How often should you be sending emails? Worried you’re bombarding your database with emails? Worried your readers think you might have disappeared into thin air? It’s about creating a rhythm and sticking to it. 

Of course, this varies between industries, but we’d say it was fair for a reader to expect to hear from you anywhere from once a week to once a month. If you are going to send multiple emails in a week, we’d never recommend sending on consecutive days. Oh and never send something for the sake of it - make sure it’s all relevant, engaging stuff. 

Using a first name tag is a great way of making your emails engaging and catching the attention of the reader, particularly in subject lines. However, you must remember that you won’t hold a first name for every single person in your database and you must consider how the subject line will display for these people. For example, if you put something like ‘Faye, we need to talk’, this would show up as ‘ , we need to talk’ - terribly embarrassing we know. That’s why we built the function to set fallback content for wherever you’ve put a merge tag. So with our example above, you could set the fallback content as ‘Hey’. So, if we don’t hold the contact’s first name, the subject line would come up as ‘Hey, we need to talk’. 

You can only set one fallback option for each merge tag, so if you’ve used the first name tag more than once in a single email, you should be mindful that the fallback content will populate all of the first name tags. So remember to make sure the fallback content works for all scenarios. 

Copy is great and can be super-effective in email campaigns. Stick to your brand’s tone of voice and keep it simple. Nobody is expecting a novel in their email, and let’s face it, your email is probably sat amongst a lot of other emails in their inbox so make it stand out by using short, punchy paragraphs. You can use bold, italics and underline to make certain words stand out so it’s easy on the eye. You should remember to utilise the plain text header too - that gives you another chance to entice the recipient into opening your email! 

It’s always a good idea to include some images as well as copy to make your email visually pleasing. Crisp, high-quality images should always be used. If you need a little more info on image size recommendations and how to crop in our email builder. Check out our article here. 

Our platform supports GIFs (but not video, right now) so if you are a bit of a graphic design wiz, then go forth and create something beautiful! Oh and don’t forget to utilise call to action buttons to give your email a clear objective. 

If you make your emails too long, you’re likely to lose the reader’s attention. We recommend never including more than 4 different blocks/stories. It’s better to be concise and clear, or you risk bombarding the reader with information which can be confusing. 

You should also switch up the layout of your emails regularly to keep them interesting. Many of our templates allow a mix of larger images, copy, call to action buttons, side by sides and a mix of them all.

Whenever you’re intending to send an email out to your database, you should always ‘test send’ it to yourself first. This allows you to see exactly how the email will look and also check for anything that doesn’t look how you would expect it to. This is particularly important when you’re including any merge tags, unique codes, and special characters (both in subject lines and body copy). It’s also worth taking a look at your test send on mobile - do you have any images with text on? Is that text readable? You should also test all links to make sure they go to the correct place. 

Stick to these rules and you’ll be an email marketing pro in no time. Eager to learn more? We’ve got plenty of other useful articles on emails including top tips for copywriting, how to use merge tags, designing for email, managing blocks and automated emails.