17 Powerful Tips to Increase Email Marketing Success

Email marketing is one of the single most powerful marketing tools at your disposal. It should be front and center as part of your overall marketing strategy. Here are 17 incredibly powerful hacks that can instantly increase your engagement, your deliverability, your conversions and more.

17 Powerful Tips to Increase Email Marketing Success

• Warm Up Your Mailing List – To avoid getting a bad ‘sender reputation’, it’s very important to avoid letting emails bounce or get delivered with very poor open rates. A good way to protect yourself from this fate is to first ‘warm-up your IP address and mailing list. That means sending some emails from your account to only your most engaged members – maybe even friends and family. This will get you off to a good start which could stand you in good stead if things take a turn later on.

• Keep Your Friends and Relatives on the List – For this same reason, you should keep friends and relatives on your mailing list. They will (hopefully) always open them, which can help just a little in keeping your sender reputation positive.

• Send Emails Consistently – Don’t go long periods without sending emails. Likewise, don’t go through phases of bombarding your audience. Let your recipients know what to expect and they’ll be less likely to complain or get frustrated with you.

• Tease the Next Email – Once you have a consistent schedule, you can use this to your advantage by getting your recipients to eagerly await each new installment. Do this by teasing what’s coming up and making it sound highly exciting.

• Use Split-Testing – Split testing means that you are going to send out two very similar emails, perhaps with subtly different subject headings, and then see which performs best. This will teach you the best practices to adopt and thus help you to optimize your process.

• Use a Landing Page Builder – Something like Lead Pages or Thrive will help you to create more professional-looking landing pages which will in turn help you to get more conversions.

• Offer a Good Incentive – A good incentive or magnet is something like a free ebook or a report. This can help to encourage people to part with their email address when they might otherwise have been on the fence and it will hopefully mean you buy some goodwill in the process!

• Use Storytelling – Storytelling is precisely what it sounds like: telling stories! In other words, when you write your next email, try to frame it as a story. Instead of dispassionately describing the merits of a certain technique or product, instead, try talking about how it helped you and how it changed your life. Set the scene, describe the emotion and generally get your audience invested in the outcome. This is a far more engaging way to explain something and it’s actually much more persuasive as well

• Use the Recipients’ Names – Your autoresponder contains a feature in it that allows you to include the recipients’ names in their emails. This will automatically replace the {Name} tag in every single message so that they say ‘Hi Joe’ or ‘HI Dave’ instead of just ‘Hi’. I previously wasn’t a fan of this technique. Everyone can see through this and it’s clear that it’s not personal and that just makes it seem emotionally manipulative. As it happens though, using this strategy has been shown to help you avoid ending up in the ‘Social’ or ‘Promotions’ inbox because it looks like natural and normal correspondence.

• Be Brief – Whenever you send an email, you always need to make sure that it contains value of some sort. That means it should provide a tip, a lesson, instructions or perhaps just entertainment. Whatever the case, your audience needs to feel that it was worth their time reading that message. Better yet, you want to ensure that the amount of time they spend is short. If they can get maximum value for minimum time investment, then that will be a more efficient exchange for them and it will feel like even more value. They’re essentially getting more for less! So, learn to write efficiently and get right to the point – be respectful of your audience’s time.

• Use a Normal Email Structure – Earlier we mentioned that using the first name in your email could help you to stand out and to bypass the spam filter. Another trick you can use that will do the same thing, is to try and use a more conventional structure. In other words, instead of creating an elaborate newsletter template with headings and flashing lights, instead, try writing a normal email as you would do to a friend. This will feel much more authentic and personal and it will also be more likely to bypass those various filters and make it to the inbox.

• Ask to Be Whitelisted – If you are still facing emails that end up in the spam folder, then one of the simplest and most effective solutions is just to ask your recipients to whitelist you. That means removing you from any spam lists and putting you in the primary inbox rather than the secondary ones. A great time to do this is in your welcome message for your double opt-in. Your audience will need to see this message in order to sign up and you can warn them that it might go into their spam folder. You can then take this same opportunity to warn them that all your future correspondence might end up there and that they should move you to the primary inbox if they want to be sure they don’t miss future updates.

• Use a Sidebar Widget – Remember that a lot of your visitors won’t land on your website or blog through the home page. If you have popular blog posts or pages within your site, then you need a sidebar widget that will contain your opt-in form. This way, people will be able to sign-up wherever they land on your site and you drive many more conversions as a result.

• Mention Your Mailing List in Your Text – Another way you can get people to sign up from your blog is simply to mention your email list in your blog posts. Again, if you have a post or two that is very popular, you can simply add a little section toward the end saying that you have much more content like this that you’d like to share and that you’d love it if people could sign up. Sometimes the simplest methods involve just asking! And you can do the same through your social media or on your YouTube channel. And it works both ways: don’t forget to ask your email subscribers if they’ll consider following you on Twitter.

• Ask People to Forward Your Email – Remember how we said it was a good idea to ask people to sign up? Likewise, you can also just ask people to forward your emails to others. This is a fantastic way to get your messages to spread and especially because your messages will be coming from addresses that people already know. But of course, for an email to be worth sharing, you’re going to need to ensure that you pack in a ton of value!

• Grab Attention With a Giveaway – Is the list that once used to respond by rapidly opening every single message now not paying any attention to your new correspondence? You can fix this problem by getting your audience to wake up with an exciting email. One good option is to give something away for free and to mention that right in your subject line. As well as getting people to click who might have stopped, this also builds a lot of goodwill. We are very used to getting things only when people want something. But if you can send an email that gives something away completely for free to people who are already subscribers… then that is unexpected! And this can win you the kind of goodwill that helps to really engage your audience and make proper fans who will support you going forward.

I admit that 17 techniques can sound a bit overwhelming. But, how do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time. Take a look at your current email marketing strategy. Then choose one or more of the tips above to strengthen what you are currently doing. Continue to apply these tips until you see the results you want.