Good email habits to get into

Email marketing is an important piece of your content marketing strategy that lets you stay in front of a very important group of people. But no matter if you are a seasoned email veteran or just building your email list for the first time, it can unfortunately become easy to fall into bad email habits.

Look, I get it, creating emails isn’t exactly the most exhilarating kind of content creation. But inconsistency, corner-cutting, and poor decision making with your email newsletters not only reflects badly on you but it also squanders an absolutely perfect opportunity for engaging with your audience. When someone opens an email, it isn’t like social media where your message is surrounded by competing messages. You have that moment of  undivided attention. If your email marketing game isn’t on, you not only waste this opportunity but you decrease the chances of ever having this opportunity again in the future.

Developing and implementing the following email habits into your regular planning and sending process will help keep your readers happy and your emails worth reading.

Plan ahead

Email newsletters aren’t something that you should send out willy nilly as a way to check a box on your marketing plan. Email marketing is still an integral part of your content marketing strategy alongside blogging and social media. Plan ahead to coordinate messaging and content among your email, social media, blogs, and everything else to make sure everything is consistent and plays into your pre-established content calendar.

The people you are connecting with every time you send an email aren’t some random group either. The people on your email list are there because they have interacted with you before, whether they downloaded a resource or signed up for your newsletter, and are now part of your sales funnel. The things you share with them over email need to be planned out to have a powerful message behind them and encourage them to take action.

Be consistent

If you promise the people who sign up for your email a weekly newsletter, you had better make sure you can deliver on that promise. Before you start your email marketing program, take a step back, evaluate, and be realistic with how much time you have to create new and engaging content and what kind of send schedule is going to work for you. If you send out 5 emails one month and then follow it up with only one the next month, this inconsistency is going to become evident to your readers.

On our annual Internet Marketing Survey, we see many small businesses find their groove by sending their email newsletters out on a one per month basis. Once a month gives you plenty of time to plan ahead, create solid content, and develop a consistent schedule that won’t frustrate your readers and won’t take up a bunch of your time working on a newsletter almost every day.

Resend your campaigns

Even if you have finely tuned your email send times and have a list full of people who regularly engage with your newsletter, not everyone on your list is going to be in a position to open every single newsletter you send right when you send it. Sometimes they are in a meeting or busy or are just already dealing with a flooded inbox and don’t have time to read your email and then soon it gets smothered and pushed down deeper and deeper into their inbox as more emails come in. Those people may be interested, they may have just not been available.

This is why it is good to get into the habit of resending your email newsletters. Not to everyone, mind you, but just the people on your list who didn’t open it the first time. Checking the early results of your campaign can help you make a list, and then a week or so after the original send time you can send it out again just to them. That gives these folks another opportunity to see your content and opens the door to picking up an additional boost in your open and click-through rate for a campaign.

Personalize your emails

Adding personalization to your email newsletters is a great way to help them stand out in a crowded inbox and makes them more enticing for readers. This email habit isn’t only effective, it is incredibly easy to incorporate into your email creation process. Most email marketing tools like Constant Contact have really easy ways of adding simple or complex customization to your emails, from adding the person’s name to the subject line to adding or excluding certain pieces of content based on what list the person is on.

Why is email customization important? Making an email feel as tailor-made to the individual as possible makes them more appealing to open. If someone is staring down a fully-loaded inbox of emails, the one that has their name in the subject line is going to stand out the most and be more likely to open. Adding or removing content from the email based on who they are, what their interests are, and what list they are on increases the value of your emails for the reader and amps up their interest in opening your emails whenever they roll into their inbox.

Don’t buy lists

It is kind of incredible that in the year 2020 some people still think buying lists of names and emails to grow their list is still a viable strategy, but here we are. For the hundredth time: DO NOT BUY YOUR LISTS! The contacts you get from these lists are not high-quality prospects. They didn’t ask to hear from you, they may not be interested in your services, they may not even know who you are, and you’ll probably just end up with a flood of annoyed people flagging you as spam.

Develop the habit of naturally growing a permission-based email list with people who are genuinely interested prospects from conversations you have had, people who have downloaded a resource, attended a webinar, or signed up for your newsletter on their own volition. This helps make sure you aren’t wasting your time sending emails to people who don’t care what you have to say and are genuinely interested in your services.

With the help of these good email habits, your emails and their performance will be all the better.