Email Marketing: The Definitive Guide

Email marketing has been used by businesses since the early days of the internet, offering a direct method of communicating with customers that can yield a great return on investment. As the digital world has developed, an oversaturation of marketing emails has made it harder for brands to cut through the noise. Marketers are also increasingly facing issues surrounding spam prevention and data protection, which must be carefully considered to ensure successful and ethical marketing practices.

Despite these challenges, email marketing remains an important channel for many businesses, and advancements like marketing automation have made it easier for brands to personalise email campaigns to increase sales and nurture customer loyalty. However, getting the best results out of your marketing emails requires patience, a clear strategy, and ongoing improvements, which can be difficult to implement alongside the many responsibilities that come with managing a business.

In this definitive guide to email marketing, we’re going to cover all the essential topics, explaining what email marketing is, exploring the different types of marketing emails, and sharing practical tips from Impression’s in-house experts. If you’re looking for something specific, you can use the links below to head straight to it:

Ready to get started with an email marketing automation agency? For a free consultation, speak to our team today.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that businesses use to connect with an audience through legitimately acquired contact details. While many would consider the email marketing definition to only cover communications promoting products and services, messages sharing industry insights or providing news updates can also be used to build a successful email marketing strategy.

Marketing emails are best used as part of a wider digital marketing strategy, allowing different elements to come together across multiple platforms and touchpoints. A curated email marketing campaign can benefit from support from a well-maintained digital marketing strategy, including SEO and PR campaigns for content generation, and paid media advertising for accelerated list growth. Effective email marketing campaigns will help to further support your existing messages, boost brand awareness, and build trust.

Types of marketing emails

There are many different types of marketing emails, each contributing to a brand’s wider business goals in their own ways. Using a variety of these different forms of messaging can help you to build stronger relationships with your audience, encourage customer loyalty and encourage more sales. 

There are several types of email marketing that your brand could explore, including:

• Newsletters
• Promotional emails
• Lead nurturing emails
• Abandoned cart emails
• Welcome emails
• Milestone emails
• Re-engagement emails

Newsletters

Newsletters have been a popular form of B2C communication since before the days of the internet. However, the advancement of technology has made it quicker and easier for businesses to keep in touch with their customers. Newsletters are used in email marketing as a method of keeping customers warm, gently reminding them of a brand while offering interesting or useful information.

For example, Impression’s bi-weekly digital marketing newsletter incorporates fresh blog content, free guides and invitations to our webinars. This helps us to provide ongoing value that encourages people to remain on our mailing list, keeping us fresh in their minds while displaying our expertise in all areas of digital marketing.

Promotional emails 

Promotional emails are one of the most common emails most people think of when they think of email marketing. These are the types of communications designed to advertise products, services and content. Just like putting a flyer through a person’s letterbox, this is a very direct form of marketing.

With the advancement of technology, brands can now deliver promotions to customers almost instantaneously, making them a powerful tool for a wide range of industries, from e-commerce and retail to tourism and hospitality. These types of marketing emails include new product launches, seasonal sale announcements, discounts and more.

Lead nurturing emails

Lead nurturing emails are designed to encourage casual browsers to convert. Different brands, industries and email marketing campaigns will have different definitions of a conversion. (A ‘conversion’ could be making a purchase, filling out a contact form, downloading an ebook, signing up for an account, or any number of other business goals.)

A common example is offering an interactive quiz on your website helping customers to decide between multiple products. After answering the questions, the user is prompted to enter their email address, which will be used to deliver the results. This not only provides a useful service by guiding the customer towards the best product for their needs, but also allows you to obtain their email address, along with key insights about their purchasing needs to customise future marketing emails. 

Additional educational and supporting content can be delivered to the recipient until either the content series expires, or the consumer makes a purchase. Post-purchase email flows include ideas such as quick additions prior to dispatch, or follow-ups and cross-sells in the cases of ecommerce businesses.

An email sharing our marketing landscape white paper

Abandoned cart emails

Cart abandonment refers to instances where a customer has added items to their cart but not completed the purchase. It’s a key tactic for some ecommerce brands, and reducing cart abandonment will help to boost revenue. There are many reasons for cart abandonment, including unexpectedly high shipping costs, payment processing errors, or the customer simply getting distracted during checkout. 

Abandoned cart emails advise customers that their purchase is incomplete, but also show them what they were planning to buy. Sometimes a polite reminder is enough, and can help you to recapture the attention of impulse buyers. If you’re looking to further incentivise them, you might consider offering a discount or free shipping if they check out within the next 24 hours.

Broadly, cart abandonment challenges can fall into two categories; technical errors and mismanaged consumer expectations as they progress through the journey. Learn more about how our digital experience and CRO services could help your business. 

Welcome emails

A common email marketing practice is to send a welcome message when a customer signs up to a website, makes a purchase or performs other key actions related to conversions. As well as providing confirmation of their purchase or membership, this offers a streamlined and unobtrusive way to share a little more information, add reassurance, and begin to promote additional sales opportunities.

You can use a welcome email to explain more about your brand’s offering, provide useful contact information for any enquiries, or encourage additional purchases by including a discount code. A welcome email is also a great way to start developing a rapport and reinforcing the brand message and USPs. This is particularly beneficial for industries that rely on trust and building personal connections, such as legal or (in some cases) financial services.

Milestone emails

Milestone emails are automated messages that are sent to customers on specific dates or occasions. Essentially, this type of marketing email capitalises on an organic excuse to get in touch. This could be the anniversary of a product purchase, a subscription renewal, or even a discount coupon sent ahead of the customer’s birthday.

This type of email offers great opportunities for personalisation, allowing your brand to develop a more human relationship with customers. You can use them to remind customers of the value of a product or service and encourage them to continue using it, or offer an incentive to make another purchase, leave a review, or refer your brand to a friend.

Re-engagement emails

Re-engagement emails are usually sent to customers who haven’t interacted with your company in a while. They’re useful to refresh the memory of lapsed customers, reminding them of your brand, its offerings, and the benefits they can enjoy by engaging with you.

This type of email should only be sent to unengaged subscribers, and could harm your customer relationship if sent to those who are already active or otherwise already receiving other email flows from you. Metrics such as the length of time since their last purchase and email open rates can help you identify which subscribers to focus on. You can then create tailored re-engagement email campaigns to target each of these metrics. 

Learn more about RFM Segmentation if you think this type of email flow could support your email efforts. 

When should you use email marketing?

Promotional emails are not the only way to connect with your audience. In fact, there’s an argument to be made for using them sparingly to avoid fatigue, which could encourage recipients to unsubscribe. A customer’s email address, and their marketing permissions and consent, is a valuable commodity, so it’s important not to waste it. Instead of pushing too hard to make a sale, use a mix of different email marketing techniques tailored to different audiences and stages of the customer journey.

Email campaigns are a great way to build loyalty, helping to increase the lifetime value of each customer. For example, contacting a customer a couple of weeks after a purchase and asking for a review prompts them to reflect on the value of your products and services. If they return to your website to write a review, they may make an additional purchase during their visit. Similarly, sending an email thanking them for their purchase along with a discount code or details of a loyalty scheme encourages repeat custom in the short and long term, respectively.

If you’re looking to improve customer engagement, a re-engagement email marketing strategy could be beneficial. As well as helping you to win back customers, it also gives uninterested recipients the opportunity to unsubscribe from your marketing emails. This helps you to maintain a healthy subscriber list, which can improve open rates and conversion rates, boosting the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Another powerful use of email marketing is in conjunction with a ‘lead magnet’, such as offering a white paper or ebook download in exchange for an email address. This provides the opportunity to send a targeted email campaign in line with the download’s content or user intent. For example, if you share a guide to payroll for small businesses, you might choose to follow this up with a series of emails detailing actionable tips, or introducing your business’ payroll services.

Impression’s downloadable media effectiveness white paper

How to run successful email marketing campaigns

Like any other form of marketing, running a successful email marketing campaign takes time, patience and a strategic approach. Avoid common mistakes like sending the same email to every person on your mailing list, wasting time on manual email tasks, and failing to personalise your messaging to the recipient. Let’s explore some top tips for email marketing success.

1. Define your email marketing goals

The first step is perhaps the most vital, and that’s to define exactly what you’re looking to achieve with the overall campaign. Marketing emails can be used to support a wide range of business goals and scenarios, but it’s important to focus on one thing at a time. Trying to target too many goals at once will dilute the message, leading to less effective outcomes. It will also make it harder to figure out which elements of an email are performing well, and which require attention.

Separate goals require their own discrete campaigns. For example, if you’re looking to boost sales, focus on promotional emails, or if you’re looking to tidy up your mailing list, consider segmentation and re-engagement emails. Remember to benchmark your performance before launching your campaign, so you’ve got something to compare the results against.

In terms of measurement, understand the attributable value your email marketing campaign is giving you and set growth KPIs from this based on increased investment. One of the benefits of email marketing when it comes to marketing measurement is that you already know the recipients, so it makes for a great channel for experimentation in your measurement methodology. 

2. Plan different types of campaigns

Consider your own email inbox. Do you feel frustrated when it’s full of emails from brands trying to get you to buy something? So do your customers. Plan different campaigns to run in tandem, as this will offer variety and prevent recipients from losing interest. Broadly speaking, marketing emails can be broken into three classifications: transactional, relational and promotional.

Transactional emails are those that relate to a purchase, such as a receipt, order confirmation or shipping confirmation. Relational emails are those designed to build a relationship with your audience, such as welcome emails, newsletters and surveys. Promotional emails are those that encourage purchases, such as a new product launch, sale announcement or discount code. Try to create a mix of these different types of marketing emails, but don’t forget to focus them on your overall business goals.

3. Build targeted email lists

For each type of campaign, it’s important to build targeted email lists to ensure that your communications are sent to the most appropriate audiences. It’s often a good idea to create separate lists for different types of products and services that you offer. For example, an estate agency might use separate email lists for people looking to rent or to buy, as their needs and areas of interest will be different.

One way to do this is to use email sign-up forms to add the address to the relevant list as it’s collected. This could be either by implementing separate sign-up forms or by using one with a tick box system for users to select which subject they’re interested in. You can also use an existing customer relationship management (CRM) database and filter your list to achieve the same effect, although this may be more time-consuming.

Sending the same message to everybody can feel confusing and impersonal, which can lead to prospects unsubscribing. For example, a brand selling men’s and women’s clothing would split its customers into these two groups, while a national chain of restaurants might segment its customers by geographic location.

When utilising more modern CRM and CDP systems, many of your segmentation challenges can be solved through automation. For example, with systems that also include web pixels, segments can be built based on your customers’ behaviour. Systems that can integrate all (or many) of your customer interactions with you can also build out segments based on past behaviours, such as purchases, enquiries or product returns. Always investigate the full capabilities of your email marketing automation system and utilise it to the best of your abilities. 

As well as these basic forms of segmentation, more advanced methods such as RFM analysis can help you to drill even deeper into your audience, creating ultra-targeted campaigns to increase effectiveness. RFM refers to recency, frequency, and monetary value, which provide pivotal insights into customer behaviour, engagement and value.

4. Plan personalised marketing emails

Adding personalisation to your marketing emails can help to increase engagement and drive sales. Rather than being a generic message sent to everyone on your list without consideration, tailored marketing emails feel more personal, strengthening customer relationships. Focusing on topics and products that are relevant to the individual will make them more likely to stay signed up to your emails and convert.

Personalisation ranges from very basic tactics such as using a [name] customer attribute field to populate the customer’s name into the email to using audience segmentation and curated email lists to deliver fully tailored messaging and offers. With the right tools and a clean, up-to-date customer database, you can produce highly personalised communications that will yield great results. 

Some platforms also allow you to go even further than just mass targeting relevant cohorts of recipients and actually allow one-to-one personalisation, such as bespoke product and content recommendations for each recipient based on their past (or likely future) behaviour. 

5. Invest in email marketing automation

Implementing marketing automation tools can help you to save time, money and resources while offering a variety of powerful functions to support your email marketing campaigns. As well as unlocking deeper audience segmentation and campaign analysis, they also promote compliance with data protection laws, keeping your business and customers safe.

Although marketing automation tools offer a variety of time-saving and campaign-boosting benefits, the best results require a detailed understanding of data analysis and industry best practices. To get as much value as possible from your customer data, you might consider partnering with an experienced email marketing automation agency.

6. Analyse your competitors’ marketing email activity

Whatever industry you’re in, chances are you’ll have multiple competitors also vying for the attention of your audience. While it can be frustrating to compete against other companies, it also presents the opportunity to learn from them – and that includes what they’re doing wrong, as well as what they’re doing right.

Start out by identifying your competitors, which you may have already done as part of your wider business strategy planning. This could be as simple as typing your products, services and location into a search engine and seeing who else comes up, or setting up Google Alerts for keywords in your industry.

Once you know who your competitors are, see which ones have an email sign-up form on their website and sign up. Analyse what they’re sending out, who to, and how often, and pay attention to essential marketing email practices like the subject line, call to action (CTA), and even who the email is sent from. See what you can learn from them, what works and what doesn’t, and try to implement your findings in your own marketing emails.

7. Experiment to optimise email marketing

One of the strengths of email marketing is that it offers fertile soil of experimentation programs to learn about the audience and optimise communications over time to improve their engagement and effectiveness.

Everything from send time and subject line through to creative, copy and dynamic content can be experimented with in email campaigns. A scheme of constant experimentation should be the bedrock of any ongoing email marketing investment, as the initial costs of data and customer acquisition have already been borne by the business; so ensuring the best return possible, just like web CRO campaigns, should be a key focus. 

Learnings from email marketing campaigns, such as campaign copy and creative, can be used across other areas of marketing and even to sharpen website content. 

Measuring success in email marketing

Tracking the performance of your email marketing campaigns allows you to measure success and analyse the performance of different types of campaign. You can then use this information to refine your communications and focus resources on the types of marketing emails that deliver the best results for your brand.

Email automation software incorporates a wide range of metrics for analysis, including how many people click through to your website and the overall return on investment of the campaign. Before we explore these metrics in more detail, it’s important to note that typical rates vary by industry. For example, Mailchimp’s email marketing benchmarks is just one of a number of useful references that allow you to select your industry to see how you compare.

Open rate

As the name suggests, open rate refers to the number of people who actually open the email, and is usually expressed in a percentage of opens vs sends. Factors that can affect this include the email subject line, the time of day the email is sent, and even the email address that it’s sent from. Optimising your open rate ensures that as many people as possible view the content, increasing the likelihood of them taking the desired action. 

Technology and data quality can also play a factor here, in that not all inboxes will remain active forever, some may be full, and some may have already marked you as ‘spam’. If your sending domain is new or has a low reputation, then again some email servers may not trust you and may not deliver your message to a primary inbox, either. 

Due to some email provider technologies, open rate is no longer the metric it used to be. Open rate was historically tracked through the usage of image pixels which detected when they had been loaded, unique for each recipient. For some time, some images have been blocked for being trackers, and in some cases, all images are preloaded, copied and cached by the email provider to prevent accuracy and efficacy in these metrics. 

Click-through rate

The click-through rate (CTR) outlines the percentage of people who click on a link in the email. In most cases, this would be a link to a specific product, service or landing page on your website. A low CTR could signal that the products or services aren’t of interest, but could also point to issues such as an uninspiring call to action or even a broken link.

The click-through rate is often calculated by replacing all links in an email with a tracker link, that when clicked, logs the click and then sends the recipient to the final destination. For this reason, these clicks may not always 100% add up to the attribution reports you see in your web analytics platforms; as they are tracking slightly different things. In some cases, sending numerous tracker links may result in lower deliverability as they can look overly promotional, so as a result some providers offer this and others don’t, and some enable this feature by default and others don’t. It’s worth being mindful of this and how it may affect your deliverability and click measurement. 

Conversion rate

The conversion rate shows how many people take the desired action after opening the email. This could be making a purchase, getting in touch, or simply visiting the campaign’s landing page. The benchmark for a good conversion rate varies by industry and can be as low as <1%, but can average out higher across industries. Increasing conversion rates can help to boost the return on investment of your email marketing campaign.

Bounce rate 

While the bounce rate in digital marketing refers to users who leave a website without interacting, in email marketing it’s the percentage of subscribers who didn’t receive the message because it was returned by their email server. It’s broken down into two different categories. A hard bounce is when the email address or its domain doesn’t exist, or the receiving server has blocked delivery. A soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s inbox is full, the receiving server is offline, or the message is too large. To minimise bounce rate, make sure your subscriber lists are well maintained, keep message sizes as small as possible, and avoid sending emails that could be flagged as spam.

Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate refers to how many people click on the ‘unsubscribe’ link in the email. With every email you send, you’ll almost always get a few people cutting ties. A typical unsubscribe rate is around ~2%, so anything in this range is nothing to be concerned about. However, unusually high rates could suggest a deeper issue with a particular email, your audience segmentation, or even your business offering.

Campaign ROI

The overall return on investment of your email marketing campaign is an extremely important metric and gives a fairly black-and-white view of its success. While sending emails is significantly cheaper than sending printed communications, there are a variety of costs that must be taken into account and calculated against the revenue generated by the campaign. These costs include charges related to your email automation software, personnel overheads, and the impact of any campaign-related discounts.

Optimising email marketing campaigns for engagement

Now we’ve looked at how to track campaign performance, let’s explore how you can use this data to optimise your marketing emails. Monitoring these benchmarks gives you a better idea of what you need to change to improve metrics related to key business goals. However, to make effective changes, you need a detailed knowledge of marketing principles and best practices.

By getting to know what makes your audience tick, running ongoing tests on your campaigns, and using this data to improve the next version, you can make informed decisions to optimise email marketing performance and increase your ROI. Let’s look at some useful methods you can use to increase engagement.

An eye-catching Naturewall marketing email

Using engaging multimedia to capture attention

While the content of your marketing emails should be engaging and informative, remember to focus on the design as well. The internet is a highly visual place, and with so many emails landing in each prospect’s inbox every day, it’s important to do what you can to stand out from the crowd. Emails with attention-grabbing graphics, images, and even videos are much more likely to convert – or at least encourage a click – than uninspiring text-only emails.

For promotional emails, rather than just including a couple of images, try embedding an animated product turntable, or a lifestyle video showing the item in use in a daily setting. This multimedia approach gives more information in just a few seconds without the recipient having to read anything. However, make sure to compress media to minimise email load times and reduce the risk of a soft bounce.

Take the example of this eye-catching marketing email promoting a sale at Naturewall: the imagery encourages potential customers to click through to the product pages, whilst the relatively small image file size means that the email still loads quickly.

Building psychological principles into your email marketing campaigns 

Like any other form of marketing, psychological principles can help you to optimise your email marketing, particularly when it comes to promotional campaigns. Some basic principles to start with include urgency, scarcity and social proof. These are tactics that aim to encourage action by implying that the customer will miss out if they don’t take action.

Urgency can be created through a limited-time offer, such as a 24-hour sale, while a good scarcity approach is abandoned basket emails that state how many of an individual item are left in stock. Social proof refers to trust signals that encourage individuals to copy others, and can be incorporated into marketing emails by embedding customer reviews, social media posts, or algorithms showing other items that similar customers also bought.

Introducing interactive elements to your marketing emails

Interactive elements, by their very nature, help to encourage engagement by giving email recipients something to do. In turn, this can help to encourage open, click-through and conversion rates, increasing the overall ROI of your email marketing campaign. Gamification and opportunities to win prizes are just some of the ways to add an interactive element to your emails.

Gamification doesn’t necessarily mean creating something for your readers to play; it can also mean incorporating components that are common in games to encourage engagement. Points and rewards, narrative storytelling and countdown timers are just a few elements that are easily applied to marketing emails. Another interactive option is embedding a widget that allows the recipient to spin a wheel or click to reveal a prize or discount. These are particularly useful for re-engagement strategies and offer a cost-effective solution for brands with lower budgets.

Running A/B tests on your messaging

A/B testing can be applied to a variety of marketing disciplines to optimise their effectiveness, including email marketing. By testing two different versions of an email, you can see which performs better and analyse why to inform future campaigns. This helps you to ensure a better return on investment backed by tangible results.

When carrying out A/B testing, it’s important not to change multiple elements at once, as this will make it hard to attribute increases or decreases in performance to individual changes. Common tests for optimising marketing emails include observing the effects of changing the subject line on open rates, testing different content lengths and images to maximise engagement, and using different CTAs to optimise click-through rates.

The future of email marketing

Like any other aspect of marketing, trends and technologies relating to email marketing are in a constant state of flux. While this provides new ways for brands to get their message across, it can be difficult to keep up with, presenting as many opportunities for failures as successes. It’s important to stay on top of these emerging trends to make sure you’re not left behind, and to gain a better understanding of which practices are suitable for your business and its audience.

AI in marketing emails

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already playing a role in email marketing strategies, with tools helping brands to validate email addresses, speed up the creation of content, and analyse optimum sending frequency. AI can also help to forecast customer behaviours and preferences, allowing brands to stay one step ahead with proactive communications that meet the individual’s current needs.

While it can be a powerful tool, it’s important to remember that, for the time being at least, AI lacks the emotion, empathy and creativity needed to generate truly successful marketing emails. It’s currently best used for more analytical purposes like extracting actionable information from large data sets, workshopping and optimising subject lines, and automating repetitive tasks to free up marketers for more strategic responsibilities. However, as AI continues to develop, we’ll be able to deploy it in ever more complicated marketing scenarios.

BIMI and standardised email authentication protocols

Marketing emails are an essential practice to support the modern business model, particularly for ecommerce and retail brands.  However, the rise of phishing attacks and email fraud has eroded customer trust in email marketing has presented new challenges for brands looking to make the most of this important tool.

As spam continues to plague customer inboxes, new regulations and email authentication protocols are coming into play. For example, BIMI is a standardised email authentication protocol that enables organisations to display their brand logos directly in the recipient’s email client. Becoming a BIMI-verified sender adds an extra layer of trust, helping to increase open rates and encourage conversions.

A BIMI-verified email from Google

Sophisticated personalisation technology

Adding a personal touch is a great way to help your email stand out in a saturated inbox. As the email marketing game becomes increasingly competitive, new technology is being developed to support sophisticated personalisation. As well as boosting engagement and conversion metrics, these tools allow brands to learn more about consumer behaviour.

Advanced personalisation technology is able to leverage data such as browsing history, purchase patterns and demographics to create hyper-personalised marketing emails targeting specific stages of the sales funnel. Capabilities include behaviour-triggered automation, localised content and timing, and dynamic content based on personal data.

Data privacy and ethical concerns

Data privacy and unethical practices in the digital space have been in the spotlight a lot over recent years, and email marketing is a discipline that requires particular care and attention in this area. With AI sparking ongoing concerns surrounding ethics and copyright, more stringent regulations will need to be created to protect users online.

Currently, one of the key pieces of legislation is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018. It outlines mandatory rules for how companies in the EU, and those interacting with users in the EU, process personal data. There are many ways in which the GDPR applies to email marketing, including ensuring that email addresses have been obtained ethically and that the recipient has given consent for their address to be used for marketing emails.

An evolving technology landscape

As with everything in digital, marketing or technology, the changing landscape needs constant consideration. In addition to the aspects mentioned in this guide, it’s important to consider the most up-to-date advice provided by email service providers, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. 

Whilst we’ve mentioned some specifics here, such as BIMI, which is one of the newest technologies, don’t forget to also ensure you have complied with existing technology best practices. 

This includes infrastructure considerations like:

• SPF – Sender Policy Framework is an authentication and verification method of ensuring your service/IP is permitted to send email from your domain name, and where it is not, enables the automatic categorisation of SPAM. This technology and some of the ones below significantly limit the risks of spoofing.
• DKIM – DomainKeys Identified Mail is another technology aimed at verifying legitimate emails from a sender, by checking for a valid and unaltered signature attached to each email. This is created by a chain of trust stored in the domain’s DNS records, similar to SPF. 
• DMARC – Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance is a reporting and policy tool, leveraging the above authentication layers. DMARC can help mailboxes report on and direct emails which don’t pass authentication. Email senders can manage this in their DNS records to ensure non-authorised email platforms cannot deliver on their behalf. DMARC providers typically offer compliance monitoring dashboards which should be reviewed periodically. 
• SPAM monitoring – Some email service providers, such as Google, offer tools for monitoring the domain health of an email-sending domain. Google’s tool is called ‘Postmaster Tools’ and Google also separately provides minimum compliance expectations and advice to help marketers remain in the primary inboxes, rather than falling into the risky areas of being marked as SPAM. 
• Separation of concerns, for large volume senders – higher volume senders might want to consider separating transactional and marketing emails, and even sharding the sending infrastructure even further. This division of concerns means that each domain can support its own sender reputation, and therefore email campaigns with a lower v higher risk of being categorised as SPAM can execute independently of one another. Transactional emails, for example, are unlikely to ever be categorised as SPAM as they are personalised, lack a lot of marketing content, and are sent infrequently. 
• Private IPs, for large volume senders – depending on your sending volume, your email sending platform, or your marketing automation platform, may offer a shared IP pool, or a unique IP pool for your exclusive use. Often, this is an enterprise feature at an additional cost, but the benefits are that the risks from other senders cannot tarnish the sender reputation of a private IP address, whereas there’s some risk this can happen on a shared IP. 
• Domain and IP warm-up plans – For new domains, and new IPs, particularly post platform changes, you should start slowly and consider which email service providers (“ESP”) you are emailing. An email warm-up plan would be customised for your business but would ensure you start by sending only 1-200 emails to each of the major ESPs on the first sending day, scaling from there subject to good deliverability.  

Advanced interactivity and dynamic content

Emails targeting new devices and smartphones can have interactive elements such as carousels. Plugins allow for search features, and deep-link CTAs buttons can be used to add products to the basket from emails.

Information such as geolocation, weather, traffic, website behaviour, and media schedule data can be used to change the content of emails and create highly relevant and personalised communications. 

Level up your email marketing with Impression

In this article, we’ve explored how you can set your brand up for success through email marketing, detailing how to plan, measure and optimise campaigns.

If you’re looking to take your marketing emails to the next level, take a look at Impression’s specialist email marketing automation services. Our experts can help you to get the most value out of your prospects with intelligent nurture journeys, customer cleanup tactics and recurring automated lifecycle flows, so every email you send is as effective as it can be.

To find out what we can do for your business, speak to our team today.