Blog Post

Email Marketing During a Health Crisis: Best Practices

Amber Blevins • Apr 17, 2020

In the wake of the current health crisis, digital marketing has become more important than ever, especially for local businesses. [Pop over to our blog for more on how you can maximize your marketing efforts during this time.]

As a natural part of this process, email marketing has experienced a surge in popularity. You, like me, and everyone else, have probably been inundated with “COVID-19 Update” emails over the past month or so. And while it’s hard to see how so many of these emails are helpful, it’s important to recognize that email marketing is something you can and should be doing right now.

But like any other marketing strategy, there’s a proper way to go about email marketing and... a not so good way to do it. Here are some best practices you should follow.

Do I Need to Send This Email?

Before you begin drafting an email that will go out to your mailing list, ask yourself this question: “Do I need to send this email?” If you’re not sure, then the answer is probably, “No.”

Staying in touch with your customer base is vital, particularly if you’re a business that is temporarily closed or operating in a reduced capacity. But emailing your customers just for the sake of emailing, without any real information to provide, is not a good idea. Even though the business world is experiencing new and unique challenges, marketing rules still apply. If you don’t have anything new or useful to share, don’t bother your customers with another message in their inbox.

DO : Email your customers if you have new information about your how you’re doing business, a new promotion, updates to your open/closed status, or if you have a new blog post or other helpful content to share.

DON’T : Email your customers just to “touch base” or share information you’ve already given them. If you’ve already sent your “response to COVID-19" message and nothing’s changed, there’s no need to send it again.

Stick to Your List

This is a pretty standard rule but for those businesses owners who don’t do a lot of email marketing, it’s worth mentioning .

Send marketing emails only to those people who have agreed to receive them. To be clear, an email exchange with a potential client, a message answering someone’s questions, or an email providing information a customer has requested don’t fall into this category.

But a marketing email – one that is unsolicited and being dispatched to multiple email addresses – should only be sent to people who have agreed to be on your list. There are federal regulations against sending certain commercial emails to people who have not opted-in to your mailing list, not to mention it’s just poor business practice.

DO : Send messages only to those people who have agreed to be on your mailing list.

DON’T : Send emails to people who never agreed to be on your mailing list in the first place or – worse yet – people who’ve opted out.

Best Practices – Not Just for the Health Crisis

It’s true, the way local businesses are handling marketing has changed in recent months. But the same tried and true techniques are still valuable, like email marketing .

Follow these best practices as you r business navigate s its way through the current health crisis and you’ll find successful email marketing will continue to pay dividend s long after things get back to normal.

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