Rules for Successful Email Marketing Campaigns: Learn Do’s and Don’ts

If you are a B2B marketer, you might know how difficult it is to craft an email that compels the receiver to open it. It is not just about the design or your subject line; there are many other factors one must take note of before hitting the send button. If you are unaware of it, go through the points mentioned in this article. We have listed a set of dos, and don’ts one must follow to execute the email newsletter campaigns successfully.

Do’s

1. Make Unsubscribe Option Quickly Accessible

Always make sure that you provide an unsubscribe option in your every email. Also, the choice must be made easily accessible. If the user is unable to unsubscribe quickly, he will end up hitting the spam button. So, now you know the importance of this point. Besides, the Anti-Spam and other privacy laws are stronger in almost every part of the world. Hence every marketer must employ this method if they wish to stay away from the penalties.

The research conducted by Litmus and Fluent stated that 50% of people had marked an email as spam because they could not unsubscribe from the list quickly. Did you know that spam complaints cause much harm to your brand than unsubscribes? Yes, it does. So, better follow the below given methods and do not hurt your brand value.

  • Include a prominent unsubscribe button in the footer of every email you send.
  • Make sure that the unsubscribe page is accessible easily without login details.
  • Do not include more than two clicks for your unsubscribe option.

2. Have a Clean Database

Always keep your email database clean. You might have a big database with hundreds of thousands of records in it. But it will be of no use if it has erroneous or missing data. It will never help you in reaching the right audience. Quality matters a lot than quantity. Keep your B2B Email List fresh so that you can efficiently manage new customers, subscribers, as well as unsubscriptions. Perform quality checks and regularly update your database to keep it free from inaccuracy.

Remove all the wrong contacts from the list and save your time as well as brand reputation. You must adequately manage the bounces; otherwise, you may end up paying the penalty for email clients when the number of bounces reaches some level. Hence take note of this point before planning to execute the email campaigns.

3. Always Have Double Opt-In

Double opt-in is one of the best ways to minimize the bounce rate. Whenever a user clicks on the subscribe button, you must provide them with one more step for confirming the email. You can do by automatically sending the confirmation link to their email address and asking them to click on that link. This method is to ensure that the email address entered while subscribing for your newsletter truly belongs to that particular person.

As mentioned above, this strategy will reduce the bounce rate and also helps you to maintain a clean email list from the beginning. So, you do not have to struggle to remove the wrong address in the later stage. Besides, it results in a high delivery rate of your email marketing campaigns.

4. Make Your Campaigns Comply With Law

Many laws were designed to ensure the privacy of the recipient’s data. GDPR, Anti-Spam, Can-Spam, and CASL are some of the famous rules that are accepted and followed by various regions across the globe. And, these laws dictate some conditions that every email marketers must follow to execute the campaigns legally. The common intention of every law is to protect the email address from spammers.

If you are planning to execute the email campaigns, follow the below steps to comply with the privacy law:

  • Ensure that the person has permitted you to send the emails.
  • Do not include misleading or incorrect information in the header fields to trick the user to open.
  • You must specify that your email is a promotional material and not a personal one.
  • You must mention a valid postal address of your business in the email campaigns.
  • Do not forget to provide a clear opt-out option in every email.
  • Do not charge a fee for opting-out and honor their request within ten business days.

5. Always Be Consistent About Your Promises

Try to provide a valuable service to your subscribers or prospects always. If you have ever made any promise while asking them to subscribe for your newsletter, do not forget it. Be consistent with your words. People subscribe to your brand or channel with some expectations. And, you must fulfill their expectation if you do not want to see them going away or mark your email as spam.

If a person has subscribed to receive notification about offers, do not annoy them by sending them the emails other than promotional contents. Always send relevant materials that will be of help to the readers. You must respect their choice of interest and send the newsletters accordingly.

Also Read: 100 Email Marketing Statistics To Drive Your Email Marketing Strategy

Don’ts

1. Sending Unauthenticated Emails

You must always confirm your legitimacy while sending the emails. Do not post any emails with no proper authentication. Nobody likes to receive the email which does not mention it’s “From” address or does not specify what it contains. Also, the incoming email providers will find difficulty in confirming the authenticity and may report it as spam. Know more about the protocols that evaluate and judge the legitimacy of the email below.

  • Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): This authoritative protocol validates the domain and also the email content.
  • SPF: This protocol verifies whether the recipients receive the incoming emails from an IP authorized by you.
  • Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): It is an email validation protocol that detects as well as prevents email spoofing, and usage of forged sender addresses.

2. Ignoring Customer’s Level of Engagement

Before sending a universal message to all your clients, you must understand their level of engagement. It is always a best practice to segment the database you have. Separate the least active subscribers from the most active ones. Craft an exclusive message for the least interested ones in such a way that they should be curious to open the email. But make sure that the incoming email provider must not detect it as spam.

Apart from this strategy, we recommend you to segment the email list based on content types such as a newsletter, promotional messages, and other.

3. Not Having Well-Scheduled Plan

After segmenting the list or identifying the user’s level of engagement, you cannot send the emails directly. You must have a well-scheduled plan with you. Fix an appropriate timing or day of the week to leave your message in the subscriber’s inbox. Send at least two emails in a month if you do not want your readers to forget your brand. If you were not following this strategy, we advise you to do so from now onwards.

Some studies have revealed the best time to perform email campaigns. Take a look at it.

  • Tuesday and Thursday are the best days of the week to send emails.
  • The researchers have found that 6 a.m., 10 a.m., 2 p.m., and 8 p.m. are the best time to drop your email.

4. Not Using Clean HTML Codes

Always try to use clean HTML codes and nested tables in your emails. Do not use JavaScript, Flash, or ActiveX forms because it does not work correctly in most of the email clients. Some spam emails come with such formatting to hide the bad stuff behind it and attract the humans to click on it. If your email provider detects it, such messages will be sent to spam folder right away. Besides, these dirty codes will increase the size of your email. Such emails take much longer to load and impact the recipient’s experience.

Check these things to make sure your code is clean:

  • No wrong tags, incorrectly nested tags, or too many closure tags.
  • Do not use the font color similar to the background color.
  • Stop including embedded Javascript
  • Try to avoid large font sizes
  • Check for invalid font faces
  • Do not use an iFrame
  • Do not include too many attachments
  • Avoid characters which are not standard ASCII characters
  • Check for blank lines in the base64 coding
  • Email size should not be more than 102kb to prevent clipping in Gmail.

Wrapping Up

Follow all the tips mentioned in this write-up if you want to improve the delivery rate of your email campaigns. Do not just send the promotional email; choose the right time, right message, as well as the right audience to reap maximum benefit from the campaigns. Make the best use of the traditional marketing channel to reach all your target audience effortlessly.