Email marketing is essential to any marketing plan, and here at Quantum, our strategic marketing team is here to support you. As you begin finalizing your marketing strategies for the year, here are four “best practices” to keep in mind when it comes to email.
- Clean and Segment Your Contact Lists
You may have a great looking email, filled with helpful resources and inspiring content, but if the right people aren’t receiving it, you won’t get the results you want. That’s why cleaning your contact lists and creating segments is first on our list of best practices.
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- Cleaning Lists
Remove any duplicate email addresses to ensure you aren’t sending multiple emails to the same person. This will also increase your deliverability, reduce bounces, and help get more accurate analytics for open and click rates.
Double check that the emails in your list are authentic and don’t have any spelling errors. Sometimes we see contacts in lists that are fake or simply spelled incorrectly like “@hmail.com” or “@ahoo.com” instead of “@gmail.com” and “@yahoo.com.” Emails that are fake and do not actually exist should be removed, but emails with minor spelling errors can easily be fixed. Making these quick changes before sending will help reduce the amount of hard bounces.
It’s also wise to make sure the names in your contact list are spelled correctly, are properly capitalized, and are listed accurately by first and last name in case you ever want to use their name to personalize your email. For instance, if you would like to start an email with “Dear Jane,” if you have misplaced the first and last name in your list and haven’t capitalized properly, your email may incorrectly start with “Dear mcduff.”
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- Segmenting Lists
When people talk about segmenting your lists, they’re referring to strategically organizing your contacts so you can tailor your email messaging to different audiences. You can segment by things like geographic location, current clients, prospective clients you’ve met with, event attendees, web leads, event leads, birthdays, email engagement, how contacts have interacted with specific content, and more.
The method of segmentation varies depends on whether or not you are managing lists inside your CRM, manually separating lists in Excel, or keeping data inside some type of email software. We utilize Mailchimp for most of our advisors, and like many email software platforms, Mailchimp has options to tag and segment the contacts you upload.
Tags are labels you can add to contacts in your list in order to easily send emails to select groups of people. This type of organization can also help you keep track of where your contacts came from. For example, if you recently had an event and want an easy way to remember who attended out of your contacts, you can add a tag like, “2026 Holiday Party Attendees.” And, if you want to send a “thank you” email or another message to those individuals in the future, all you have to do is add the tag “2026 Holiday Party Attendees” to the “Send To” box in Mailchimp and your email will get sent to all contacts with that tag.
Most email platforms, including Mailchimp, allow you to automate simple email “journeys” so a series of emails can be sent at scheduled times to specific contacts in your list. For example, if you send an email asking contacts to complete a survey, you can schedule automated follow-up emails. Those who completed the survey can start automatically receiving additional emails about the survey results, while contacts who did not fill out the survey can receive a different message altogether.
Cleaning, tagging, and segmenting your contact lists makes it easier to send emails to specific groups of people and helps ensure that your contacts are receiving content that they actually want to read. This can help increase your open and click rates, reduce unsubscribes, and ultimately can help convert prospective clients into clients.
- Craft Compelling Subject Lines and Preheaders
Subject lines and preheaders seem like the easy part of email writing, but since most people get dozens of emails every day, these lines are incredibly important in getting someone to click rather than delete an email without even reading it.
In our industry, it’s important to be relevant and not overpromise or sound like clickbait. But you must get to the point quickly. Many email inboxes will cut off the majority of a subject line, so that’s why we try to keep our subject lines to no more than 40 characters long.
As for preheaders, keeping them between 30 and 80 characters should be long enough to give the reader some more insight about what they will find in your email, without words getting cut off in the preview.
Even though subject lines and preheaders should be short, it is also important to be clear about what the reader should expect to find once they open your email. Finding some sort of hook and highlighting the topic your readers will find most interesting is a great way to encourage them to open your email. When crafting subject lines, we find that asking the reader a question or including what they could personally gain from reading the email can increase open rates substantially.
- Maintain Brand Consistency and Keep Content Clean and Actionable
Maintaining your brand is key in anything you do as an organization or individual, including email. Implementing your brand colors, fonts, logos, and having your contact information readily available in each email you send builds trust in your brand over time.
Branding is key, but so is making content actionable. What exactly do you want the reader to do after reading your email? Ask yourself what you most want to achieve. You should have at least one call to action (CTA) in each email. Whether it’s clicking a link to the contact page of your website or filling out a quick survey, the reader should have a clear understanding of what actions you want them to take.
On that note, keeping your emails clean can help your email reader see the CTAs more easily. Breaking up the content you are sharing with headers, colorful blocks, images, and dividers can help keep your email organized and readable.
At Quantum, we use monthly newsletter emails to help you and your brand stay top-of-mind with your audience, and encourage your clients and prospects to click through to your website to access new educational content that we post for you. This has the additional benefit of sending SEO (search engine optimization) signals to Google and AI, which index and count them as website visits from links.
- With Clean Segmented Lists, Use Automated Personalization Tools
So, what should you do if your contacts are opening your emails, but they aren’t clicking on anything other than the unsubscribe button? Personalizing your content can lead to less unsubscribes and more engagement.
For instance, did you know that you can personalize the subject lines and preheaders themselves, encouraging more email opens in the first place? Using first name merge tags in subject lines or preheaders shows the email is meant specifically for the reader. (But remember this requires a clean list.)
You can also add these touches to the email itself, by using the merge tags button available in most email platforms to include the reader’s first name, last name, birthday, etc. to make the email feel more personal and engaging.
Don’t forget, “Personalizing your emails” also pertains to YOU. We encourage you to share your own personal content to emails, like staff spotlights, pictures from your latest event, or key takeaways from your latest adventure. This can be a great way to remind your readers who you are, and why they should both like and trust you as a person.
At Quantum, we help our advisor partners create personalized email campaigns, and apply best email practices in every email we create and deploy. We put thought, research, and passion into our content and constantly work to increase your success.
If you would like to become one of our financial advisor partners, and you’re interested in learning more about how we can impact your email campaigns, please give us a call today at 800.440.1088!
Sources:
https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-segmentation/
https://brandguide.asu.edu/execution-guidelines/email/content
https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/email/best-practices/
https://mailchimp.com/resources/beginners-guide-to-segmentation/
https://mailchimp.com/features/dynamic-content/
https://mailchimp.com/help/best-practices-for-email-subject-lines/
https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-preheader/
Marianna Touloumes supports the marketing team at Quantum with email design, development, and strategy. She manages and builds newsletters for our wide range of advisor partners, tailoring messaging and branding to each unique audience. From layout to deployment, Marianna brings a fresh perspective, compelling messaging, and a focus on performance.
