What are the email marketing best practices for 2026?

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to engage with your bottom-of-the-funnel audience in 2026. However, too many companies make the fatal mistake of over-engineering their email campaigns and ending up overlooked in the inbox. Don’t let this happen to you. Go back to basics and learn the best practices for creating campaigns that will skyrocket your website traffic.

Identify your audience

Who your audience is dictates how you should approach email marketing. What you say, how you say it, what your emails look like, how often you send them—all of these factors should depend on what sort of people make up your audience. The best way to start identifying your audience is to ask yourself two questions:

What kind of people are already in your email database?

If you are like most companies, you likely already have a selection of people in your email list. Typically this database is made up of past customers, people with some connection to your company, and some amount of current or past prospects. Your list also probably contains quite a bit of outdated or spam records as well. As you go through and clean them out, take note of how your list breaks down into each of those categories, and start thinking about ways that you can approach them with relevant information.

What kind of people are you hoping to add to your database?

As you look to grow your email list, it’s good to make sure that your content is aligned with the segments of your audience that you would like to reach with your email marketing. For example, if you know you are going to be promoting your email newsletter to people working in their companies’ HR departments, then the content, tone, and frequency of those emails should feel familiar and relatable to that audience.

Figure out what your audience wants to hear about

Once you have a grasp of who your audience is, you need to build your email marketing strategy on what is actually important to them. Too many companies send emails that are overly “sales-y” and not relevant to the actual needs of their target customers. Successful marketing emails—both B2B and B2C—provide real value. If your company has done any brand messaging to learn more about the motivations of your customers, that information is the perfect starting point for developing a well-targeted email campaign.

Outline each campaign

With a message and audience in place, it’s time to iron out the big details of your campaigns. To do this, ask yourself the following questions:

What is the goal of the campaign?

Are you attempting to nurture your customer base with helpful information, motivate dormant prospects with personalized email drips, or convert leads fast with promotional campaigns? You will likely have a campaign for each goal, and it is good to differentiate between the three of them.

What should the emails look like?

Should you have bold HTML designs with colors, images, and interactivity, or should you stick with simple and straightforward text-based design?

How often will the emails be sent?

Are you sending weekly emails, or are you only going to reach out a few times a quarter? Is the frequency of your campaign dependent on the actions of the customer, or are you sending everyone emails with the same cadence?

Implement your plan with each email

Once you have a plan in place for every campaign, it’s time to apply best practices to each individual email.

Have enticing subject lines

Your email’s subject line is the primary factor that drives the open rate. When brainstorming subject lines, make them SMART:

Short: Keep it under the standard limit of around 70 characters.
Mysterious: Your subject line should stir up a curiosity that can only be satisfied by opening the email.
Actionable: Make it clear what they can accomplish with phrases like “join” or “You should know”.
Relevant: Use your understanding of your audience to choose a subject that is meaningful to them.
Timely: If appropriate, show urgency with words like “time-sensitive” or “new”, or communicate timeliness with wording topical to the day or season.

Combine a clever subject line with informative preview text to increase your open rate for your email campaigns.

Have a clear call to action

Your email marketing should be a gateway to a website full of conversion-driving content. Make sure that every email has a clear call to action. Include links or buttons that lead back to landing pages on your website, then work to improve each landing page to reduce the bounce rate and up the conversion rate.

Use your CRM

No matter how they progress, your email marketing campaigns will provide you with a lot of data. Don’t waste it. Make sure that your email efforts are connected to your CRM. That way you can better segment your audience and provide your sales team with more insights as they pursue their prospects. Don’t neglect to do this. This is one of the most important steps for ensuring the success of an email campaign.

Keep it simple

No matter how you craft each campaign, they should all have one common characteristic: simplicity! With the amount of clutter in most peoples’ inboxes, an over-engineered email campaign doesn’t stand a chance. From the inbox preview all the way to the last bit of copy, every aspect of each email needs to communicate value. Create a simple yet effective plan for your campaign, and avoid deviating from it as much as possible.

For an example of short, engaging emails with effective subjects and clear calls to actions, we recommend signing up for our own newsletter. Along with containing weekly marketing tips, it is also a great example of an email campaign engineered with these best practices in mind.