10 Email Marketing Best Practices To Accelerate Business in 2023

Businesses of all sizes are increasingly aware of the importance of email marketing as part of their overall customer engagement strategies. Effective email marketing can stand alone (perhaps ideal for a solopreneur or micro-business) or integrate into pre-existing social media, video, and in-person efforts. Email is flexible and diverse, and can help increase sales, drive customer engagement, and build customer trust. 

While many business owners enthusiastically embrace email marketing, the challenge for 2023 is understanding which practices and techniques yield the best results and which ideas simply waste time. Now more than ever, owners and marketing managers may feel swamped by the number of platforms and services available to help businesses with automation. In addition, it can be challenging to find trusted advice about correctly interpreting email marketing data and what to do when strategies don’t yield the expected results. 

This article reviews the best email marketing tips to drive results in 2023 and offers advice on how businesses can implement them.

Top 10 Email Marketing Tips that Guarantee the Best Results

The first steps to creating an effective email marketing strategy are understanding your audience, creating compelling content, and having a clear call to action. Once you have those pillars in place, here is how to increase engagement and optimize your campaigns.

1. Always Obtain Consent

One of the most common mistakes businesses make in email marketing is contacting people without explicit consent. In other words, make sure the recipient has given their permission by actively opting in through a sign-up form or checkbox on a website. The fine print in this example is unobtrusive but still communicates that consent to future messaging is a condition of joining the list. It also provides links to the full terms and privacy policy.

One of the best email marketing tips is to avoid purchasing email lists, as sending unsolicited emails without consent is illegal in many countries, including the United States (CAN-SPAM Act), Canada (CASL), and the European Union (GDPR). Spam is the opposite of all email marketing best practices, and violating these laws can result in hefty fines and damage your business’s reputation.

2. Personalize Your Greeting

Chances are you’ve received emails that started with a generic welcome, such as “Dear Member.” Every email automation platform has a *|FNAME|* field, so there’s really no excuse to not use a more personalized hello. It’s always preferred to use a person’s name over their market segmentation category. 

3. A/B Test Your Subject Lines

Everyone knows that smart email marketing has a compelling subject line, but it’s hard to tell which ones will be most effective. Should you add an emoji or keep them out? Do you lead with a discount or not? This is where A/B testing can help you make data-driven decisions about what is most effective for your audience and industry. Run at least five iterations of an experiment before you determine that one technique works best for your audience.

4. Incorporate Strong Graphic Design

Increasing the visual appeal of your email will grab the reader’s attention. Be sure your images are high-quality and relevant to the message, and keep the layout simple and easy to navigate. While using fun, trendy, or whimsical fonts can be enticing, stick to styles between 10- and 12-point sizes that are easy to read. Email marketing best practices suggest one font for headlines, a complimentary one for text, and an optional third for CTA buttons.

These examples incorporate engaging product photography, graphics, and fonts.

5. Include Your Logo

Don’t forget to include your logo in your email. Including your business’s logo helps readers remember your brand and increases the likelihood of purchasing by nearly 35%. If you’ve delayed creating a logo and unified branding for your business, now’s the time to take action.

6. Make Your Content Relevant

Your audience will only take action if the content applies to them. Depending on the focus of your business and size, this may mean you’ll need to engage in market segmentation. For example, you could send an email previewing an upcoming sales event and designate everyone who clicks on it as “interested.” Then, as the sale approaches, you could send a more detailed presentation of discounts to your interested segment. Geographic area, purchase history, and demographics are other common ways to subgroup your audience. Segmenting is a proven email marketing best practice to create more targeted and effective campaigns that yield better results.

7. Establish a Clear Call to Action 

A call to action (CTA) encourages the reader to take another step in your marketing funnel. Examples of CTAs include “See How It Works” or “Order Now.” CTAs should be clear and concise and located in the top portion of your message (also called “above the fold”). Consumers spend 57% of email viewing time looking at above-the-fold content. That percentage decreases as a reader scrolls down the page, and only 17% make it through the second half. One of the best email marketing tips is to have succinct, well-placed CTAs. This will increase conversions and drive results from your email campaigns.

8. Keep it Simple!

Decluttering is good for your closets and for your email marketing. Another best practice to follow is going through the message and removing everything unnecessary or distracting, such as animation, memes that aren’t explicitly related to your CTA, and lengthy updates or conversational chatter that is more appropriate for a website blog post or social media message.

9. Optimize for Mobile

Remember, in 2023, most people will see your message on a mobile device. You’ll need to do more than tick a box for a responsive mobile design. Your email needs to be read easily across different inboxes and devices, including in dark mode — a popular option for mobile users. The only way to guarantee your email displays well is to preview it.

If you’re using a commercial email marketing platform, make sure you know how to preview the email’s appearance across devices, including phones, tablets, and laptops/desktops. While it’s unrealistic to test your email on every device, keeping your subject line and preview text to less than 50 characters each will accommodate most display sizes and give you the best performance on mobile.

10. Tackle Abandoned Shopping Carts with Email Marketing

You can increase conversions and maximize sales by integrating email marketing best practices into your online sales funnel. For example, when a customer adds an item to their cart but does not complete the purchase, you can send them an automated message offering a discount or other incentives to encourage them to complete the purchase.

What to Expect with Email Marketing in 2023

Once you’ve mastered our top 10 email marketing tips for great results, consider diving into these four advanced topics to turbo-charge your sales and engagement rates in 2023 and beyond.

Integrated Marketing Communication

Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is a marketing approach that uses a variety of channels, such as paid search advertising, public relations, direct mail, social media, SMS marketing, and email marketing, to reach a target audience. By integrating email marketing into your overall marketing and sales strategy, you can maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns by reaching a wider audience and increasing engagement. For example, make sure your website’s landing page matches your email in design, look, and feel. Consistency in branding and messaging will build customer trust and loyalty.

Up-Selling and Cross-Selling Using Email Marketing

Up-selling and cross-selling are techniques that encourage customers to buy additional products or services related to what they’ve already purchased. Email marketing can incorporate up-selling and cross-selling by offering related products or services. For example, if a customer purchases a laptop, you could email them offers for accessories such as a designer laptop bag, wireless earbuds, battery chargers, or cooling pads.

Look for Real Customer Engagement

One of the best email marketing tips is periodically reviewing your email lists and removing subscribers who no longer open or engage with your content. This might sound counterintuitive to increasing sales, but it’s a necessary practice for learning about your customers and creating authentic engagement. Pruning your subscribers helps your business in three ways: First, it improves the delivery rate of your messages by removing those who are inactive; Second, it cuts your delivery costs as you’re no longer paying to connect with inactive subscribers; and, Third, it allows you to focus on customers who engage with your business. If you’re hesitant to remove people from a distribution list, consider transferring less engaged subscribers to a new list that is contacted less frequently and with different messaging.

Evaluating Email Marketing

Evaluating your email campaigns is essential to understanding what works and what doesn’t so you can make adjustments accordingly. Several metrics are available for evaluating email campaigns, such as open rates, click-through rates, engagement time, and the results of A/B testing. A/B testing is when you split your recipients into two equal groups, each receiving a similar, yet different, version of your message. For example, Group A receives the regular newsletter, and Group B receives the newsletter with a specific variation (different images, a different CTA, or a different product description). While the frequency and length of A/B testing will vary based on your industry, on average, it typically involves five specific tests conducted over 6-8 weeks. By analyzing the results of a comprehensive A/B testing plan, you can determine what message elements perform well with your customers and improve click-through rates and purchases. 

A Trusted Partner for Email Marketing

Coalition Technologies specializes in omnichannel marketing campaigns for growth-oriented businesses. Our team can help you launch a new email marketing campaign or revitalize an existing one with best practices. Talk to a digital strategist for a custom-tailored plan to meet your needs and budget.