You should also include your contact information in the signature because it adds to the overall impression. Most people find emails sent by agencies nothing but repelling because they feel impersonal.

They probably won’t even consider your offer because they think to themselves, ‘Just another agency trying to trick me into buying something I’ll never need.’ If you want to avoid this at all costs, don’t forget to add that signature to your email—it will improve your campaign in more ways than you expect.

A/B Test

The best email marketing practice is to perform A/B testing until you figure out what works best. Without it, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t, which may result in poor campaign performance.

A/B testing is going to boost your open and click-through rates. If you want to have successful campaigns, you should test the following:

• Subject lines

• Visuals

• Copy

• CTAs

If you’re looking to test multiple variables at the same time, A/B testing won’t cut the mustard. Look into multivariate testing—it’s going to work much more quickly and smoothly.

Start testing early on—waiting for your campaign to be 50% complete to perform A/B testing is not a smart move. The earlier you start, the more you will be able to tweak and adjust your emails to your target audience’s liking.

You can see what CTA A/B testing looks like here:

Source: Optimizely

Offer Incentives

The first thought your recipient will have when they see your promotional email is ‘What’s in it for me?’ If you’ve got nothing to offer, they are likely to move your email to the junk folder right off the bat.

It would be a smart decision to offer them something right away—it can be as small as a 10% discount for their first purchase or links to free whitepapers, case studies, video tutorials, etc. You don’t have to send them a box of free products to lure them in, so it won’t affect your budget.

As soon as you get them to do what you intended, you won’t have to put as much effort into engaging with them or ensuring that they stay signed up for your newsletter. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t nurture your leads—it’s just going to become easier to get them engaged.

Create Drip Campaigns

Email drip campaigns are an email marketing strategy that consists of multiple emails sent out over longer periods of time with the goal of nurturing leads.

Creating drip campaigns is one of the best email marketing practices out there. They will help you nurture your leads over long periods of time. This ensures excellent customer retention rates and keeps them engaged for as long as possible.

When it comes to drip campaigns, you should follow these steps to get optimal results:

1. Write relevant emails that align with your target audience’s needs and issues

2. Set the frequency of your drip campaign and stick to it so that you’re consistent

3. Segment your drip campaigns to personalize your content better

4. Track the performance of your campaigns regularly

If you haven’t already, you should check out some email automation tools we’ve reviewed. The majority of them will enable you to create drip campaigns effortlessly. These are some of the most popular ones:

Use Metrics

Using metrics to make data-driven decisions is the best email marketing practice you will come across. Without them, you wouldn’t have actionable data that would allow for instant improvements.

Source: Pixabay

To get to the answer more quickly, ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve with the campaign you’re launching. Is it excellent open rates? Or is it maybe doubled conversion rates?

As soon as you determine what it is, use the metrics that can measure your progress toward that goal. If your campaign doesn’t deliver the results you were hoping for, the good part of the experience is that you’ll get to learn what works and doesn’t.

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to tweak all of your future campaigns and maximize your ROI.

Use Our Cadence and Newsletter Software to Boost Your Performance

If you want to optimize your campaign, you should use our cadence and newsletter software that will automate any email marketing activity. This tool is going to track all of your open, click, bounce, and unsubscribe rates.

One of the best parts of our software is that you can send an unlimited number of emails. You don’t need to pay additionally to get this option—you can even sign up for a free trial to get some experience with the platform before you invest in it.

This is how the pricing plan is set up:

If you want to create an additional revenue stream for your business, you can also resell any of the software solutions we at Sell SaaS offer. Because all of the software pieces are white-labeled, you can add your logo, colors, and company name and treat them as your own. The best part is that you get to choose which price you will sell them at.

You will get 60%–80% in commissions with each sale, depending on how successfully you manage to resell it.

You can choose from a wide array of software solutions:

1. Email, phone, and social media extractor

2. Chatbot solution

3. Online review management

4. Notification widget

5. B2B email extractor

What makes our program unique is that the vast majority of affiliate programs offer only 20% to 40% in commissions. Our offer can increase your budget significantly, and if that’s something you’re on the lookout for, sign up to become a successful SaaS reseller!