8 practical tips on how to improve your email marketing

When you prepare a bulk email, look at it through the eyes of the person you are sending it to. Consciously or not, they ask themselves eight questions about every email they receive. If your email and landing page answer them correctly, there is a good chance they will read it and do what you wrote to them for. Here are the questions, and the answers.

In a nutshell

1. The sender is always a real person the recipient knows, with a verified domain.
2. The subject line, heading and preview tell them what they will find inside.
3. Send only to people for whom the content is relevant and who open your emails.
4. The opening image and headline must match the recipient's reality, not your product.
5. Personalise the greeting, the subject line and parts of the text based on what you know about the recipient.
6. The email has a single main call to action, prominent and with a clear motivation.
7. The landing page mirrors the email: the same images, colours and font.
8. On the page, let the recipient finish what they came for, with no distractions.

In brief: what the recipient decides, where, what you need and what is at stake

• What they decide: whether to open, read and click the email and, on the landing page, whether to finish what you wrote to them for.
• Where they decide: the first five questions come up in the inbox and in the opened email, the next three on the landing page.
• What you need: a known sender with a verified domain, a subject line and preview that say what is inside, active recipients, one call to action and a page that mirrors the email.
• What is at stake: unopened emails damage the sender's reputation and end up in the promotions folder or in spam. A page without a clear call to action wastes even a successful click.

What has changed since 2021: This article was written in June 2021 and its advice still holds. The rules of the game have tightened since then, though. Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to verify their domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), offer one-click unsubscribe and keep the spam complaint rate below 0.3%. Apple Mail Privacy Protection has devalued the open rate as a metric, because it loads images automatically. And most emails are now opened on mobile, often in dark mode. The updated passages are marked as tips throughout the text.

As soon as your email lands in the recipient's inbox (alongside everyone else's), they immediately ask themselves several questions. The first five decide whether they open, read and click the email. The next three come up on the landing page you send them to. Let's go through them one by one.

1. Who is writing to me?

This question is tied to the sender of the email. You most likely do the same thing. If you receive an email from someone you know, the chance that you open it and pay attention to it is much higher than when it arrives from info@clevercompany.com.

Have a look at the results of our survey, in which we asked 311 respondents. 42% of them said that when deciding whether to open an email, they look at the sender name first. An equal 34% said their attention goes first to the subject line and to the email heading.

If you want your customers to receive emails directly from the salespeople who are in touch with them, try automatic sender selection in Quanda. You will find this setting on the Sending page. For every single email, it automatically replaces the sender address and signature according to who is listed as the owner of that contact.

This way you achieve a higher open rate, a higher click-through rate and better overall results. You can learn how to set up a contact owner in the guide Contact owner.

Tip: The sender name is only half of the answer to "who is writing to me". Mail servers verify the other half themselves: the sender's domain must have SPF, DKIM and DMARC records in place. Without them, Gmail and Yahoo have been rejecting bulk emails or sending them to spam since 2024, no matter how well known the sender is. You will find the steps in the guide DKIM, SPF, DMARC, link branding and sending domain verification. Deadlines and details are summarised in the article Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook requirements for bulk email senders.

2. What are they writing to me about?

This question is answered by the subject line, the email heading and the email preview, if the recipient has it displayed. The email preview is the part of the message that appears in the inbox list next to or below the subject line.

A lot has been written about how to write the subject line and heading of an email. It certainly does no harm to refresh the recommendations, though. Read the article How to write the subject of an email. A detailed guide you will not want your competition to read and the article 9 tips on how to create the right email title.

Tip: On mobile, roughly 35 to 40 characters of the subject line are displayed, plus another 40 to 90 of the preview. So put the most important part at the start of both. And never leave the preview empty, otherwise the email client fills it with the first text from the email, often the sentence "If this email is not displayed correctly…".

3. Is this for me?

You have a few seconds for the recipient to decide to give your email their attention. In that time you have to catch their attention and convince them that the email is worth dealing with. How do you do that?

I. Do not forget to choose your recipients correctly

The content you send must match the expectations of the people you send it to. Obviously, sending a business offer to someone who cannot use it will not work. So everything starts with the selection of recipients. But choosing them only by how well the content or offer fits is not enough. The selection also has to take into account how active or passive those recipients are towards your emails. What does that mean?

On your email list you will find contacts who are interested in your emails, open them and click through. But you will also find contacts who will not open your emails no matter what you send. Maybe your emails end up in their bulk mail folder, maybe their mail server classifies them as junk and blocks them. Or they simply used an address they have not used for a long time. There can be any number of reasons.

With emails sent to inactive recipients, the problem is not just that the person does not read them. Every unopened and unclicked email is a signal to the mailbox provider that the recipient is not interested in emails from you as a sender. Based on how interested or uninterested recipients are, providers form a picture of you as a sender over time. They start grading you so they know how to treat your emails in the future.

If you have a good grade, your emails generally go to primary folders and there are no delivery problems whatsoever. If your grade is worse or bad, your emails end up in bulk mail folders or in junk. And that is regardless of what you are sending and to whom.

And that is the catch. When you have bad grades, that is a bad reputation as a sender of bulk emails, you will struggle to get your emails into primary folders. With a very bad reputation, your emails may be blocked entirely.

Put yourself in the role of a mailbox provider for a moment. Imagine you run Gmail. What grade would you give a sender whose emails have a 20% open rate and who keeps sending emails, over and over, to people who have never opened anything from them? After a while you would conclude that this sender just churns out bulk emails regardless of the results, and you would not give them a good grade.

On the other hand, how would you grade a sender who achieves a 40% open rate or higher, and who, as you would notice, does not keep sending to people who do not open their emails? Your rating would be better. And that is the difference between why some emails end up in primary folders and others in junk, or are not delivered at all.

Warning: Today, providers measure reputation mainly through the spam complaint rate. Gmail requires it to stay below 0.3%, and the safe threshold is below 0.1%. So one complaint per thousand emails separates you from trouble. The simplest prevention is exactly this: excluding inactive recipients and a working one-click unsubscribe. Take the open rate with a pinch of salt, on the other hand. Since Apple Mail Privacy Protection arrived, a share of opens comes from images being loaded automatically without the recipient's involvement.

To make your work as easy as possible, we have extended the Detailed contact filter on the Recipients page in an email campaign with a section called By sent campaigns. You will find the same filter on the Contacts page too.

I often use the terms contact and recipient. To be clear: a contact is a record stored in Contacts, usually a first name, surname and email address, possibly with further information. A recipient is a contact that has been added to an email campaign and to whom an email has been sent.

This filter lets you filter recipients and contacts by sent campaigns and their activity in those campaigns. You can quickly find both active and inactive contacts and work with them accordingly.

The procedure is simple: in an email campaign, open the Recipients page and show the detailed contact filter. In the By sent campaigns section choose the period, the campaigns and the Opened event. Exclude the filtered inactive contacts from the mailing or address them with a separate campaign.

II. Get the recipient to identify with the content of the email as much as possible

When the recipient opens your email, they must see immediately that it is for them, that it concerns them. The fastest route is through the opening image and the headline. In that order. First the image, then the text. People would rather look at an image than start reading text.

The opening image of the email

Which image to choose? One that shows the recipient at first glance that the email is for them. The image should capture the recipient's reality. The situation they are in. The field they work in. The environment they know, the product they use often. If the recipient does not know your products or does not use them, placing an image of a specific product here may be a mistake. The recipient may not even know what it is. In that case, avoid the product image.

This email is sent to recipients who work in agriculture.

The main headline

Like the image, the headline has to catch attention and convince the recipient to keep dealing with the email. So it serves two functions: to catch attention and to get the recipient to stay and continue reading. From the headline, the recipient should understand that the email concerns them. The headline should contain something the recipient knows well. A description of a familiar problem you have a solution for. A recommendation on how to handle a common situation the recipient knows. You have to connect the headline to the recipient's reality. To the situations they experience, to what is happening around them, to the things they usually look for solutions to.

If you are not sure, ask your customers directly. Surveys are perfect for this. Ask what the most common problem is that your products or services solve. What they have actually gained from them. What problems they would have to deal with if they did not have them. Find out why they started buying from you. All of this will help you formulate headlines that are guaranteed to attract attention.

III. Use a personalised greeting and text parts

A personalised greeting is standard today. You can, however, try addressing the recipient by their first name. It can be an interesting change that attracts attention. Personalising certain text parts of the email is also worth considering, for example information about a service the recipient used, a product they bought, or why they are receiving an email from you. When you place this information in the email footer, you can reduce the number of recipients who unsubscribe.

An example of personalised text in the footer of an email sent from Quanda:

Well-chosen text personalisation also helps you tailor the content to each recipient and make the message far more relevant. Quanda creates the salutation in the vocative case (personalised greeting) completely automatically, from the surname with or without a prefix as well as from the first name. You can also automatically store text information in custom fields and use it to personalise parts of the text. All of this through the automations you will find in Contacts.

You can also personalise the subject line itself:

And likewise the greeting and parts of the text:

4. Why should I read this?

The combination of a well-chosen image and a correctly formulated headline decides whether the recipient stays or leaves. What is in the headline, together with the subject line and heading of the email, sets expectations and largely determines whether the recipient reads on into the rest of the content and eventually clicks.

The headline is also where you convey the main reason why the recipient should deal with the email. They should find something valuable, interesting or advantageous in it, something that makes it worth reading on and giving the email more attention and time. The headline should spark their desire to learn more.

If you succeed, the next part of the email gives you room to present what you are sending the email for. Add a brief description of the product or service, an image, highlight points of interest, include a reference.

The entire content of the email has a single job. To make the recipient click and get to the landing page.

5. I am interested. What should I do?

Now comes the key element of the whole email. The call to action. The place that moves the recipient towards an order, a booking, a document download. Simply, towards whatever you are sending them the email for.

The call to action must be simple, easy to understand, prominent, and ideally it should contain a real motivation for the recipient to click. From a discount to a bonus, an advantage, being first, priority… anything of value the recipient gains when they click and complete what you are asking them to do.

In an email, the call to action is usually a text link, a button or a clickable image. If you choose a text link, avoid linking the word "here". Instead of "Find out more about this product HERE", where the link is the shortest word, it is better to make the whole phrase the link: "Find out more about this product". Such a link is easier to see, attracts more attention, and you have a better chance that the recipient clicks.

If you go for a button, use a contrasting colour, make it big enough and leave enough free space around it so it stands out from everything else.

Tip: One email, one main call to action. The button must be comfortable to tap with a thumb, so at least 44 px tall, and legible in dark mode too, where a light background disappears and white text on the button can blend into its surroundings. Before sending, always open the email on your phone, not just in the preview on your computer.

If you manage to get the recipient to click, you have only half won. Now the landing page you send the recipient to has to do its job.

How to fine-tune the landing page so it sells

If you have got this far and the recipient of your email has clicked the link or button, that is a great result, but not yet the product.

The recipient usually reaches that goal only on the page you direct them to. It is called a landing page because the recipient "lands" on it after clicking through from the email. It is an ordinary page on your website. Here too the visitor asks themselves several questions, and here too you have to keep them in mind when creating the page and its content.

6. Am I in the right place?

When the recipient arrives on the page you send them to from the email, they should know immediately that they are in the right place. They should not spend even a second wondering where they have ended up and whether they are where they should be.

To achieve this, the email and the landing page need to be aligned. Ideally they will contain the same images, buttons in the same colour, and the same or at least a very similar font in the same colour.

The more alike the email and the landing page are, the fewer surprises you prepare for the recipient on the landing page.

7. Why should I stay?

Just as you have to convince the recipient to open, read and click the email, on the landing page you have to convince them to stay. What does the page need for that?

• Clarity and simplicity.
• A main headline with your unique selling proposition.
• A description of the product or service focused more on benefits and value than on features and technical details.
• References, the number of customers who have already bought the product or service, or anything else that increases the credibility of the offer.
• Fast loading and legibility on mobile, because that is where most visits from email come from.

8. I want it. What should I do?

If the opening of the landing page has convinced the recipient to stay, the goal of everything else is to create desire. If you have managed that, only one last step remains. A very important step, and once again it is the call to action.

You do this with an enquiry, order or registration form with a button, a purchase button and the like. If the call to action is missing from the page, everything before it was wasted effort. For the recipient who has made it this far, you have to make it as simple as possible. Do not bother them with unnecessary form fields, an extensive menu, additional offers and banners.

Do not overdo the number of calls to action, two on a page is plenty.

Pre-send checklist

Before you send the campaign, go through these ten points. Each of them answers one of the questions the recipient asks.

• The sender is a real person the recipient knows.
• The sending domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up, and one-click unsubscribe works.
• The subject line and preview tell the recipient what they will find inside, with the most important part at the start.
• Recipients are selected by content relevance and by their activity, and inactive contacts are excluded.
• The opening image and headline match the recipient's reality, not your product.
• The greeting, subject line and, where appropriate, parts of the text are personalised.
• The email has one main call to action, prominent and with a clear motivation.
• You have opened the email on your phone, including in dark mode.
• The landing page mirrors the email and has a simple form or button.
• A test email has been checked by a colleague who did not prepare the campaign.

In conclusion

If you have successfully guided the recipient through all eight steps, congratulations. If you are losing the recipient at one of the steps, take a look at it and adjust it so that it automatically moves the recipient on to the next one. And if you are not sure how to put all of this into practice, get in touch with us. We will be glad to help.

Fingers crossed!