February 5, 2017 4 min read

This story originally appeared on PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit



Reportedly, 83 percent of marketers consider email their primary lead generation channel. While email marketing can be a cost-effective way to reach new prospects and stay in touch with existing customers, its popularity as a marketing tactic demands that you understand how to optimize your email campaigns in order to cut through the clutter.

Here are some important email marketing tips to keep in mind when you design your next email marketing campaign.

The day of delivery matters.

The “best time” to send emails depends on your unique product/service, customer base and content, but there are some general best practices email marketers can use to optimize when their campaigns arrive in inboxes. Based on the email provider’s analysis of billions of email campaigns, it found that emails sent on Thursdays generally receive the highest amount of opens, followed closely by those sent on a Tuesday. With the exception of campaigns promoting hobby and recreational content, its data indicates that weekends are the least ideal time to send an email marketing campaign.

Time your campaigns carefully.

The type of content your email marketing campaign promotes dictates the time of day it arrives in your inbox, too. MailChimp’s data suggests that:

Email with recreational content gets a better-than-average response when delivered on the weekend, as do some email marketing campaigns promoting retail and hobby-related content.

Hobby-related content email marketing responses are optimized when messages are delivered between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.; retail-related email content is most impactful when it arrives in inboxes between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Both data points suggest that B2C content may most likely be read when it’s in the recipient’s inbox before the traditional work day begins.

Government and nonprofit email marketing efforts tend to perform best when sent on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Spend time crafting the perfect subject line.

Your email’s subject line acts as the headline that will entice a prospect to open your email, or cause them to delete it. Some experts recommend subject lines that lead with actionable language (using words such as “save,” “learn,” “take” and “see”). When you eliminate nouns and pronouns, your subject line is concise but impactful: Tell recipients exactly what your email can offer them and why they’ll benefit from opening it.

Segment your email lists.

Personalized content is key to a successful email marketing campaign. It may begin with communicating that you know the person’s name, but it also demands that you consistently send relevant content and offers that match their interests based on their search history on your website, past responses to your other email messages and purchase history. Your email copy should address these points, and focus on second-person language (you, yours) that puts the customer front and center throughout the campaign.

While it takes time and strategy to segment and manage a targeted email marketing list, it’s worth the investment. According to one study, the majority of respondents said most of their email marketing campaigns are intended to drive either revenue or customer engagement, and that segmented and targeted email campaigns generate nearly 60 percent of their email marketing-related revenue.

Test your emails before you send.

According to Litmus.com, more than half of all email messages were opened on a mobile device in 2015. In addition to ensuring emails can be opened and read as clearly on a mobile device as a traditional computer screen, test the appearance and functionality of your emails in various email clients to ensure that they look as you intend (before you hit send). Litmus reports that while Apple iPhone, Gmail, Apple iPad, Android and Apple Mail are the most popular email clients this year, Outlook remains popular as well.

Email marketing can be an effective way to drive business, but it requires that you invest time into a strategy aimed at the right people with the right messages at the right time. Incorporate these best practices into your next email marketing campaign to improve its impact, and ideally, the ROI you see from it.