Best Practices for Email Outreach

Email is an efficient and accessible way to build, nurture, and grow your partnership program. When utilized correctly, email campaigns are one of the most effective methods of engaging with your current or potential partners.

To reap the rewards of an email nurture campaign, you’ll have to first avoid the common pitfalls of email strategy. This article will walk through the best practices of using email automation for outreach, so you can reach your goals and strengthen your partnerships.

 

Best Practice: Get Permission

When messaging your partners, make sure you have their permission. This will not only keep your brand compliant with local and national regulations but will also build stronger partnerships and more trust in your brand.

For more information on spam in the United States, please see CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business.

We recommend that you get permission from all the contacts in a given email list before sending the first email to recipients, so all your contacts know exactly what to expect from your messages. All recipients should understand what they are giving permission for and why they are receiving messages from you.

A best practice we strongly suggest is to include a short message in all your email messages that reminds the recipient of why they are receiving emails, along with a link that enables recipients to unsubscribe at any time, should they later decide that they no longer wish to receive future emails.

Mediarails offers a unique feature, the Do Not Contact flag, that can help your team manage a list of contacts that should not be messaged in the future. The Do Not Contact capability allows users to flag a contact as "Do Not Contact". This is similar to a recipient unsubscribing, but is an action taken by you or your team, as opposed to the recipient. This could occur upon request of the recipient, or from other determining factors. Once a contact is flagged for Do Not Contact, the Mediarails system will catch and stop any future emails from sending to that contact, regardless of who sends it or the method of sending, including Newsletters, Email Workflows or One-Off messages.

 

Best Practice: Avoid Purchasing Third-party Email Lists

Always be wary of something that seems too good to be true. Email Lists that can be purchased online are something to avoid. The lists are often filled with irrelevant, or even fake, email addresses that do not provide any real value to your email campaigns. 

Mediarails is strongly against the use of purchased email lists on the platform. This degrades the reliability of your brand’s image and contributes to poor emailing practices such as spamming, emailing without permission, and sending emails that are irrelevant (and often frustrating) to the recipient.

 

Best Practice: Take your Time and Plan

As they say, “Rushing never saved the time that planning did”. Don’t rush your email campaigns. Take the time to plan not only your campaign calendar, but also your messaging sequence, content, and Calls to Action (CTAs) that align with your campaign goals.

Don’t tempt fate in an attempt to rush your campaign and press Send before the time is right. Even if there is pressure to get your campaign started and report on results, doing so could result in overlooked errors, increased unsubscribes, and even a botched campaign.

 

Best Practice: Send Messages Regularly

Make sure to create a campaign calendar and plan regular messages to send to your partners. This not only helps with increasing partner engagement, but also helps avoid increased bounce rates, unsubscribes and spam reports. 

Sending regular messages is a great way to keep your brand top-of-mind and to create a stronger relationship with your partners by keeping them engaged and informed of upcoming sales, seasonal promotions, and new creatives or program incentives.

 

Best Practice: Create Strong Subject Lines

The subject is the first thing your recipients will see, so make it count. Avoid sensationalized subjects that are filled with exclamation points. Let your recipients know what the email is about without being overly sales-y and using generic verbiage. 

Catchy, witty subject lines that tell partners what the email is about will often bring high open rates and click-through rates. You want your partners to be interested in opening the email immediately upon reading the subject line, so put some time into creating strong subject lines to entice the reader.

Best Practice: Learn about Spam Filters

Spam filters get more and more advanced each year, so you’ll need to keep your knowledge fresh so you can avoid making a mistake that could get your company’s domain marked as spam. Spam filters use certain criteria to filter out your messages within the recipient’s email client. They can greatly affect your deliverability rate.

Spam can also be marked by the recipient. They can select your message from their inbox and choose to “Mark as Spam” or they can move it to their junk folder. These actions, as harmless as they may seem when only one or two messages get marked, can have an adverse consequence on your ability to send messages when multiple recipients take those same actions. In that case, spam ratings increase and the rating on your domain is shared across multiple spam filtering services.

Below are some tips to help you avoid getting marked as spam.

• Get permission to send to recipients, or create an opt-in process. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, make sure you have permission to be sending emails to your partners.
  
  
• Make sure you have a process for unsubscribing. Enabling recipients to unsubscribe easily from your emails is a great way to avoid unnecessary spam complaints. If the reader decides they no longer wish to receive your emails, make it easier for them to unsubscribe than mark you as spam.
  
  
• Maintain a positive email reputation. Don’t send emails to your partners too often, or send emails with low-interest content. Sending multiple emails to the same contact in a short period of time can result in frustration, unsubscribes and spam complaints if the messages don’t seem relative or useful to the recipient.

• Avoid certain elements. Certain elements can trigger spam filters to filter out your messages and place them in spam boxes prematurely. Elements such as iFrames, too many HTML tags, and even attachments can all alert spam filters.

• Balance your text-image ratio. An unbalanced ratio of images to text can result in spam filters picking up your message. Try to keep your messages well balanced with simple text interspersed with a few meaningful and well-placed images that are relevant to your text.
  
  
• Make sure your intent is clear. Using the subject line as well as body text, you’ll want to make sure your recipients understand why you are emailing them. If your intent is unclear, recipients may mark your message as spam as a precaution or if they are confused as to why you are emailing them.

 

Best Practice: Test Before you Send

There’s nothing more disappointing when launching a new email campaign than sending your messages to a large group of partners and realizing later that your text was smooshed or your images aren’t appearing correctly. 

This is why we always suggest previewing the message and sending a test email.

When creating a new message, whether an Email Workflow, One-off, or Newsletter, keep in mind that different email providers, devices and monitors will render the message and images differently. Testing all your emails before sending can help you prepare for differences in monitors or devices. It’s a good idea to send yourself a test email and check it on multiple devices, such as a laptop (with and without a monitor connected), as well as a phone or tablet.

 

Best Practice: Utilize Reporting to Improve Outreach

A common pitfall of email marketing is ignoring the data and continuing to make the same mistakes. Listen to the data. If something isn’t working, try something different. If you look at your reporting pages and see multiple unsubscribes or bounces, it’s time to analyze your content, subject lines, and CTAs.

We recommend regularly analyzing your email reporting for trends and anomalies, and taking action to correct any insufficiencies in your messaging before launching another email campaign.

Once you identify trends, you can run A/B tests to work on improving your open, response, and click rates, as well as  conversions. You'll also want to keep a close eye on your recipient list to make sure you're sending to relevant audiences and that you have the most up-to-date contact information for your partners.

From any Partner or Prospect list view in Mediarails, you can easily track email communications, such as opens, link clicks, and unsubscribes by adding those columns to your view. 

If you are managing your campaigns using Email Workflows or Newsletters, you can find helpful information on the respective reporting page for each campaign. Learn more about reporting pages in the article Understanding Email Workflow and Newsletter Reporting.