Email marketing is a great way to nurture cold leads, educate and entertain, and convert to sales (59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI Emma, 2018).

If you are looking for proven methods to improve your email marketing’s performance this list of resources shows you what can be done and how.

1. Personalization

Using this tactic is a great way to improve the performance of your email. A study made by Experian has found that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than those without. Another study, this time by Rich Relevance found that revenue is 5.7 times higher in emails that employ personalization.

The most common personalization tactic is to use your recipient’s name in the email subject line. A study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that by simply adding the name to the subject line of an email, it has the ability to increase the probability of an open by 20%, boost sales leads by 31% and reduce unsubscription rates by 17%. Pretty awesome, right?

• Should You Personalize Your Subject Lines?

This article from Campaign Monitor is a great resource if you’re just getting started with improving your email open rate with personalization. It briefly explains what is a personalized subject line, how to create it and gives you examples.

• 25 Email Personalization Stats That Might Surprise You

If you want to know if this tactic is really worthwhile (and me briefly mentioning those personalization statistics before wasn’t enough), this article will help you get a clear picture of some of the results you can expect with using this tactic to improve your email marketing performance.

• The Power of Email Personalization to Reach Humans (Not Just Inboxes)

This guide from Campaign Monitor takes the in-depth approach to explain how email personalization works and what you can do to make your emails stand out from the crowd. You will also learn what are the three elements that make up a personalized email, what can be personalized (and how it looks like with examples),

• 8 Email Personalization Techniques That Work Better Than The Name Game

Neil Patel is as always ahead of the game. Read this article if you are looking for more advanced techniques to use personalization in your email marketing strategy. You will find statistics, a guide on how to collect usable data for your personalization strategy and what kind of tools you can use to put it to work. This article is for more advanced users of email marketing.

• Email Case Study: Wayfair’s Triggered, Personalized Campaigns

If you are curious to see how other brands are using personalization in their email marketing strategy, you can read this case study about Wayfair including in every subject line of a triggered series a reference to a specific product category

BONUS How personalization works for different email marketing tools:

• What are personalization tags on Active Campaign and how to use them

• What are merge tags on Mailchimp and how to use them

• How to use email personalization with Campaign Monitor

• How to personalize your customer interactions via email with Drip

• How to use Liquid to create deep personalized emails with ConvertKit

• How to use personalization tokens on Hubspot

2. Segmentation

A study by Campaign Monitor found that marketers who use segmented campaigns see as much as a 760% increase in revenue. 

What is it? Segmentation means dividing your audience into smaller groups based on characteristics they have in common which you can decide based on activity, surveys, and stage of their customer jouney.

Through this practice you can tailor (or personalize) your marketing to address specific customers with relevant offers and language.

It is commonly used by brands that sell multiple products to different audiences.

You can create segments that group email subscribers by product usage, demographics, psychographics, buyer’s journey, engagement with your brand (new vs returning), desktop vs. mobile.

Segmentation can happen as soon as you have a new contact in your CRM. You can do it via a survey, the sign up form or a link within the welcome email.

If you have a clear customer journey for each segment, then you can use automations to educate, nurture and convert (read down the page).

• Audience Segmentation: What is Segmentation and How Can It Improve Your Marketing?

In this guide from Active Campaign you get a crash course on what segmentation really means, when it is worth your time, what you can segment based on, and how you can collect the information needed to segment your audience.

• The Power of Email Segmentation & How to Use It

This guide from Convert Kit shows you what KPIs are impacted when you use email segmentation and shows you how you can do it using tags.

• 10 Quick and Easy Email Marketing Segmentation Strategies to Try Today

If you’re looking for some clear examples on how to use segmentation as part of your email marketing strategy, check out this article from Neil Patel.

BONUS How to setup segmentation for different email marketing tools:

• Learn about Mailchimp’s segmentation criteria and common segmentation recipes

• How to create segments with ActiveCampaign

• ConvertKit guide on creating segments

• How to create and use segments in Campaign Monitor

3. Split testing

• 14 Research-Backed Ways to Split Test Your Subject Line for a Higher Open Rate

This article from Sleeknote is a great resource if you’re ready to start experimenting with split testing your email subject lines to improve open rates. It walks you through 14 different ways to change your subject lines, all packed with explanations of why it works, and examples that make it easy for you to implement them yourself.

• A/B Testing Email Subject Lines: 4 Tests You Can Run (and Templates You Can Steal)

If 14 tests sounds like too much, you can start with this Active Campaign tutorial that also includes templates (when you sign up for their service, you get them even if you choose their 14-day free trial). And it does a lot more. This one walks you through the psychology behind crafting a good email subject line and some valuable copywriting concepts that will help you write subject lines that are opened.

4. Customer journeys

When you know your customer and you have a well planned content and offer calendar for at least three to six months, you will be able to reap the benefits of automation or customr journeys.

This is a series of automated emails that get triggered by specific actions an email subscriber or customer performs within your email campaigns, other automations, or interaction with your website.

Example of triggers: signing up for a mailing list, purchasing or not purchasing a specific product, clicking on a specific link in your recent campaign (newsletter), staying on your list for a specific time but not purchasing or not opening your emails, visiting specific pages, signing up for a webinar, lead magnet etc.

Example of automations: welcome sequence, abandoned cart, indoctrination, soap opera, promotion etc.

If you’re looking for easy ways to improve your email marketing strategy to the point where it delivers results without requesting constant action on your part, then through building a customer journey you will be able to walk new (and old) leads through the right pathway.

• How to Create a Customer Journey

This guide from Campaign Monitor is a good start if you’re looking to understand more about what email marketing tools call “customer journey”. It shows you what a customer journey looks like and how you can set it up.