Email marketing includes email newsletters, behavioral emails, transactional emails, outreach emails, and several other types of email campaigns. What makes email marketing so powerful is that you can speak directly to your audience — and that means you can use email marketing (in combination with Customer Experience Automation) at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Here are five best practices you can use to improve the success of your email campaigns, from increasing your open rates to your click through rates. Send highly segmented, targeted emails: Send your emails with a distinct message, and for a purpose. Reach out to people about their most recent interest or interaction. Use personalization tags: Add a contact name to an email subject line or greeting to draw them in. Use personalization tags to deliver messages that incorporate your contact’s interests. Use a clear headline: Readers judge an email by the subject line, so write with purpose. Is there a question they’re asking themselves you want to address? Are they running out of time to act? Let them know why they should open your email instead of hitting delete. Always have a call-to-action: Send all emails for a purpose, and make that call-to-action clear to your audience. Focus on direct messaging with a clear objective that will encourage a higher rate of engagement.

There are many ways to measure success, and there are many, very different kinds of businesses that use email marketing. The most commonly quoted successful open rate for email is between 15 – 25%.

We have several resources available to help you check your email deliverability. Be sure to begin by reviewing our help article with important tips and suggestions for your first 30 days with a new email provider. Looking for more? Check out the email deliverability section in our Help Center.

This is a common question with a multitude of answers: think of email deliverability as a credit score, impacted by many factors. But there are a few quick wins you can use to improve your deliverability. Keep your emails out of the spam folder by following these tips, and more:

• Remove inactive contacts: Inactive contacts bring down your open rates. Use an automation recipe to track engagement, and remove contacts who have gone cold from your targeted sends.
• Focus on good, engaging content: Send the content your contact signed up for. Make sure to remain fresh and interesting, and don’t over-send the same tired promotions.
• Review your signup process, and think like a subscriber: Have you tried to be a secret shopper… for yourself? Go through the process of signing up for your own emails, and deliver on the value you promised.
• Send more targeted, triggered, personalized emails as opposed to batch and blast campaigns: Don’t send all of your emails to all of your contacts. Use the segment builder to create your segments, and then check the list to see how many people meet your criteria. Make your segment more specific, if necessary.
• Sending frequency: It takes time to learn how often your contacts want to hear from you. Oversending emails may cause contacts to mark you as spam. But if you send too infrequently, your message may never make it to their inbox because you haven’t built up your sender reputation.
• Find more tips here: Why is my email going to the spam folder? How to improve email deliverability