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Table of Contents
Email Marketing Software Salesforce Help
Email marketing can be one of the most effective marketing strategies in your toolbox especially when you have a data-based strategy and the right tools in place. It can also be one of the best marketing investments you can make because you are in control. You manage your list of subscribers, and compared to other marketing channels, you don’t have to depend on search engines or social media algorithms to get the word out for you.
To maximize your budget and see improved ROI, use email marketing best practices to deliver high quality, relevant content to users who can’t wait to open your messages. Here are the email marketing best practices you need to do precisely that.
Email’s ROI is High Across the Customer Journey
The Email Marketing Best Practices You Need to Know
On this page, we’ll go over the following topics:
Email Marketing Software
Email Subscriber List Best Practices
How to Design an Email
Elements of the Email Message
Email Marketing Metrics and Testing
Responding to Email Marketing Errors
For additional resources on email marketing best practices, check out Legends of Trailblazers for Email: Tips and Use Cases and the Marketing Cloudcast.
Email Marketing Software
When you want to start using or to improve your email marketing, best practices are your map of the ways to get there. Once you understand the overall landscape, you can chart a course that avoids pitfalls and speeds your progress toward your goal. In short, you can develop an overall email marketing strategy.
No matter how comprehensive your strategy, you need the right tools for the job. A regular email client such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail isn’t enough for business communication because you don’t get metrics such as opens, bounces, and your click-through rate, and it doesn’t scale to send tens, thousands, or millions of messages at once. These clients also aren’t compliant with email marketing laws such as CAN-SPAM in the U.S., GDPR in Europe, CASL in Canada, and CCPA in California for sending to mailing lists.
To legally land your emails in recipients’ inboxes — and get them noticed — you need an email service provider. Not only does this software help with legal compliance and measure your success, but some come with automation tools that allow you to scale your email marketing with less effort. Your marketing software should also include access to a dozen or more additional email marketing tools.
Once you have the right email marketing software, your amped-up campaign strategy, based on tested email marketing best practices, can begin.
Email Subscriber List Best Practices
Creating an email subscriber list in your email software is generally simple. Often, all it takes is a few clicks and a descriptive title. The challenge is growing, segmenting, and maintaining your lists.
Grow your email list organically. This means you need to seek out leads who are genuinely interested in your brand, perhaps using the demographics research tools available on Facebook. You can offer these potential subscribers incentives, such as contests, a loyalty program, or free webinars, to encourage them to sign up for your list.
To ensure your email subscribers receive only the content most relevant to their needs, segment your list by demographics, interests, geographic location, or other factors that make sense for your business. From there, you can create drip campaigns and other automated messaging for these segments using your email marketing software.
Although it might seem like an easy way to jumpstart your reach, never buy an email list. These leads have not opted in to receiving your emails, which puts you out of compliance with most anti-spam laws. Furthermore, you’ll likely end up with terrible open rates, high bounce rates, and recipients marking your message as spam. Without a proper opt-in system, you can’t be sure your messages will ever be seen. This may be the most important email marketing best practice for companies.
Finally, regularly scrub your subscriber list of fake, incorrect, bouncing, or inactive email addresses. Keeping subscribers who aren’t interested anymore or who have invalid addresses only skews your metrics and drains value from the insights that your email marketing software provides. After you try to reengage subscribers who may have gone quiet for a while, pause communications for those who remain unresponsive.
How to Design an Email
When a recipient opens your email, they should know they’re about to see high-quality, enjoyable content from your brand. A well-designed email is among the best ways to accomplish an instant impression of quality.
Start with an email design template that’s flexible, but allows you to create consistency across messages. One crucial email marketing best practice is to choose a template that’s responsive. That way, your content renders correctly on desktop, mobile, and everything in between. Responsive email design is essential because subscribers move seamlessly between desktop and mobile devices when they check their email. They expect the message to display properly no matter which device they use. Your email engagement rates depend on your messages being easy to read and navigate, and responsive designs play a large part.
When it comes to visual appeal and leading your readers’ eyes to key components of your message, color choices are critical. Align colors with your branding, but be flexible, too. Choose contrasting colors and use them to direct attention to buttons and clickable text. Your email templates will help make sure your designs are easy to read if you don’t have a graphic designer on hand to help create a visually interesting email campaign.
Finally, any images in your email need to be accessible for your entire audience, so add descriptive alt text that helps visually impaired subscribers understand your content. This alt text also helps in the event the graphic doesn’t display or load when the recipient opens the email.
The Basics of an Email Layout
Elements of the Email Message
When you’re competing for inbox attention, details matter. In addition to using your email marketing software, maintaining a healthy email subscriber list, and using effective design elements, use psychology to optimize your emails and reach even more readers.
How to Write Email Subject Lines
Once your message lands in an inbox, the subject line has to entice the recipient to open it, and most marketers agree that subject lines should be roughly 50 characters for maximum impact. Create a sense of urgency by adding a time frame or pique curiosity by asking a question. You can personalize the subject line by using the subscriber’s name, and stand out from the crowd with a relevant emoji — if that’s what’s right for your audience. As always, A/B test your subject lines to learn what resonates most with your recipients. Your email marketing software should make A/B testing easy to execute and measure. Even better, some email marketing tools will layer in AI to help in crafting the best subject line for your audience.
How to Personalize Emails
Adding a recipient’s name in the subject or body of an email is a good first step toward personalization, but it’s often not enough. The industry standard is to create dynamic email content that matches their interests and progress through the sales funnel. To take it a step further, one of the most recent additions to the list of email marketing best practices is to use AI to analyze each recipient’s behavior.
How to Use Emojis in Email
Depending on your brand, emojis can add interest, personality, and meaning to your emails. It can be easy to overdo emojis once you get started, so use them sparingly and only where they’ll be most effective. Millennials tend to appreciate emojis more than older generations, for example, and typically only in content that isn’t too serious.
How to Write Effective Email Copy
The copy of your email is where you’ll hone in on your message. Whether you’re encouraging readers to take advantage of a sale, educating them, or encouraging them to write a review about your brand, use clear, compelling language. Keep it concise, relevant, and easily scannable. Follow these email content best practices and you’ll also support the overarching goals of your email campaign by creating high-quality, useful content. Your subscribers will know your messages are worth their time.
How to Use Images in Email
The human brain processes images faster than it reads text. Images can also evoke emotion and spark the imagination, so using them in your emails can help you get your message across more quickly. However, some recipients have their email client set to not display images, while others see text-only messages. When you use an image, make sure it enhances but doesn’t replace appropriate copy, and remember to use alt text to describe what the image conveys.
How to Write an Email Call to Action
An important email marketing best practice is to have a strategic purpose for every email campaign. In other words, once opened, your email has a job to do. Maybe that job is to inform or entertain, or maybe it’s to entice a purchase. Either way, the goal likely involves clicking through to a landing page on your website, so make sure you include a call to action, or CTA, that stands out visually and clearly explains what the action is. You can include additional links in the email, but make sure the CTA of your main goal attracts readers’ attention.
How to Make An Email Interactive
When you send an interactive email, your subscribers can engage with the content without leaving their inboxes. This feature brings web-like functionality to the inbox and can include hover effects and hide-reveal states, as well as galleries and product review forms, within the email itself. To make an email interactive, work with your email developer to add in code or leverage a partner tool. You can also ask your email software provider what tools they have that support interactivity.
Email Marketing Metrics and Testing
The perfect email is a moving target. Email marketing best practices make excellent guidelines, but what works for one business may not work for another, and these best practices change as technology and people change.
What works for your audience right now may evolve. Start with a strategy built from email best practices, and then measure and test your way to even better email marketing results.
Improve Your Email Marketing by Measuring, Analyzing & Adjusting
The Most Important Email Marketing Metrics
To determine how successful your campaigns are, make sure your email marketing software measures and tracks, at the minimum, these key metrics:
Open rate
Click rate
Click to open rate (CTOR)
Bounce rate
Delivery rate
Spam percentage and complaint rate
Unsubscribe number and rate
A/B Test Your Emails
Once you have a baseline for key email metrics, start tweaking elements of your emails to see what improves your numbers. The best way to learn what works best is A/B testing. With this strategy, you create two versions of the same email campaign, each with only one aspect that’s different from the other. You’ll send email A to one half of your audience and version B to the other half, then track which performs better.
A/B testing works best when you make one small change at a time, so be patient and keep track of your learnings, and know that you’re getting closer to a better email each time you press send.
Email Marketing Errors
Every email marketer makes mistakes. Your first error is like a rite of passage, and sometimes these issues are out of your control. Don’t let the possibility of making a mistake keep you from hitting the send button. Instead, know how to deal with email marketing errors: Prevent as many as you can and correct the ones that happen.
First, become familiar with some of the most common email marketing mistakes. One of the biggest pitfalls is forgetting that email is part of a relationship with your subscribers. Keep this in mind to help ensure your messages are respectful, relevant, and useful for recipients.
For mistakes that occur in just one or two emails, have a response action plan. Know when to let small errors, like a typo or a formatting issue, go. For larger mistakes, triage them by how much impact they’ll have on your audience. When necessary, don’t forget the power of a sincere apology for rebuilding any relationships an error may have impacted.
More Best Email Marketing Practices
Email marketing pays off whether you’re looking to nurture leads, convert prospects, or reward repeat customers. To maximize your time, effort, and budget, stick to these tested email marketing best practices. These tips will get you started on optimizing your email marketing. For more, download the 50 Best Practices for Email Marketers e-book.
exact target email
In this article, you’ll learn how to set up the bridge and connect Incoming Email to Exact Target (Salesforce® Marketing Cloud) using LeadsBridge.
Not using LeadsBridge yet?
Start your free trial today!
SIGN UP FOR FREE
HOW TO SET UP YOUR BRIDGE STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL
Before you start
Head over to the left sidebar and click on Bridges
You’ll be taken to the Bridges section of your account
Click on the Add New button
You’ll be taken to the first step of the bridge creation
Step 1: Bridge’s Main information
Choose a name for your bridge (this will only be visible inside LeadsBridge)
You may add labels to help you identify your bridge later
Choose Incoming Email as the source for your bridge
Choose Exact Target (Salesforce® Marketing Cloud) as the destination
Click on the Next button
Step 2: Setup your Incoming Email source
You may send lead’s information from Incoming Email to LeadsBridge through the Email Importer feature.
Copy the Email Address that you see in this step and set this endpoint as the data receiver inside your Incoming Email settings.
How to setup the INCOMING_EMAIL on Incoming Email
This integration extracts, automatically, data from a specific email, and then transforms it into fields that may be used in your bridges.
To set it up, copy the email provided, then you can decide where to put it in your system according to your needs:
as a recipient of your system notifications
as a cc in the emails you receive to extract the data from the email body
Now you should trigger a test email notification or forward the email containing the desired information.
The system will recognize all fields that contain data and display them.
Now everything is ready!
You can combine the various fields recognized by the system to send them to your destination during the step of the fields matching!
Before proceeding
One last thing before proceeding to the next step is to send a test lead from Incoming Email. This will allow us to recognize the attributes you’d like to pass along and offer them as presets in the next steps of the setup.
Please make sure the LeadsBridge screen is saying “Waiting for New Lead…”, it means that we’re ready to receive your test data
Go to Incoming Email
Submit a test lead
Once done go back to LeadsBridge and verify that your test was sent successfully
You should see the information processed correctly by the app
Click on the Next button
Step 3: Setup your Exact Target (Salesforce® Marketing Cloud) destination
Type in the integration’s name in the dedicated field
Enter Client ID, Client Secret and Authentication Base URI to connect Exact Target (Salesforce® Marketing Cloud) with LeadsBridge
Log into Exact Target with an Admin User
On the top right of the screen, next to your username, make sure to select the correct Company, or Business Unit, that you want to connect with LeadsBridge
Click on your username on the top right of the screen
Click on Setup
Go to Apps » Installed Packages, under Platform Tools
Click on New at the top right of the screen
Give a name to your New Package, for example LeadsBridge
Click on Save
Click on Add Component
Select API Integration, then click on Next
Select Server-to-Server, then click on Next
Click on the Edit button of the API Integration you just created
Flag the following items:
Under Channels » Web, flag Read, Write and Publish
Under Contacts » Audiences & Contacts » List and Subscribers, flag every item (if you want to use Lists)
Under Data » Data Extensions & Data » File Locations, flag every item (if you want to use Data Extensions )
Click on Save
Copy the Authentication Base URI, Client ID and Client Secret from the API Integration you have just created on Exact Target
Paste that information inside your LeadsBridge integration setup
Click on the Next button
You’ll now be able to select the destination segment to send your leads to
You may choose to receive an email receipt for each incoming lead.
Type the address(es) where you’d like to receive the receipt
You may also modify the Subject line of the email
Click on the Next button
Not using LeadsBridge yet?
Start your free trial today!
SIGN UP FOR FREE
Step 4: Fields Mapping
Here you’ll be able to map your source information with your destination fields.
You’ll see a field name with the destination integration’s logo at the top, this indicates the name of the field on Exact Target (Salesforce® Marketing Cloud).
Underneath there’s a box where you may add the information you’d like to send.
Check each of the Exact Target (Salesforce® Marketing Cloud) fields available
Match the information you wish to pass along from Incoming Email
You may type the information manually and pass them as a static value
Use the functions to customize information like reformatting dates and times or modifying text, phone numbers and so on
You may also leave blank the box of a field’s information you don’t want to send through
Custom Fields
If you’d like to add more fields, just look at the bottom of the page
Head over the “Don’t find a CRM custom field?” box
Select the field you’d like to add from the dropdown list
Click the Add Custom Field button
The field will appear above
Add the desired information, as you did with the other ones
Once accomplished your desired outcome, just click Next and head to the last step.
Step 5: Test
In this final step, you’ll be able to send a lead from LeadsBridge to test if the configuration works properly.
To create a new test lead, fill in the required information when prompted
Click Test Now
To test with a real lead, switch the toogle to “Test with existing lead”.
Click Sync Now along the lead you’d like to send
If you did everything right the button will turn green, meaning your lead was synced successfully and the integration is ready
Click Finish to save your settings and turn active your bridge
That’s all! Congratulations.
You’ll be redirected to the bridges section of your account with a green success message at the top right of the page and your bridge will now be active.
HAVE YOU GOT SOME QUESTIONS?
You may want to take a look at the common questions on the respective integration’s documentation.
Source: Incoming Email
Destination: Exact Target (Salesforce® Marketing Cloud)
Conclusion
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