Most of business success lies in picking the right strategies. And if you want to make the most out of email, learning the best email marketing strategies is a surefire way to get those results that only email marketing can provide.
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And remember, email marketing is still the undisputed king when it comes to results and ROI. Despite digital marketing existing for close to 3 decades now, there has been nothing to come even close to the kind of results that email marketing achieves for a business.
Now, let me be honest here for a second. It is true that email can give quite good results even if you’re not that great or strategic at it. However, implementing the right strategies can multiply your results. So why leave all that money on the table?
It is worth investing some time learning what works, being strategic about it, and getting all the business growth that you deserve this year.
Get clear on how you add value, and excel at this
If there is one strategy that will never go out of style, it has to be this one. Excel at adding value to the subscriber’s life or business, and you will reap massive benefits.
And this is for several reasons, but let’s start with the not-so-obvious ones. First, when it comes to email marketing, the inbox providers are going to be either your friend or foe. And trust me, you do want to have them on your side.
Their primary job is to make sure that people only receive emails that they’re interested in, or even excited about getting. Otherwise, your emails are likely to end up in the “promotions” tab, or even worse in the spam tab, regardless of whether you’re actually engaging in spam or not.
The number one trick to boosting your reputation with the providers? Boost engagement by sending such valuable content that your open rates communicate this signal to the providers.
But it’s not just about the providers though. You know what else providing value has an outsized importance in? Your bottom-line profits. The more valuable your content, the more profit you will make in the end.
Focus on building a quality list, make hygiene a priority
If you have any plans on making it as an email marketer the phrases “list hygiene” and “list cleaning” have to be something which is top-of-mind.
In fact, if there’s one thing that differentiates the expert super-profitable marketer from the novice, it has to be a focus on keeping lists clean. And interestingly enough, Emercury’s expertise with list-cleaning is one of the main reasons why veteran mailers with huge lists are moving to Emercury on an almost daily basis.
Don’t let this talk about experts fool you though: list quality isn’t something that you start worrying about after you become successful. In fact, most every expert marketer will tell you they wish this was their strategy from day one.
When you’re just starting out it can be tempting to focus on quantity at all costs and just rack up as many leads as possible. By keeping low-quality leads around you’re accomplishing nothing but making sure that your deliverability suffers.
This means that even the people who are excited to hear from you are less likely to get your email. In turn, this means less profits, despite having “bigger lists’.
Engage and work with the stale leads
With all this talk about dumping low-quality leads and keeping your list clean you might get the idea that you should give up on people the moment they lose excitement.
This isn’t the case however. There is a happy middle ground between not caring about who’s on your list, and just deleting people the moment they are no longer super-excited hot leads.
Some of your leads are going to start off as fully-qualified leads that open and read your emails, but might become stale over time. The solution is to give them a second chance by launching the appropriate re-engagement campaigns.
To learn more about this, see our super popular guide: How to Make a Killer Re-engagement Email Series and Win Back Lost Subscribers
Make calls-to-action your focus as a marketer
As a marketer you might sometimes feel overwhelmed with all the things that fall under the umbrella of “being a marketer”. And especially if you have to combine it with all the things required specifically for email marketing.
Fortunately the 80/20 rule applies to marketing and email marketing just as it does to most areas in business. If you want an easy strategy in terms of what to focus on “as a marketer”, I would say pick working on your calls to action.
Choosing to prioritize CTAs is especially synergistic with your prime directive of providing extreme value in your emails. So your first goal is to make sure that every email is like a gift, a package of value. Your secondary goal is to always make sure that it can lead to an action of some sort.
This might be getting people to read an article on your blog, getting them to try out a new feature in your SaaS, or clicking to see your latest special offer.
Prioritize learning over selling
The more you know about your subscribers, the better you will be able to sell things to them. And as paradoxical as it sounds, the best way to sell in email marketing is to focus on “learning about the subscriber first”.
Selling should almost be an afterthought to where you’re so well acquainted with what the subscriber needs and wants that a purchase is merely the next logical step.
So how do you “learn” and “get to know” the subscriber? Well, with a platform like Emercury this is quite easy as we do two crucial things for you.
First, we gather a lot of information automatically. This includes which kinds of emails they open and respond to. In turn, you can set up automations that tag people based on this information, or set up segments, again, based on this information.
It doesn’t stop there however. If you really want to learn more about the subscriber, you can get as fancy as you want thanks to our complete event and site tracking system. This means that you can, in real time, follow what the subscriber is interested in.
Their behavior will tell you everything you need to know. In turn, you can then use this information to create segments, personalize better and implement behavior-triggered campaigns. When you do all of this, conversions and purchases are almost guaranteed.
Get good at segmentation
Do you know what every subscriber hates more than anything else? An email that feels like “bulk mail”. People can tell when an email is generic and the exact same thing was sent out to 100,000 people in exactly the same way and at the same time.
This might seem kind of ironic, as the assumption is that the whole point of email is to do “mass marketing” and get easy sales. And well, this is where the paradox comes in.
Yes, email marketing is in fact highly profitable precisely because you can take a huge list and market to all of them at once. You don’t have to reach out to every single subscriber and try to sell them one-on-one.
However, you can, and you should put in at least some minimal effort into tailoring the experience. This is where marketing segmentation comes in. Segmentation represents a division whereby an email list is sub split into smaller segments based on set criteria.
Types of segmentation
You can segment on a lot of different criteria. However, I always recommend starting with the easy stuff first. This involves utilizing the data we gather for you automatically. That is, you can build some very nice segments based on email opens, clicks and other email related data that we gather for you. Just fire up the segment builder, and have fun.
If you, however, apply the learning strategy we discussed in the previous point, you can take things even further. If you’ve set up those systems to tag people and gather events around subscriber actions, this can be very powerful. You can utilize this additional data to build even finer segments.
In either case, if you want to learn more about segmentation, check out this guide: How To Utilize Market Segmentation for Maximum Profitability
Personalize, the easy way
When it comes to personalization, this is one of those things that can get quite advanced and complex. And unfortunately, a lot of marketers and platforms like to focus on the ultra-complicated stuff, because it “sounds cool”. This is to your detriment, because you’re much better served by implementing the basic, easy personalization hacks first.
And here’s another secret, even if you only apply the easy personalization secrets and nothing else, you’ll still be way ahead of most people. This is why my recommended strategy is to focus on easy personalization first. You can always get more complicated later on. Speed of implementation beats “fanciness” any day of the week.
Let’s get more specific here though and focus on what you need to implement right away. Even if you do nothing else, you should, at the very least, implement merge tags in your welcome sequence. And if you’ve already built some automations, be sure to work merge tags into those as well.
If you’re not familiar with merge tags, it’s when an email says something like “Hey, {your name}, we have a new deal in {your city}”. That is, the email dynamically inserts some piece of information that’s personal to you.
As weird as it sounds, even just utilizing people’s first name can give massive results, so really, there is no excuse to postpone implementing this from day one. And furthermore, you’re lucky to have discovered Emercury, as we invented another “no-excuse” way to implement personalization in an easy way.
Our unique new feature called smart personalization lets you create truly dynamic emails where no two people get the same email. And yet, at the same time, it is as easy to use as basic merge tags. To learn more, check out the announcement post here.
Leverage behavior-based campaigns
I hope you’re noticing a trend here. We went from talking about segmentation, to basic personalization, and now behavior-based marketing.
In essence these are all ways to custom tailor the marketing message for a subscriber, and the order matters. If you had to choose, I would say implement segmentation and basic personalization from day one, as this is your magic 80/20 right there.
However, once you’re ready and want to become even more fancy, you can make your marketing fully personalized. You can make it so that people get a different email or campaign based on behaviors, as they engage in them.
If that sounds kind of vague, let me give you an example. For instance, you can implement our event and site-tracking system. And then, you can set up an event where if a person visits your pricing page, 2 hours later they get an email pitching them to book a demo call.
Or perhaps, you might want to set it up so if a person opens an email, they get enrolled in one campaign, and if they don’t open the email, they get enrolled into another campaign.
If you want to learn more about this, check out our guide: Why Behavior Triggered Email Marketing is Changing the Email Delivery Landscape.
Test, track, iterate, improve and win
You can think of this one as your “meta-strategy”. This is going to apply to how you apply and utilize all the other strategies in this guide. And in fact, this is the one thing that will ensure you get really good results with all of the other email marketing strategies.
So what am I talking about here? Well, this is the one best recipe to ensure maximal success in email marketing. And it’s actually quite a bit simpler than you would think.
You just want to adopt a strategy where you look at everything that you do as a “test” or a “learning experience”. For example, you might try sending out a campaign where you send different versions to different engagement-based segments. Then, you study your metrics, ascertain the results, and see what can be improved.
Then you try the next iteration of your test and compare. Now, it does help that with a platform like Emercury this is quite easy and fun to do. And this is for two reasons. First of all, we include a really simple-to-use A/B testing option.
And then secondly we give you a really easy and fun way to study your metrics with ease. In fact, a lot of people have told us they moved to Emercury because of how easy it is to study metrics at a glance.
Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side
There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.
If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.
I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.
Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.
Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Be warned, we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.
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