Email Best Practices: Common Sense Simple

Nowadays, almost everyone has email, from your 12 year old to your 80 year old grandmother. And anyone who uses email knows all too well that the system is abused by people sending out unsolicited emails; also known as spam. These can be jokes, unethical internet marketers trying to sell you something or an internet hoax. If you are trying to start or run a business using email marketing, you’ll want to make sure that you follow these email best practices to ensure no one tries to accuse you of stepping over the line.

Often times with email marketing, you may find the need to send an attachment to your recipient. Depending on the service you are using to send your emails, you will need to verify that a virus scan can be achieved. People will learn to trust you and open your email if they can be assured you will not be giving them a virus. This is an important email best practice for you to make use of.

Keeping an organized and uncluttered inbox is an often overlooked and unattended email best practice. If you have a business account, you’ll want to make sure that customer emails voicing a concern or that require a response are spotted in your inbox, don’t fall prey to your spam folders, and don’t get buried and lost among the less important.

Safeguard your important emails by making use of a folder and file system just as you would with important paper documents. With most email services, there are features you can set to automatically filter your emails as they arrive in your inbox. This will allow you to save both time and effort, and will help in managing your inbox.

Now that your email is organized and you’re no longer missing any important customer emails, how do you get your recipients to open the emails you’re sending?

Compelling subject lines!

And while arousing curiosity might get them to open the email, you better make sure that the content is relevant to the subject line.  Don’t comprise your ethics and risk your reputation by trying to “fool” your readers into opening your emails. The last thing you want to do is break any trust you’ve already worked so hard to establish.

Last but not least, and perhaps one of the most important best email practices I’d like to mention is, ensuring that all the information you collect from your subscribers remains private and that it doesn’t end up in someone else’s hands.

Be careful when sending out emails manually from your inbox to multiple people that the BCC and CC lines are used with the proper addresses and the information is sent to only those who need to see it.  The personal information your subscribers trusted you with is privileged information and should be treated with all due respect. I personally don’t send out email responses to multiple subscribers from my inbox. Emails sent to multiple addresses are always generated from my autoresponder email delivery service.  However, an individual response to a single recipient may come from my inbox.

Peace & Prosperity,

photo credit: Black Cat