73% of marketers believe that email marketing is core to their business and 79% consider email content and design to be absolutely critical to email effectiveness. So, it’s very important to make sure that every aspect of your B2B email marketing strategy is optimized.

Step 1: Authentication and Deliverability:

• Use authentication standards such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
• Don’t buy email lists, use active opt-ins or confirmed opt-ins and make opt-outs easy and fast.

Step 2: Design Template:

But before you start there are some questions you need to answer:

• Is HTML or plain text better suited for your email?
• Does your email have an obvious call to action that’s set apart from the rest of your email?
• Have you broken your email up into smaller sections and used bulleted text as much as possible?
• Have you taken advantage of using images wherever possible?
• Did you include contact information, social sharing buttons and unsubscribe links?

Step 3: Email Content:

Follow the content best practices which include:

• Identifying your audience.
• Considering the buyer’s journey.
• Avoiding meaningless superlatives and sales buzzwords.
• Keeping your content simple and get to the point.
• Choosing your wording carefully.
• Backing up your claims.
• Using dynamic content.
• Personalizing signatures.

Step 4: Testing & Optimization:

• Use campaign preview.
• Test a text-only version of your message.
• Check your image-to-text ratio.
• Check your text styling.
• Make sure your content doesn’t include styling from Microsoft word.
• Check for SPF and DomainKeys records.
• Optimize your emails for mobile.