Your email marketing wants to stand out for when you hit a subscriber’s inbox.
Email subscriptions are a great way to promote a product or service and spread a branded message. But if your email subscribers aren’t opening them, you are just wasting your time.
Making your email stand out in a prospect’s inbox requires a thoroughly thought-out strategy. To make your email marketing campaign more effective, there are many things you need to consider.
You should know who you want to reach, what you want them to know, and your goals.
This email marketing checklist will help you write more effective emails.
In this checklist, you’ll find 20 points you should remember before sending an email. If you follow these guidelines, you’re sure to get more opens and conversions.
Read on to learn the top things you should consider when crafting an email campaign!
1. Define Your Audience
When a prospect reads your email, it should seem like it’s written for the individual. To write a strong email, it’s essential to know your audience.
Think about your ideal client and their pain points. What benefits can you offer them, and what language will resonate with them?
2. Refine Your Email List
Your email list won’t do you any good if every email address is outdate.
You should go through your email subscriptions periodically and clean the list up.
Specifically, you want to remove these from your email list:
- Invalid emails
- General addresses with domains like “support” or “info”
- Subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails for a long time
3. Ensure Subscribers Are Signed Up
For your email marketing campaign to be effective, you must ensure that email subscribers want to get emails from you.
A good email marketing strategy is to make your opt-in process require confirmation.
If everyone reading your emails is opted in, they are more likely to match your ideal customer.
4. Group Subscribers
There are a few reasons to divide your email list into groups. For offers only available to specific subscribers, for example, you’ll want to send the offer only to them and not your whole list.
Segmenting your list will also help you avoid getting your emails marked as spam.
5. Provide Value in Your Email
The quickest way to lose subscribers is to send an email full of fluff with no substance.
Your email copy is the most important part of your email.
You can spend all day optimizing your emails and getting a high open rate, but if your email copy is bad, your target audience will unsubscribe quickly.
Reward your subscribers for reading your email by providing value, whether it’s information, an offer, or an opportunity. Check your email spam score to ensure your emails don’t get flagged.
6. Write Conversationally
Your emails shouldn’t read like a doctoral thesis. You also don’t want them to come across as robotic.
People are more likely to read an email with a conversational tone.
7. End With a Strong Call to Action
What do you want to happen when your subscriber finishes reading your email? You might want them to click a link or accept a limited-time offer.
Your email should clearly tell the reader what to do at the end of it.
8. Have a Consistent Brand Voice
Think about what your brand voice should be. Do you want to come across as friendly, professional, or funny?
Whatever your brand voice, once you pick one, stick to it. Your subscribers will find your emails jarring if your tone varies from email to email.
9. Use First Names
Greetings like “hi,” or “dear reader” are impersonal and clearly signify a mass email. Use the subscriber’s first name in the subject line and greeting whenever possible.
10. Don’t Get Too Technical
If the reader gets bogged down in overly technical language, they won’t finish reading your email. You should avoid industry-specific jargon and acronyms.
Write your emails in a way that someone completely new to a topic will understand.
11. Use a Template
Not only will a good template save you time, but it can also result in a better email. Once you have a template you like that has good results, you can use it for multiple campaigns.
Templates can also help you avoid simple formatting mistakes.
Make sure to look at the plain text version of your email.
12. Images
Using images thoughtfully can add to your email and make it more visually appealing. Images will also help you avoid creating an unreadable wall of text.
Be sure to include alt text with every image.
Having too many images in your email can trigger spam filters.
13. Subject Line
Your subject line is probably the most important part of your email. Your subscribers decide whether or not to open your email based on the subject line.
A good subject line creates curiosity in the reader, so write one that raises a question in their mind. However, make sure your email answers the reader’s question.
Avoid all capital or all lowercase subject lines as well, as these generally look spammy.
Some email clients will allow you to A/B test an email subject line, and you can pre-send to a list, and it will automatically pick the winner and send that to the rest of your list.
14. Make It Easy to Unsubscribe
While you don’t want to lose subscribers, they’re more likely to report spam or block your emails if it isn’t easy to unsubscribe. Include an obvious link in every email where the reader can unsubscribe.
15. Check Your Sender Name
If your sender name gets flagged, your subscribers won’t even get the chance to read your email. Avoid any emails that will get marked as spam or no-reply emails.
Before they even look at the subject line, your subscribers notice the sender. Make sure your sender name appears reputable.
16. Use A/B Testing
To ensure emails are performing well, send two versions and see which works best.
Use the better-performing email to guide how you write future emails.
17. Test All Links
If you include links, always test them before you send out an email.
Your email will come across as careless if any of the links in it go to error pages.
In particular, any links to an offer page are critical to your email.
18. Optimize for Mobile and Desktop
Some subscribers may use their phones to check emails, while others prefer desktops.
Make sure your email doesn’t get reformatted incorrectly before sending it out to your list.
19. Send at the Right Time of Day
People read emails at different times of day, and the best time depends on your industry.
If you aren’t sure when your ideal customers are reading emails, test a few different times of day to see which performs best.
20. Monitor Analytics
The process of crafting your emails doesn’t stop when you send one. After sending each email, use an analytics tool to check open rates and conversions.
