Making sales. Boosting traffic to your website. Growing your social media following.

Chances are you have certain goals in mind for your email marketing. It’s likely too that you want to get even better results from your campaigns – who doesn’t? Well, there are some simple email marketing tips you can follow to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns right now.

1. Don’t experiment with the sender field

A recognisable name in a crowded inbox is a good thing. Keep your sender field consistent and make it easy for your reader to see who the email is from. This is the first thing that readers look at when deciding whether to open your email or not.

2. Write a killer subject line

The second thing readers pay attention to is your subject line – so it makes sense to spend time getting it right. Be original. Be enticing. Keep it short and snappy. Speak to your reader’s fears, needs, desires, doubts or ambitions.

Read our ultimate guide to creating the best email subject lines.

3. Address your reader

Whether your email is being sent to 5 people or 5,000, write for an audience of one. Build a mental image of your model reader. Be vivid and talk to them directly, just as you would if you were talking to them in person.

4. Make it personal

If you know the name of your reader, use Constant Contact’s email marketing software to automatically include it in your emails. You can also use it in the main message of your email to keep the reader engaged. But don’t overdo it. Jamming your reader’s name into every sentence may sound a bit creepy. The aim is to sound natural.

5. Provide value

Chances are that your reader doesn’t care about that new member of staff you are so keen to announce. What they do want is the answer to a problem. Ultimately, that’s what every reader wants. When you provide value, your emails get read.

6. Make it snappy

The average person’s inbox is something of a battlefield. They want to keep the number of unread emails under control, which isn’t easy when they receive dozens of emails daily. Now, your reader has given you permission to be in their inbox. Honour that by respecting their time and keeping your content snappy. If it takes longer than a minute or two to absorb the message, it might be time for rethink.

7. Make the links and call to action obvious

You want your reader to click through to an article? Then make sure the buttons or hyperlinks standout, and put your main call to action near the top. Don’t expect your reader to do the guesswork.

8. Segment your subscriber list

The more targeted your message, the better you can expect your results to be. That means you need to gather as much information and insight about your subscribers as possible. Let’s say you run a high street fashion store and are offering a half-price weekend in one of your branches. You want your subscribers who live near that branch to know about the offer, but it’s a pretty useless message for anyone that doesn’t live near the store in question. List segmentation lets you target the people that matter, with a message that matters.

Learn more about segmentation: >> What is email segmentation?

9. Make sure your email is mobile-responsive

Around two-thirds of email is opened on a smartphone or tablet. If your email design doesn’t look great and function flawlessly on mobile devices, you could be alienating more than 60% of your audience.

10. Test, test, and test again

Do your links go to the right page? Does the design look as it should in all of the most popular email clients? Do your images match your content? Run multiple tests – and send multiple test emails – before you go for the big launch.

11. Split-testing is your friend

Sometimes the slightest tweak to a send title, layout, body copy message, or call to action can make a big difference to the effectiveness of your campaign. Split-testing, or A/B testing, is when you send slightly different versions of the same email to a sample of your subscribers. In Constant Contact, it’s simple to compare the results, and then you can send the best performing version to the rest of your subscribers. It’s an easy way to squeeze every last drop from your campaign.

Email marketing doesn’t need to be tricky, and it remains one of the best possible marketing techniques for reaching out to your audience. Please leave any questions in the comments below.