The first month of 2025 is behind us, so now is a good time to make sure your email marketing is in good shape. Here are five fundamentals worth locking down.
1. Build a quality email database
Size does not always matter, and your email database is a good example of that. A smaller, well-qualified list will consistently outperform a large, bloated one. Cheap, fast database growth tactics tend to hurt your sending reputation more than they help your numbers.
Focus on sign-up forms that qualify your subscribers. Ask for enough information to know who is joining your list, but not so much that you put people off signing up in the first place.
2. Use segmentation
Your subscribers' inboxes are crowded. If your emails are not relevant to the person receiving them, they will be ignored or, worse, marked as spam. Targeted campaigns based on solid segmentation consistently outperform batch-and-blast sends.
Segment by customer data, purchase behaviour, email engagement, or a combination. And it does not have to mean more work. With dynamic content, a single email can show different content to different segments automatically.
3. Get your text-to-image balance right
Image-only emails are a deliverability risk and a poor experience for subscribers. iOS 15's Mail Privacy Protection blocks images until a user manually downloads them. Several versions of Outlook do not load images automatically either. A subscriber who opens your email and sees nothing but empty image placeholders is not going to stick around.
Aim for a minimum of 20% text in every campaign. Avoid placing important information inside images, particularly text overlaid on graphics.
4. Re-engage and remove dormant subscribers
Some subscriber drop-off is inevitable. What matters is how you handle it. Build a re-engagement strategy to reach subscribers before they go fully dark, not after. A simple series targeting contacts who have not opened in 90 days can recover a meaningful portion of your list.
For contacts who do not respond to re-engagement attempts, remove them. Cutting ghost and zombie subscribers improves your deliverability, gives you more accurate reporting, and can reduce your monthly platform spend.
5. Focus on relationship-building
A large slice of your database is not ready to buy right now. If every email you send is a hard push for a transaction, you will lose those subscribers before they ever reach that point.
Keep them engaged by making your emails worth opening. Good design, useful content, humour, blog posts, videos, and genuine value all work. The goal is to stay in the inbox and build trust, so that when a subscriber is ready to act, you are the first brand they think of.
These five areas will not fix everything, but getting them right gives your email programme a solid foundation for 2025. If you want to talk through how any of these apply to your specific setup, get in touch with our team.
Frequently asked questions
- How big does my email database need to be for email marketing to work?
- There is no minimum size. A smaller, well-qualified list of engaged subscribers will deliver better results than a large list full of uninterested or inactive contacts. Focus on attracting the right subscribers rather than chasing volume.
- Why should I remove dormant subscribers instead of keeping them on my list?
- Dormant subscribers drag down your engagement rates, which damages your sender reputation over time. Removing them improves deliverability, makes your reporting more accurate, and can lower your monthly platform costs.
- What is a safe text-to-image ratio for email campaigns?
- Aim for at least 20% text in every email. Image-only campaigns are more likely to be filtered as spam, and subscribers using iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection or older versions of Outlook may see nothing but blank placeholders if your email contains no text.
- How do I segment my email database if I do not have much customer data?
- Start with what you have. Email engagement data, such as open history and click behaviour, is available to you regardless of how much customer profile data you hold. Segment by active versus inactive subscribers first, then layer in additional data as you collect it.