Email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels available to businesses today. With an average ROI of $42 for every dollar spent, it consistently outperforms social media, paid search, and display advertising.
But here’s the reality: simply sending emails isn’t enough anymore.
Your inbox is competing with dozens of other messages every day. Your subscribers are bombarded with promotional content, newsletters, and updates from countless brands. The difference between email campaigns that drive real results and those that end up in the trash comes down to execution and strategy.
Email marketing is a great way to connect with customers and promote your business. When done correctly, it builds relationships, nurtures leads through your sales funnel, and creates loyal customers who become brand advocates. But, like any marketing strategy, there are best email marketing campaign practices to follow to ensure your campaigns are successful and compliant with modern regulations and user expectations.
Here are some of the best practices for email marketing that can transform your campaigns from generic mass mailings into powerful revenue-generating tools:
Best Email Marketing Practices For Successful Campaigns
1. Build Your Subscriber List Strategically
You may already have an email list of clients and prospects, but you should always be working to build upon this list in ethical and sustainable ways. Quality trumps quantity when it comes to email subscribers. A smaller list of engaged subscribers who actually want to hear from you will always outperform a massive list of disinterested contacts.
First, make sure it’s easy to subscribe to your email list through your website. Your signup forms should be prominently placed, clearly communicate the value subscribers will receive, and minimize friction in the signup process. Consider offering lead magnets like free guides, exclusive discounts, or valuable content in exchange for email addresses.
Popular brands do a great job at collecting email subscribers on their blog by offering content upgrades, exit-intent popups, and inline subscription forms that feel natural rather than intrusive. The key is making your value proposition clear: what will subscribers get that they can’t find elsewhere?
You can also build your list through more traditional means that complement your digital efforts. If you have a booth at an industry conference, provide an option for people to sign up for your newsletter using tablets or simple signup sheets. Include QR codes on printed materials that link directly to mobile-optimized signup forms. Even if you don’t end up closing a sale directly at the conference, getting someone to sign up for your email list can turn into a business opportunity down the road as you nurture the relationship.
Cross-promotion with complementary businesses, referral programs that reward existing subscribers for bringing in new ones, and social media campaigns that drive email signups can all contribute to sustainable list growth.
2. Talk With Your Audience, Not At Them
Unlike the old system of direct mail, where communication was purely one-way, in email marketing, if you’ve got the right content and approach, you are starting to actually engage in a conversation with clients, not simply throwing information at them. This conversational approach builds trust, encourages responses, and creates a sense of community around your brand.
This conversation starts with three basic steps that work together to create engaging email experiences:
Great Subject Line Writing: To ensure that people open your email, which they need to do before they can engage with your company or take any desired action. Your subject line is your first and sometimes only chance to make an impression. A dull subject line encourages people to just hit delete without a second thought. Test different approaches like curiosity-driven headlines, benefit-focused statements, or personalized references to see what resonates with your specific audience. And so, it is why many say writing a good marketing email is important.
An Entertaining and Distinctive Voice: To make sure that once the email has been opened, it’s actually read and also engages the reader’s interest rather than being skimmed or immediately deleted. Your brand voice should be consistent across all emails while remaining authentic and relatable. Whether you’re professional and informative or casual and humorous, maintain that personality throughout your communications.
Tailored Content: Which is customized based on the subscriber’s demographic information, purchase history, website behavior, or previously collected data, and encourages them to take up an offer, engage with you, or even pass it on to other prospective clients. Segmentation allows you to send relevant content that speaks directly to different customer groups’ needs and interests.
3. Make All Your Emails Personal, Beyond Just Names
Whenever possible, add a personal element to your emails that goes beyond basic name insertion. Most email tools allow you to enter shortcodes that will be replaced with the recipient’s name when the email is sent out, but true personalization runs much deeper than surface-level customization.
Use behavioral data to personalize content based on past purchases, browsing history, or engagement patterns. If someone frequently opens emails about specific product categories, prioritize that content for them. Send birthday offers, anniversary emails celebrating when they joined your list, or recommendations based on their preferences and past interactions.
Geographic personalization can make your emails more relevant by referencing local events, weather, or regional preferences. Time zone optimization ensures your emails arrive at optimal times for each subscriber’s location.
Dynamic content blocks allow you to show different images, offers, or messages to different segments within the same email campaign, creating a more tailored experience without requiring separate campaigns for each group.
4. Ensure That Your Emails Are Not Sent to Spam
If your carefully constructed emails are sent directly to spam folders, they’ll never see the light of day, and certainly won’t generate any results or return on your marketing investment. Email deliverability is a complex topic that involves multiple technical and content factors working together.
The first step here is making sure your recipients have opted in to your emails through clear, unambiguous consent so you aren’t running afoul of any regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, or other privacy laws. Maintain detailed records of how and when people subscribed to your list.
Technical factors that impact deliverability include setting up proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain, maintaining a good sender reputation by monitoring bounce rates and spam complaints, using a reputable email service provider with good relationships with major ISPs, and warming up new domains or IP addresses gradually.
Content factors include avoiding spam trigger words in subject lines and body text, maintaining a good text-to-image ratio, including your physical address and clear unsubscribe links, and keeping engagement rates high through relevant, valuable content.
5. Make Sure Your Copy Looks Clean and Crisp
This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people send out emails that look like amateur websites from the 1990s or appear broken on modern devices. If someone has opened your email because of an engaging subject line, you want to keep their interest with a professional presentation and easy readability.
This means several key design and formatting principles:
Using short paragraphs and ensuring that keywords and phrases relevant to your readers stand out through strategic use of bold text, headers, and white space. Long walls of text intimidate readers and reduce engagement. Break up content into digestible chunks that can be quickly scanned.
Making use of bullet points to let people quickly browse the content and take in the vital points without having to read every word. Busy subscribers often skim emails first before deciding whether to read in detail, so make your key points easily discoverable.
Using pictures properly and strategically. Any images should be there merely to illustrate your message and enhance understanding, not to replace important textual content. This is important to remember as many email service providers block images in their default settings, so your message should be complete even without images loading. Large images also make your email more likely to be sent to spam or make them impossible to view on mobile devices with slower connections.
Consistent branding elements like colors, fonts, and logos help build recognition and trust. Template consistency across campaigns creates a professional appearance that subscribers learn to recognize.
6. Make the Links and Call-to-Actions Obvious
The aim of your email marketing campaign is to drive specific actions, whether that’s increasing traffic to your landing pages, generating sales, or encouraging social sharing. No clicks means no conversions, and no conversions mean no return on your marketing investment; it really is that simple.
So make your links obvious and give readers multiple opportunities to interact throughout your email. This is helped with strong calls to action that speak to emotions, create urgency, and clearly communicate the value of clicking. A simple “click here” just won’t cut it these days when subscribers are overwhelmed with generic promotional messages.
Instead, use action-oriented language that describes the benefit: “Get Your Free Guide,” “Start Your Trial Today,” or “See How Much You’ll Save.” Use contrasting colors, buttons instead of text links, and strategic placement to draw attention to your primary call-to-action.
Consider the hierarchy of your calls-to-action have one primary action you want most people to take, with secondary actions for different segments or interests. Too many competing calls-to-action can create decision paralysis and reduce overall engagement.
7. Make It Easy to Unsubscribe From Your Email Campaign List
Your email marketing campaign needs to be respectful of subscriber preferences and focused on building long-term relationships rather than short-term gains. After all, no one wants to buy anything from a pushy or manipulative business, at least not willingly or repeatedly.
It may seem counterintuitive that you are cutting off the ‘conversation’ by giving clients the chance to opt-out, but if a user wants to remove their name from your lists and can’t do so easily, they’ll flag emails as spam which will cause significant deliverability problems for your future campaigns and damage your sender reputation.
Make your unsubscribe link clearly visible in your email footer, ensure the process takes only one or two clicks, and consider offering alternatives like reducing email frequency or changing email preferences instead of complete removal. Some subscribers might prefer monthly updates instead of weekly emails, or only want to hear about specific product categories.
A graceful unsubscribe process actually builds brand respect and can lead to re-subscriptions in the future when circumstances change.
8. Optimize for Mobile Devices
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? For many people, after turning off their alarm, the first thing they grab is their smartphone to check messages, news, and emails. With over 60% of emails being opened on mobile devices, if your emails aren’t optimized for viewing on these smaller screens, you’re potentially missing out on a huge number of engagement opportunities and conversions.
Mobile optimization goes beyond just responsive design. Consider how your subject lines appear when truncated on mobile screens, ensure your font sizes are readable without zooming, make buttons large enough for easy tapping, and test how images scale and load on different devices and connection speeds.
Single-column layouts work better on mobile than complex multi-column designs. Keep your most important content and call-to-action above the fold so subscribers don’t need to scroll to understand your message and take action.
Test your emails on actual devices, not just browser tools, to see how they really appear to your subscribers. Loading speed becomes even more critical on mobile, especially for subscribers on cellular connections.
9. Embrace Continuous Testing and Optimization
Some email tools have built-in A/B testing modules that allow you to compare the results of different versions of your emails, but even if you don’t have access to these advanced features, you can run simple tests on your own to continuously improve performance.
Try sending your emails on different days of the week or different times of the day to see when you get the best open rates and engagement from your specific audience. Test different subject line approaches, email lengths, call-to-action buttons, and content formats to understand what resonates most with your subscribers.
Beyond timing and subject lines, test different email structures, personalization approaches, and content types. Some audiences prefer educational content while others respond better to promotional offers. Some segments engage more with video content while others prefer detailed written explanations.
Document your results and build a testing calendar so you’re continuously optimizing based on data rather than assumptions. Small improvements in open rates, click rates, and conversion rates compound over time to create significant improvements in overall campaign performance.
10. Track Your Email Campaign Data and Measure What Matters
Along with testing, it’s crucial to look at all the data you can collect from your emails to see what is and isn’t working for your specific business goals and audience. Most email marketing tools provide basic information on open rates and click rates, which are a great starting point for understanding engagement levels.
These basic metrics are a great start, but with the appropriate setup and integration, you can learn even more about your email performance and its impact on your bottom line. Track conversions, revenue per email, customer lifetime value of email subscribers versus other channels, and how email marketing contributes to your overall sales funnel.
Advanced tracking might include website behavior after email clicks, social sharing of your content, forward rates and list growth from referrals, and long-term engagement patterns that help predict customer retention and value.
Use this data to inform your content strategy, segmentation approach, and resource allocation. If certain types of emails consistently drive higher engagement and conversions, prioritize creating more of that content.
The Foundation for Email Marketing: Always Provide Value
Great email marketing ultimately comes down to providing genuine value to your audience with every single message you send. Each email you send should have something meaningful in it for your subscribers, something that makes their life easier, solves a problem, entertains them, or helps them achieve their goals.
Be it educational information about your industry that helps them make better decisions, operational messages about your service that keep them informed and confident in their choice, or marketing messages about the products you offer that genuinely benefit their situation, every email needs to provide some sort of positive value for the reader. Otherwise, that message is just going to end up in the trash, and worse, it erodes the trust and relationship you’ve worked hard to build.
Value can come in many forms: exclusive insights, early access to sales, helpful tips and tutorials, industry news and analysis, or simply entertaining content that brightens someone’s day. The key is understanding your audience well enough to know what they consider valuable and consistently delivering on that expectation.
When you focus on value first and selling second, you build a loyal audience that actually looks forward to your emails and views your brand as a trusted resource rather than just another company trying to sell them something.
Conclusion
Email marketing success doesn’t happen by accident. It requires strategic planning, consistent execution, and ongoing optimization based on data and subscriber feedback. These ten best email marketing practices provide a foundation for creating email campaigns that not only reach your subscribers’ inboxes but also drive meaningful engagement and business results.
Remember that email marketing is ultimately about building relationships with real people who have chosen to hear from you. Respect that privilege by consistently delivering value, maintaining professional standards, and focusing on long-term relationship building rather than short-term promotional gains.
Start by implementing one or two of these practices, measure the results, and gradually incorporate more sophisticated strategies as you see what works best for your specific audience and business goals. With patience and persistence, email marketing can become one of your most effective customer acquisition and retention tools.
1 thought on “10 Email Marketing Best Practices For Top-Performing Campaigns”
Great information shared. Really, enjoyed reading this post. Thank you, author, for sharing this post. Appreciated. Would like to hear more about the email campaign types in upcoming posts.