Email marketing remains one of the most powerful — yet misunderstood — tools in our digital marketing toolbox. As a Fractional CMO, I’ve seen firsthand how brands waste time (and money) sending emails that never convert. The good news? A well-executed email marketing strategy can build trust, deepen relationships, and drive real ROI when you follow best practices that actually move the needle, not just fill up inboxes.

What is Email Marketing Today?

Email marketing today goes beyond newsletters, using automation, triggers, and transactional messages to drive personalized engagement and lead qualification. It remains the top ROI channel for owned media and is more valuable than ever as first-party data replaces third-party cookies.

To help you make the best of email marketing, here is my guide to the best practices that email marketers follow so that you can use email marketing to better connect with your target audience and generate real business value from your email list.

Digital Marketing Foundation: Building and Maintaining a Healthy Email List

A healthy, permission-based email list is the bedrock of every successful email marketing strategy.

The Importance of Permission-Based Email Lists

A permission-based email list means that subscribers have explicitly opted in to receive your communications by confirming their subscription. Not only does this practice comply with privacy regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM, but it also means your audience is genuinely interested in hearing from you, which can lead to higher delivery rates, more opens, and increased conversions.

This also means that every email communication with your contact list includes unsubscribe buttons to allow recipients to unsubscribe at any time.

Use Double Opt-In for Consent and Compliance

Privacy regulations are tightening, and spam detection is becoming more aggressive in 2025. A smart safeguard to make sure you have explicit consent from your subscribers is to set up a double opt-in.

What is double opt-in, and why does it matter?

Double opt-in is essentially a subscription verification, which you have probably done yourself before. After signing up for an email list, a confirmation email is sent to the subscriber asking them to verify their subscription before they are officially added to your list.

Double opt-in helps to weed out bots, stopping fake sign-ups or accidental opt-ins from cluttering your database.

It also provides compliance benefits, helping you to adhere to global privacy regulations such as GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM because it demonstrates clear consent. You can even store a timestamp and IP address for audits, disputes, and regulatory checks.

Provide a Clear Value Exchange

Most people are hard-pressed to part with their email address unless there is a genuine reason to. There has to be a clear benefit. To make sure you are providing a clear, valuable exchange or offer, try to answer the question: “What’s in it for me?”

The best way to offer value is to provide a lead magnet. Here are some popular ones to help inspire you:   

• Niche, actionable ebooks for download.
• Exclusive presale access or limited drops.
• Personalized quiz results sent to responders.
• Checklists, templates, and toolkits.
• High-value giveaway entry.
• Free consultation.
• X% off coupon (for e-commerce stores).

To make sure your audience knows what it is getting, be specific. Forget the generic “Sign up for our newsletter” and try “Get your hands on our 5-part crash course and exclusive member-only discounts.”

Optimize List Growth Touchpoints

Audiences live their digital lives across multiple channels, so promoting your email list on only one channel makes zero sense. To learn what resonates with your clients and hit growth goals, I recommend testing a variety of value propositions across landing pages, pop-ups, and social posts.

My suggestions would include the following, many of which I employ on this website:

• Website pop-ups and slide-in offers. Keep them clear and non-intrusive.
• Exit-intent offers that are triggered when a user moves to close the tab.
• In-content opt-in forms in blog posts or resource pages.
• Social media lead ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, or even Twitter / X.
• QR codes placed on physical products.

Clean Your List Regularly

Once you’ve built a list and communicated regularly with them, your list will grow in size over time. This is both a good thing and a bad one because not everyone who signed up will continue to engage with you.

Therefore, to maintain reasonable engagement and avoid spam filters, your list needs to be clean. It is a good practice to build processes around having a quarterly or even monthly list review and remove those who haven’t opened an email in the past 90 or 180 days.

Before removing subscribers, you can try a re-engagement campaign to win back inactive recipients of your communication. Email verification tools are also available to catch typos and discover invalid addresses.

Content Strategies: Crafting Compelling Content That Converts

Great email marketing turns subscribers into clients and loyal customers. It boils down to writing relevant messages that resonate. Your copy needs to be thoughtful with a smart design and CTAs that are irresistible calls to action.

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Nail Your Subject Lines and Preview Text

In email marketing, your subject line is often the deciding factor in whether your email will be opened, so have your marketing team craft it wisely if you don’t want it ignored. And don’t forget about the preview text as well!

• Keep it short and punchy. Remember that many clients are reading your emails on email clients such as Gmail on mobile devices, so under 50 characters is ideal.
• Use first names, location, or recent actions where possible to personalize. For example, “Still considering new hiking boots?”
• Emojis can increase client open rates, but should only be used if they are on-brand, and even then, sparingly.
• Run A/B testing between formal and casual tones, question vs. statement structures, and email content lengths.

Keep Your Copy Scannable and Actionable

Many subscribers skim read, so format the body of your content to be scannable and easy to digest.

• The first sentence should grab attention, so open with a hook. Try leading with a question, statistic, or insight.
• Highlight your key information with headlines, bullet points, and bolding.
• Paragraphs should be kept to 2 or 3 sentences to keep things easy to read on mobile devices.
• Guide readers towards your CTA using the elements of urgency, curiosity, or surprise.

Make CTAs Clear and Irresistible

Ultimately, the point of email marketing is conversion, and for that, a compelling CTA (Call-to-Action) is fundamental. Strong verbs are the best motivators, such as “Shop now,” “Book a consultation,” and “Take our free quiz.”

CTA placement is an important consideration; your leads may be skimmers, browsers, or deep readers, so think about where to place it in the text. I recommending limiting yourself to one CTA per email for maximum impact.

Designing for User Experience

Designs need to be kept clean and accessible supporting how subscribers engage with your emails. A mobile-friendly layout is integral; it keeps things easy to read and act on.

Mobile-First and Accessible

In fact, 60% of users open emails on mobile devices, making small-screen designs the new standard.

Responsive email templates can help ensure layouts, font sizes, and images adjust for users’ screen sizes. Try to keep body text at 14 to 16px and headers at 20 to 24px.

Alt text for images improves accessibility and helps with user experience if images don’t load. Color contrast also helps with accessibility for visually impaired readers.

Keep It Simple, Narrow Down Business Goals

Multiple offers and links can be overwhelming, so craft each email with a single objective and guide the reader with a clear, visual hierarchy.

Personalization and Segmentation

Client engagement improves when you tailor your content to be relevant to the subscriber, transforming the generic into a personal conversation.

Segmenting your list is the first step to understanding what to personalize to which recipients. Have your marketing team tag how clients signed up, what content they engaged with, or what products they viewed or purchased to help personalize future messages to them.

You can also send a survey, which will help segment respondents based on their input.

Smart Segments to Increase Relevance

The more relevant your content, the higher your open and conversion rates. Analyzing the following KPIs to group subscribers and increase your campaign performance.

• User behavior, such as clicks and page visits.
• Purchase history.
• Engagement level.
• Source of visits and signups.

Dynamic Content and Product Recommendations

To take your personalization a step further, you can employ the following dynamic content tips to tailor text blocks to user data:

• Use past purchases and browsing history to tailor product recommendations.
• Localize the content, providing nearby relevant events and regional shipping updates.

By pairing dynamic content and segmentation, you can deliver highly relevant, 1:1 marketing experiences at scale.

Campaign Deliverability and Compliance Essentials

To ensure your emails land in the inbox of the intended receiver, you can’t neglect deliverability and compliance. The following best practices will help your sender’s reputation and adhere to governing laws.

The following key practices can help you maintain strong deliverability and keep you out of spam folders:

• Avoid spam trigger words that could potentially flag your emails as junk in both subject lines and email copy.
• If you are sending from a new sender domain, send content to engaged users first. This builds trust with inbox providers as you warm up your new email domain.
• Boost your credibility through authentication via SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols.
• Remember to bolster your security when accessing email platforms by leveraging a trusted Facebook VPN. It will help to safeguard your login credentials and other sensitive information.

You must also honor privacy laws (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL) for compliance and legal protection. If your marketing team fails to comply with privacy laws, such as the demands of the Federal Trade Commission and European Union regulations, you risk hefty fines.

You will also break the trust of your subscribers, which can devastate email marketing efforts. That is why you should include a working unsubscribe link in all of your digital correspondence, and should someone unsubscribe or request deletion, honor it promptly.

Remember to also add the physical address of your business, typically placed in the footer.

Monitor Your Sender Reputation

Deliverability is dramatically affected by sender reputation; a high volume of spam complaints will kill your email marketing efforts.

It is good practice to check the health of your domain, brand positioning, and reputation regularly and track bounce rates to help keep your lists clean and relevant.

Automate and Optimize

Modern email marketing should be scalable and consistently manageable as your reach expands. Automating and optimizing your campaigns can help the growth considerably.

Automated workflows allow you to work smarter, not harder, saving time and boosting efficiency.

It is a good strategy to automate the following elements to boost the performance of your marketing efforts:

• Welcome emails help educate and assist new subscribers while their interest is fresh.
• Cart abandonment reminders to help boost potential revenue growth opportunities; Remember to include product images and send them promptly within the first 30 minutes.
• Post-purchase marketing to continue engagement, think review requests and loyalty perks, or cross-selling.
• Re-engagement content, such as offers and check-ins, to tempt dormant users back into action.

Every marketing campaign should be treated as a test opportunity, allowing you to improve growth. The more you test, the better you will ultimately perform.

• A/B test everything: subject lines, images, CTA placement, sending time, and layouts.
• Click maps and heat maps can assist you in making refinements.

Integrate Email with Your Broader Marketing Strategy

Email campaigns amplify other channels of communication, so they should be treated as the central pillar of a larger marketing strategy. When effective, it produces a flywheel effect, driving traffic to blog posts, landing pages, social media, and YouTube content, ultimately helping with growth.

You can repurpose top-performing marketing emails as social media posts and build social proof by sharing testimonials, case studies, and UGC via email.

Email open and click data behavior can also inform other channels, helping with the following:

• Identifying high-performing content for SEO.
• Building lookalike audiences for paid ads.
• Shape future campaigns and offers.

Use Email Data to Inform Other Channels

Email platforms provide a wealth of first-party data that can be used to improve performance elsewhere:

• High-performing subject lines are ideal for ads and social captions.
• Paid spend can be better distributed by focusing on which blog posts get the most email clicks.
• Click heatmap analysis can be used to help optimize web UX and CTA placement.
• Email engagement data can be fed directly into ad targeting by CRMs to sync your best audiences across digital platforms.

The right tools make email marketing easier and scalable. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or leading a lean marketing team, your tech stack should match your business goals, not your budget.

Here’s a shortlist of proven tools worth considering:

Email Service Providers (ESPs):

List Cleaning & Deliverability:

• ZeroBounce or NeverBounce – Keep your list healthy and improve inbox placement by removing invalid or risky email addresses.
• Bouncer – Lightweight, pay-as-you-go option for occasional scrubbing.
• Postmark – Excellent for transactional email deliverability and domain reputation management.

A/B Testing & Optimization:

• Most leading ESPs offer built-in A/B testing tools. Use these to test subject lines, send times, CTAs, and more.
• Litmus – For design previews across devices and inboxes, plus detailed engagement analytics.
• Google Optimize alternatives like VWO or Convert – Useful if you’re testing email-to-landing-page flows.

Now that you know which tools are popular and proven, let’s talk about how to evaluate which one is right for your setup.

How to Choose the Right Tool for You

Start with your current pain point. Is it deliverability? Automation? Segmentation? Then work backwards into the tool that solves that without over-engineering your workflow. A solopreneur doesn’t need Salesforce Marketing Cloud — but they do need something reliable, intuitive, and proven to scale. Think utility over trendiness.

And don’t forget integration. Choose tools that work well with your CRM, eCommerce platform, or lead capture system. Email marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it performs best when it’s stitched tightly into your broader digital strategy.

Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

After reviewing countless campaigns across industries, I’ve seen firsthand what separates sustainable email marketing from short-term hacks. Here are the missteps I see far too often — and that I strongly recommend you avoid:

• Buying lists instead of building relationships. It might feel like a shortcut, but purchased lists rarely convert and often damage your sender reputation. Organic growth might take longer, but it attracts people who actually want to hear from you — and that’s where ROI lives.
• Over-sending without value. Frequency isn’t a strategy. If you’re showing up in someone’s inbox, you’d better have a reason. Ask yourself: would you open this email? If the answer is no, hit pause and rethink the message.
• Ignoring mobile and accessibility. A beautifully written email means nothing if it’s unreadable on a phone or screen reader. Make mobile optimization and basic accessibility (like proper contrast and alt text) non-negotiable.
• Failing to honor unsubscribes and legal requirements. It’s not just bad practice — it’s risky. Always include a visible unsubscribe link, use a verified physical address in your footer, and follow opt-in best practices. Respect builds trust, and trust drives conversions.

Email marketing works best when it’s built on permission, value, and clarity. When you start cutting corners, you’re not just risking performance — you’re undermining the trust your brand has worked to earn.

Email Marketing Campaign Best Practices for Long-Term Success

Email marketing success isn’t about volume — it’s about value, relevance, and trust. With the right strategy and leadership, it becomes the most consistent, highest-ROI channel in your digital marketing mix. Treat it that way, and you’ll not only build better campaigns — you’ll build a better business.

This is a post contributed by one of my marketing partners.