Crafting successful email campaigns could quite possibly yield the highest ROI of all of your marketing initiatives. When it comes to email marketing, there are a lot of marketers out there who say you should ALWAYS do this or NEVER do that. Below are what I consider the BEST and not-so-best marketing practices.
The Do’s:
- DO keep your email subject lines between 30 and 50 characters
- DO use double opt-in when growing your list
- DO have a good balance of images to text
- DO send an email during the middle of the week
The Don’ts
- DON’T use words like “free” or “deal” or “discount” in an email subject line
- DON’T use a pop-up (or pop-over) to collect email addresses
- DON’T send a mostly-text email
- DON’T send a mostly-image email
- DON’T send an email with one big image
- DON’T buy a list
- DON’T use ALL CAPS in an email subject line
- DON’T use animated gifs in the body of an email
- DON’T put the unsubscribe button or link at the top of an email (or make it obvious)
- DON’T send an email at the end of the day
- DON’T send more than one email per day