Email Marketing Best Practices
Our Blog and our Knowledge Base are filled with articles covering advice on best email marketing practices. Our Live Webinars offer real-time information and interaction with our Education Team on some very useful topics.
If you're interested in learning more about email marketing, these resources are available to browse and use.
The purpose of this article is to collect some of the most important practices successful email marketers use and we tend to write and speak about.
Whether you're having issues with the deliverability of your messages, or are simply looking to compare your well-functioning campaign against some suggestions, this information should offer some guidance.
Email Best Practices
In a broad sense, make sure that whether you are adding subscribers or they are adding themselves, it is quite clear to them that they're giving you permission to receive email messages.
More specifically:
- Don't use purchased leads
- Ask people if they want your email and don't simply assume that they do based on another transaction with you or your business
- Use Confirmed Opt-In to protect your sender reputation
Your subscribers will give you that same type of reception (through complaints and unsubscribes) if you don't stick to meeting the expectations you've set for your email campaign.
Start by focusing on maximizing the value of each message you send to your subscribers, and stick to it.
In some cases, however, subscribers will respond to your email messages asking to be removed from your list. To avoid issues:
- Use a reply address you check regularly
- Manually remove people who ask to be unsubscribed
- Complaints
- Unsubscribes
Set expectations for how frequently you're going to send messages to subscribers and stick with it. You probably don't want to send every day, but you certainly don't want to wait several months between each message you send.
- It has a plain text version, even if you've written one in HTML. Unless you've changed settings, AWeber's message editor will automatically create a plain text version of your message for you.
- You've avoided using excessive punctuation within words and phrases
- There is a sufficiently high text to HTML ratio -- messages should not consist of large images with little text
- You haven't hyperlinked URLs in HTML messages
Email users add only certain chosen parties -- senders who they know, trust, and expect email from.
Because of this, senders who appear there sometimes get better email deliverability often with an added benefit of images appearing automatically.
Along with the subject of your message, the first thing your subscribers see of your messages when they're browsing their inboxes will be the reply address and/or the "Name" you also set.
You reply address and name should be:
- Recognizable
- Hosted at the same or similar domain as the website subscribers signed up at
Instead, get started by:
- Publishing a form to your website
- Setting up your autoresponder and possibly one or two other messages
Once you have a basic set up, you can move onto optimizing your campaign including:
- Considering HTML versions of your messages
- Customizing the branding of your campaign
- Targeting specific segments of your lists