The Whitelist

Email best practices are those practices that improve your email marketing results, whether you’re improving your email delivery rate or your email copywriting or how your emails render in various email clients. As an email solutions provider, we at ClickMail are probably much more aware of how numerous these email best practices are, as we strive to make sure our email marketing clients learn them and use them.
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What is it about copywriting, and even email copywriting, that makes people change the way they communicate? Our in-house copywriter is constantly preaching “write like you talk,” but quite often, people don’t.

There’s something about picking up a pen or sitting at a keyboard that brings out another persona, it seems, even in the email marketing world. But in email marketing, we’re not interested in pretty prose or stuffy statements. We want results. Period. And if you’re not careful, your email copywriting can decrease your email marketing results.
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Email marketing is made up of many moving parts. There are technical parts like the software, policy parts like CAN SPAM compliance, tricky parts like the email delivery, email design parts like alt text, and last and certainly not least, the word parts.
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Quick, what are two elements of your email marketing campaign you can easily tweak to improve your email marketing ROI?

If you guessed subject line and email body, you’re right…or maybe you already got a peek at this month’s ClickMail Marketer.

Although there are other ways to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing, email marketers still do need to pay attention to open rates and click throughs. And the two factors which will influence those metrics the most are 1) email subject lines and 2) email copywriting in the body of the email.
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It’s springtime! The birds are singing, buds are bursting and grass is greening. Could your email marketing results use some freshening up too? If so, check out MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Awards Gallery for inspiration.

With 43 inspiring email marketing award winners’ examples and descriptions, you could consider this an email marketing best practices tutorial. Seriously. Take some time to skim it, then go back through and learn from tried-and-true techniques for:
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The other day we saw an article that dismissed the use of numbers as the basis for an article. We’ve all seen these types of articles: 100 Ways to Optimize Your Web Site; 10 Tips for Better Email Subject Lines; 43 Things You Should Know About Email Marketing. And so on.

The author’s point was, be careful about these types of headlines because they often lead you to articles that lack substance. The articles are usually just recycled information, he claimed.
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If you read this blog with any regularity, you’ve seen plenty of references to email best practices. Pick any facet of email marketing, and you’ll find numerous email best practices you should adhere to in order to maximize your email marketing ROI: email copywriting, email subject lines, email delivery, email everything…

…including email design.
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Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, social media, social networking, tagging, blogging…there’s a lot of noise going on in the online marketing world. Are you letting it pull your focus away from your email marketing efforts? Beware of the latest and greatest shiny new thing if you haven’t yet done all you can to maximize your email marketing ROI.

Chances are, with all the moving parts that make up email marketing, there are some moving parts of your own email marketing campaign that can use some refinement. Rather than look outside of your existing email marketing program to try to up your open rates, click throughs and conversions, like adding video or a link to Facebook or something like that, first look inside to see where you can tweak and improve…and increase your email marketing ROI.
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The holidays are over and it’s back to work, fellow email marketers! Time to get refocused on email marketing ROI through better email delivery, more relevant email copywriting, and email design that renders right no matter the email client.

It’s also time for a reminder of upcoming email marketing events that will get you up to speed and in the know about email marketing tactics and techniques.
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Even permission-based email marketing can go awry if you deploy an incorrect email marketing campaign. Yes, those folks opted in to get your email promotions and email newsletter. But they won’t stay opted in if you send them an email with broken links, typos in the subject line, or irrelevant content.
As an email marketing vendor, we’ve put together a quick checklist for just before you send that email:

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