Five Ways to Upgrade Your Email Marketing

Intro

Feeling like your marketing emails could get better results? Here are five simple tweaks you can adopt to upgrade your email marketing.

One common misconception about email marketing is that having a newsletter isn’t much different from the personal emails you send. While the tone of your newsletters can be similar to that of your personal emails, email marketing requires more structure. 

Using reliable tools and learning about healthy email habits will make you more confident when reaching out to your list. Furthermore, successful email marketing programs need consistent efforts.

Why it pays to work on boosting your email marketing

If you aren’t regularly taking steps to ramp up your email marketing, you’re likely wasting time and resources. Eventually, you’ll end up in the spam folder or being met with indifference. 

How to avoid this?

We’ve taken out the guesswork. Read on to learn five great ways to upgrade your email marketing so you can:

• Retain customers and consistently acquire new leads
• Build genuine relationships with your audience
• Increase email ROI.

Let’s get into the five easy tweaks you can make to get your emails more visibility and engagement.

#1. Fine-tune your sending schedule

The schedule at which you send emails is the bedrock of everything you do. You must understand your audience’s needs which also largely depend on your product. If you don’t have a sending schedule, you’ll need one.

See how Felix from Ranktracker follows a sending schedule for his marketing emails. His consistency is important as it builds familiarity and helps his email deliverability.

The benefits are multifaceted: 

• You’ll increase your open rates because your audience comes to expect your emails. 
• Moreover, sending your emails on a set schedule teaches Internet service providers (ISPs) that you’re a legitimate email sender. 

Both this increased engagement and the familiarity your emails enjoy from ISPs will boost your email deliverability. Your email deliverability is the rate at which your emails hit the inbox. And the inbox is where the action happens. 

When you’re in the spam folder, it’s the equivalent of a dungeon you may never escape. Sending emails on schedule helps to keep you in the inbox, as does our next essential step.

#2. Handle email hygiene

Handling email hygiene is another step in boosting email deliverability and overall upgrade of your email marketing program. Some people make the mistake of thinking it’s negotiable, but it’s actually a requirement. Email hygiene involves ensuring that all the email contacts in your list are valid and active.

This is how much email lists decay in just one year. According to email validation company ZeroBounce, only 57.21% of all email addresses it processed in 2022 were valid and safe to use.

To assess your email list health, you can use an email validator. When the validator identifies inferior or inactive email addresses, you must remove them immediately. If you don’t do this regularly, invalid addresses will cause bounces and your entire email marketing program will unravel.

In addition to regular bulk validation, consider setting up an email validation API on every single form to check all email addresses entered. You want to cut off bad data at the source. Spam traps and other caustic email types can easily find their way into your list if you don’t take these precautions. 

#3. Outsource any parts you’re lacking on or step up the game

One of the things every professional must accept is that you can rarely do everything. If you’re great at writing copy but your ability to create images is lacking, find out if someone on your team has a knack for it. Don’t let your ego get in the way of group collaboration.

If you are struggling with getting in a rhythm because a certain part of your email marketing always seems to hit a snag, it’s time to consider outsourcing. Some wildly successful marketing departments outsource their entire email marketing. It’s all about finding a system that works for you. 

Maybe you want to do everything yourself. That’s fine as long as you can be consistent and timely. Everything you send should contain content you’re proud of, and your audience cares about. Inconsistency will sink you.

It comes down to asking yourself an honest question: could someone else do a much better job than you? Don’t let pride get in the way of answering this truthfully. If you aren’t prepared to improve, it may be time to consider bringing in some fresh talent to improve things.

#4. Starting using segmentation to your benefit

Even if the people on your email list have a great deal in common, it’s always a good idea to segment your list. The more information you have about your customers, the more effectively you can market to them. We’re living in a time of precise personalization, and a one size fits all approach won’t cut it anymore.

This graph shows how email segmentation and personalization improves subscriber engagement. Source: Salecycle

Segmentation will help increase your engagement because your subscribers feel the content is catered to them – and it is. So, start segmenting your audience to create better campaigns. Some of this data you can begin collecting immediately based on how your list behaves or interacts with your emails. You can also collect a great deal of data by asking your customers directly. 

Once you’ve begun segmenting your list, experimentation is the best way to test new approaches. Measure the results every time you experiment with a segment of your list. From there, you can continue to calibrate. Segmentation can be a game changer when you learn how to use it.

#5. Be open to new approaches

One of the keys to upgrading your email marketing is to avoid tunnel vision. It’s tempting to fall into a pattern and not ponder what new approaches would look like. You must change with the times and use the new technologies available to you.

An excellent suggestion is to ingrain yourself in the email geeks community. When there’s a big new thing in the email space, try to find out all about it. You’d be surprised how often a new update, feature, or SaaS comes along that can make your life infinitely easier. I know from experience the pain of finding out that a tool that could save you time and money has been available—only you weren’t aware of it. 

The answer is to be one of the early adopters of new approaches and innovations. You can only be that person by keeping your finger on the pulse. Getting involved in the email world is one of the best ways to gain an advantage with your own email marketing efforts. Learn from others and share your own tips and perspectives.

Conclusion

The reader may be wondering if there’s a guiding principle that leads to success. Celebrating your successes is easy, but you also have to own your failures.  If it’s all up to you, you’ll go far. Whether your emails win or lose, you’ve got to be honest with yourself. Always ask the question: how can I make the next email better? And then do what it takes to make it happen.