Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to boost sales and revenue for your business (big or small)/

However, many companies don’t know how to strategize, run and send an effective email campaign that will engage their audience and convert email subscribers into new customers.

This article will guide you through my most essential tips for successful email marketing campaigns.

9 tips to send more effective email marketing campaigns

The one thing any successful email marketing campaign needs

Before you even think about a subject line or a call to action, you need to think about your email marketing strategy. Your marketing efforts will pan out only if your content, pitch, and offer are backed by a strategy.

So this means your email marketing should have a journey, a roadmap that nurtures your subscribers into raving fans. It should also get your audience familiar with the idea of working with you.

Get your offers in front of them frequently. Show them how they can work with you and what’s possible when they become your customers.

You can do it through automated marketing emails (like a welcome email sequence), weekly newsletters, monthly promotions etc.

But make sure your email marketing strategy works towards your goal, which should help potential customers understand how you fit into their lives.

Know your email analytics (engagement and conversation rates too)

Email marketing can help your business grow only when you know how it’s doing.

Analytics such as open rate, clicks on links, unsubscribe rate and revenue per email will tell you how well your strategy and copy are working and what needs to be changed so more people read it and buy things from it.

If your email open rate is low, then you can tweak your email subject lines to see if a more compelling subject line would improve your results.

That’s a split test and most email service providers can do that for you.

Here’s another example:

A welcome email sequence in ecommerce can do a few things. But what you need it to do is to convert leads into buyers.

The average conversion rate for a welcome sequence is 11%. If you don’t understand how your emails compare to benchmarks, then you’re not going to be able to reap the benefits of this powerful growth hack.

Let me explain:

I have a client selling handcrafted gifts for kids in the US.

Her website optin rate (website visitors to subscribers) is about 0.8%. Based on the last 30 days data, she got 27 new subscribers.

Those people are sent into an automated welcome sequence which currently converts at 4%. In the last month, she got 1 order, valued at $195, from that sequence.

Now, if she improves her optin rate on the website to 3.5%, she’d be getting about 120 new subscribers each month, which when put through a welcome sequence and converting into buyers at 4%, could generate about $900 per month.

That’s over $10K per year from automated marketing.

This is all ball park numbers. But let me show you one more thing:

The average conversion rate for a welcome sequence is 11%. So if she optimizes her welcome sequence to convert better, even if she does nothing to get more subscribers, she’d still be making twice as much as what she does now.

Data tells you what needs to be tweaked to improve your results.

Sometimes it’s not your emails, but your landing pages. You can’t know that, without understanding your email analytics.

Use customer data to decide your content

Your target audience has very specific problems, frustrations, desires, expectations and challenges.

The biggest bottleneck for many brands when it comes to using email marketing is not knowing what to write in their emails.

Have a marketing manager or a business owner write sales emails and they’ll get very uncomfortable, very fast. Because they think the content is about the brand and the pitch. Which makes them think marketing emails that ask people to buy have to be aggressive, super salesy and sleazy.

It’s never about your brand in emails.

It’s always about your target audience.

You are a coach helping your subscribers navigate from ZERO problem and solution awareness, to understanding how your product fits into their life.

Read these articles to learn more about writing for your target audience:

• From Objections To Sales: 9 Resources On How To Increase Sales With Copywriting That Every Business Owner Needs To Know

• How To Sell More With Copy Tailored To Your Audience’s Motivations, Not Yours

• Your Secret Business Success Weapon: Define Your Target Audience

Nurture leads before pitching

When you want to sell something, you first need to get people interested.

You can do this by sending them emails that educate about the problem your product solves.

Then, when they are interested, you can tell them more about how your product can help solve their problem. But it is important to remember that before you sell anything, you need to make sure people are interested in what you have to offer.

That’s why it’s a good idea to nurture leads before pitching anything.

Start with the welcome email.

Subject lines will make or break your campaign

Your email subject line is crucial since it’s what people will see that helps them decide if your email is worth opening.

Your subject lines should be succinct yet intriguing so that readers want to read and open your emails. Fail at this and you’ll fail at email marketing altogether.

This is a great place to start optimizing your email marketing campaigns, so here are a few tips for compelling subject lines:

• Make it short and sweet

• Aim to pique your reader’s curiosity

• Run A/B testing

Every email needs a call to action

This is why most email marketing campaigns have disappointing results.

Email campaigns that don’t have a clear call to action.

People need to know what’s the next step. If they don’t know what you want them to do, then you’re not going to get any results.

Let’s say you’re sending your weekly newsletter. Tell people what they should do next, like maybe read your blog post, which generates more traffic to your landing page of choice.

Even if it’s an automated email, you should still make sure your reader knows what he is expected to do next.

Calls to action are great for generating website traffic, boosting engagement and conversion rates, improving not only your overall campaign performance but your deliverability as well.

Don’t email inactive subscribers

There are many people on your email list who aren’t “engaged.” These are people who don’t open or look at emails.

For a long time, digital marketing has been all about the numbers, but it’s starting to be all about quality.

So if your email list has 100K people, but only 10% actually engage with your emails, here’s what to do:

Have an automation in place that aims to re engage inactive subscribers.

When they don’t open your re engagement email or click a button inside, they are automatically cleaned from your email marketing software.

This helps you get rid of inactive subscribers, improves your email deliverability so more emails actually reach your subscribers inboxes.

Invest in email marketing automation

Most businesses have no idea how powerful marketing automation can be for nurturing leads and converting them into buyers. So this means you’re going to see more revenue – on autopilot.

Marketing automation is more than transactional emails, so much more. It’s having emails that meet your audience with the right message, right offer and call to action at the right phase of their buyer journey.

It’s an advanced content marketing strategy that impacts your entire list, so the more subscribers you get, the more marketing automation becomes essential.

Here are a few examples of what you can automatically send email subscribers:

• welcome sequence

• indoctrination series

• surveys to collect customer data

• segmentation and personalized campaigns

• offer follow-up emails

• re engagement campaigns

Most email marketing tools will allow you to run automation. If yours doesn’t, I suggest you start shopping for a replacement.

Don’t buy an email list

You’re probably wondering why people tell you not to buy an email list when it seems like such an easy way to get new leads. But there are a few very important reasons why this isn’t a good strategy for your business. 

First of all, if you’re buying an email list, chances are you’re getting low-quality leads that won’t convert into customers.

Even worse, you could be getting fined by spam laws for sending unsolicited emails. And finally, building your own email list from scratch takes time and effort but it’s worth it because you’ll have higher engagement rates and more qualified leads.

Promotional messages don’t have to be salesy

This gets me all fired up.

Brands fail at email marketing because they can’t figure out how their marketing messages fit into their buyer journey when using email marketing.

This is one of the highest converting marketing channels and you need to treat it differently than what you’d do on your social media or on your blog.

When people join your email list, their intent is clear. You have something they are interested in. They’re not necessarily looking to be entertained (that depends on your industry though). They are looking for a solution to their problem.

But people are not always in the pain. This means that your emails need to bring them back into pain awareness, and gradually move them towards solution awareness.

Email marketing is not about how great you are as a brand. They don’t care about your new office furniture. They don’t care about your latest team retreat.

Your audience cares only about what’s in it for them.

Make your email campaigns about your audience and you’ll discover you have a golden goose on your hands.

That’s the secret of writing promotional emails that are not salesy or sleazy as F8ck.

Ask these questions before sending your next email campaign:

• Why should my audience care about this email?

• What’s in it for them?

• How is this email increasing their awareness towards the problem?

• What’s happening this week in my audience’s life that I can help with?

• How is their problem impacting other areas of their life that they might not even be aware of?

• How can you deliver VALUE with your email, something tangible that will shift their mindset, open new perspective, show them something new about themselves?

Selling online isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Just having a buy button on your website is not enough any more.

Sending a discount based email campaign isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Your competition is huge AND your potential customers can find it at the click of a button.

Use email marketing to show your audience you’re not just out for their money.

Show them you are actively interested in seeing them succeed.

Coach them through objections, false beliefs and fears, show empathy and prove that what you do can actually create results.

Focus on value and your audience and email marketing campaigns will reward you tenfold.

These email marketing tips are based on hands-on experience with coaching small businesses and writing sales funnels and email promotions that have generated over $3M in 12 months.

You can do a lot of things with emails, like sell products, share some news, improve your cart abandonment rate or tell a story.

But when your email marketing works, you not only connect with your audience, but you are able to increase sales.

Here’s what to read next for more successful email marketing campaigns: