Email Best Practices: Technical Requirements
We’ve reviewed best practices for approaching your audience and creative specific to email marketing (if you haven’t read them yet, I would 11/10 recommend). However, email marketing is only as successful as its foundation—the technical requirements behind the campaign. This includes everything from your Email Service Provider (ESP) to your back-end tracking. Here are a few suggestions to make sure your email foundation is solid:
Separate Your Accounts and IPs
This one seems obvious, but you would be surprised. Manage your clients on separate accounts, not on one single account. This is to avoid consumer overlap. One blanket email list is not ideal, or appropriate, for multiple profiles or businesses.
Manage Your Audience
A lot goes into managing your audience on the back end of your ESP. Using tags or segments to categorize is key to maximizing your email marketing efforts. You can further segment based on user activity and engagement, age, gender, location, or time and place they subscribed, and more. This will allow you to cater your communications and increase relevancy to each recipient instead of blanketing the same message to your entire database.
Segmenting and tagging also provides your team a clear view of the overall email operation and target demographics. This oversight will help improve your campaigns over time, ensuring you continue to evaluate and categorize who is engaging with your content.
Audit Your Email Campaigns
This doesn’t need to be a fancy-schmancy audit. But at the bare minimum, you should monitor the unsubscribe rate and spam complaints about each campaign. Extreme fluctuations in these metrics can be a sign that something is off with your email list or ESP.
Use UTMs to Track Clicks and Web Activity
We love data in this household! UTMs, or Urchin Tracking Modules, are codes added to URLs that tell Google Analytics (or other analytics tools) which marketing campaign your site traffic came from. Understanding where site traffic originates is a key success metric and can be used in other digital marketing efforts, but that’s a blog for another day.
