Email marketing could count as the no. 1 commonest and most effective direct marketing that millions of companies apply for the generation of new businesses and customer loyalty cultivation. However, improper strategies deployed by most companies lack the insight and only rampage into the prospect’s inbox or even directly into the spam/trash bin with no clear purpose, effective persuasion, or friendly layout and content to the filtering system.

That’s pathetic for two reasons, one being good mailing lists really cost, and the other being failed emails could have reverse brand impact and wreck your good fame you have built over years. Therefore, it is really advisable that you take some insight into the emails or have some professionals examine them before you actually hit the send button.

Given proper direction, marketing emails do generate enormous revenue, and thus every profit you need. Remember, there are no universally applicable rules in any kind of marketing and you should always keep exploring the better version of your strategy aiming at specific target audience and under certain circumstances. And listed below are the 10 best practices for lead-generating email marketing based on my personal experience.

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1. Do offer something

No one likes to receive meaningless spams that do no one any good. So when you conceive an email campaign, give it a second or third thought about what you can literally offer to the recipients. In most cases, a explicit discount offer or similar schemes could be an easy and safe choice if you cannot come up with really appealing incentives. And do include your offer in the subject line as much as possible.

2. Call to action

That is what I talked above, and clear purposes should be just more than included in the marketing email, but also put in prominent places like the opening line and get reaffirmed several times later in the email body. Just go straight with what you expect the recipient to respond, either to click the links incorporated or reply directly, depending on the type of the email.

3. Write a compelling subject line

Subject line is the most crucial part of your marketing email because it largely decides whether the email content gets read at all. As I put before, go straight telling your offer could be an easy and safe choice, but if you do have some decent copywriting skills that help come up with truly appealing subjects, you are golden. As the copywriting bible says, the only purpose of the subject line/topic is to get the firstly line of your copy read; the only purpose of the first line is to get your second read. This could go on and on and on and seem a little dogma though, it is a pattern worth following regarding promotional copy writing after all.

4. Mention the recipient’s name

Everyone wants to be shown respects and it is their natural instinct to return some back when they feel their personal presence is noticed and respected. This could require some tricky technicality because you can only rely on machine when you have over thousands or tens of thousands of victims to harass. Putting down your prospects’ name one email by another is just too much human work that can be tedious and mechanical and should be a job for tireless machines.

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5. Watch the layout

People hate scrolling horizontally. They just hate it. If you dare to challenge their very taste of browsing web content, you are screwed. You cannot assume everyone is as easy-going and would “kindly” treat your email like a friend. Hence, do take some thoughts into making your email more visually friendly, making them no more than 500 pixels wide, or, ideally, automatically adjustable to the window frame.

6. Use only one typeface

Think multi-typefaces will add vividness to your email? Well, think again. I would personally recommend using only one typeface, or two at tops, to write the sales email. Fanciness is a very subordinate concern to the prospect, who might find short and direct info more helpful while saving up time from going through the dreary stereotypes. However, make the title and subtitle in bold or in one other variant of the consistent typeface is advisable.

7. Proofread the email

You should always have the email examined by a second or third person before actually sending it out. What are worth the attention are the subject line, if the reader can get the gist, and if they understand what you expect them to respond. Try showing the email to some of the people you are targeting and get their feedbacks, which could be very important and mean the difference of tens of thousands of dollars or even more.

8. Be mobile optimized

Mobile devices are getting into people’s life and starting to play an even more vital role in the Internet business sphere. One sad thing about it is most devices usually have a comparatively much smaller display than PCs or laptops, which makes it difficult to properly present specially designed HTML format email or dynamic content. Recent surveys show that over 60% of business runners and decision makers browse their email via a mobile terminal and usually cannot read most of the advertorial emails with dynamic contents. A plain text marketing email then is preferable when you cannot reach a viable solution to tackle the display problem on cell phones.

9. Make unsubscribing easy

No marketers like their newsletters or marketing emails to be unsubscribed to, but the law says you have to provide this option in the mailing. What matters even more is you have to provide the unsubscribing option because it is integrally incorporated with your respect for the recipient. Unsubscribing sure is bad, but not as much as building an inner hatred in the recipient, who make start bearing a grudge that completely seals the door of doing business with them. From the recipient’s view, if they can find an easy and convenient unsubscribing link, your email as long as your brand image could be seen as socially responsible and business-reliable, and thus may alleviate the recipient’s worry and shed a glance at the actual content of your email.

10. Collect performance statistics

Data is everything when it comes to advertising and marketing. All future campaigns and marketing strategy improvement solidly rely on the performance statistics of previous campaigns and it is almost imperative that the marketing email performance should be recorded and analyzed with certain technologies. Critical info like Expressions, Clicks(Response), CTR(Response Rate), Conversions and Conversion Rate can tell a lot about the campaign and how improvements can be made.