Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Did you know that 49% of consumers say they’d like to receive an email from a company every week? Email is a marketing channel you can rely on, but results can sometimes feel hard to achieve. Also, even when your emails get good reactions, you can still maximize every campaign with just a few simple tweaks.
So, let’s get into the seven things you should checkmark to ensure your email marketing is set up for success.
Related: How to Start Using Email to Market Your Small Business
1. Be protective of your email list
Your database is your main email marketing asset, and how you maintain it has a dramatic impact on your results. First, you must build it the right way, but gathering subscribers responsibly isn’t enough.
A significant segment of those subscribers’ contacts will decay: On average, 20% of email addresses become invalid every year. Poor data quality is a prevalent reason for low click rates, as bounces cause email deliverability problems. To avoid that and land your campaigns in the inbox, validate your database every quarter.
2. Create different emails for target segments
Sending the same email to your entire audience isn’t a good way to go about increasing your engagement. Your customers and prospects are in different stages of interaction with your company, and each stage requires a different approach. Segmenting your database and targeting those groups with specific messages can give you a 14% higher open rate. While email list segmentation can seem daunting, once you set it up, you’ll be able to refine your strategy and see better clicks.
Related: How to build your email list the right way
3. Set up a welcome email
As an entrepreneur in the email space, I subscribe to many company newsletters and I’m surprised to see how many of them don’t send out a welcome email. If you haven’t set up one, you’re missing out on the opportunity to connect with your new subscribers right away.
Welcome emails are so popular that most people expect them. So don’t leave your new audience hanging – send out a short email packed with great resources or just a “thank you” for allowing you in their inboxes.
4. Refine your subject lines
Before you hit send on your next marketing email, ask yourself if the subject line does it justice. Does it convey your message succinctly while enticing people to click? It pays to spend more time polishing up your subject as 64% of people say they judge an email by its subject line. Also, if your email provider allows it, make sure to follow the subject with a compelling preview text. Sometimes, that short copy can carry more weight than the subject line itself.
5. Adjust your sending frequency
Sending emails regularly has two benefits: It builds brand awareness and helps your email deliverability. For instance, if you have an email newsletter, it’s best to send it out on the same day of the week or month. However, there’s something to keep in mind with marketing emails that aim to sell – such as drip campaigns. Such email sequences can be overwhelming for some of your subscribers. Your content may be high-quality, but if people can’t keep up with the number of emails you send, they won’t engage.
To test whether your audience is experiencing this fatigue, consider sending fewer emails for three months. Any improvement in your performance will steer you toward the right sending schedule.
6. Test your design and email deliverability
We all test our emails to check whether they look good on both desktop and mobile. Design issues can cause your audience to abandon your email within seconds, not to mention the poor impression it leaves.
Aside from design, you can also test your email deliverability to find out if your email will land in the inbox. Using an inbox tester, you can even get detailed results on your performance with different email providers. Thus, if your email goes to spam, you can try to fix the issue so you can reach your subscribers successfully.
7. Run email blacklist checks regularly
Email providers (like Google or Outlook) and anti-spam organizations maintain lists of IP addresses and domains that have engaged in spam sending. While the purpose of email blacklists is to block spammers, legitimate senders can end up blocked, too. The tricky part is finding out whether your IP or domain have been flagged.
If your clicks suddenly plummet, it’s a sign your emails aren’t reaching your customers. But instead of guessing and worrying about it, use an email blacklist checker to get a real-time status assessment. If you find out you’re blocked, you can make changes and follow the protocols to get off that blacklist.
This story originally appeared on Entrepreneur
