According to research, email marketing can generate a $32-$45 return for every $1 spent, depending on your industry. It looks so appealing because it has been thoroughly researched and it does generate sales. Besides, email marketing is a very simple concept, at least in theory — you just write good emails and get sales.
But if it were that simple, everyone would be generating millions of dollars from their newsletters. However, this is not the case. The harsh truth is that you are not the only business trying to slide into your customer’s inbox. The competition for your customer’s attention is crazy, so you need to have a pretty good game.
If you want to build a good email marketing campaign, start with a solid foundation. AI tools and automation are the stars of the show nowadays but they are extra bonuses rather than showrunners. If you don’t have a good email list, no amount of AI can bring you sales.
So let’s meet the five titans of email marketing: subscribers, templates and analytics.
Your email marketing campaigns will be only as good as your email lists. It doesn’t matter what tools you use or how well-crafted your emails are until you have an audience who engages with your emails. Sending emails into the unresponsive void is a very frustrating experience.
So start with identifying what audience you want to attract and what value you’ll bring them. In the endless sea of emails, why should they care?
In email marketing, quality beats quantity. Having 100 super-engaged subscribers can be more impactful than getting 1,000 people to subscribe to your emails only to never open them again.
There are different ways to build an email list, including:
Once you have an email list, it’s time to think about the content for your campaigns. What kinds of emails do you want to send and what would you like to achieve?
If you want to accompany your leads on their buying journey, create sales email templates for different touchpoints in your sales cycle. For example, an email asking your prospects for a demo call, or inviting them to a webinar, or sharing some handy resources. Then you can reuse these templates to avoid writing emails from scratch for every new lead.
It’s also a good idea to create a bunch of templates for your newsletters. The majority of professional email service providers (ESPs) have drag-and-drop builders and HTML editors. So you’ll only need to create layout templates once and then update the copy and images every time you are about to send a new email. Many ESPs also have a library with ready-made editable email templates that cover the most popular types of emails.
For example, Selzy has a template library with a bunch of professional templates for all major campaign types:
Email marketing has a lot of metrics. But the good news is, they are easy to track using the email analytics feature in a professional ESP. Besides, you can focus only on the most important ones at the beginning.
Metrics help compare the results of different campaigns and make corrections because good email marketing follows data, not a hunch or an intuition.
Here are a few metrics to keep an eye on if you’re only starting:
Here’s what these metrics look like in Selzy’s analytics report:
Once there’s a strong foundation, it’s time to start building the powerhouse of your email marketing campaigns. Below you’ll find tips for refining your email marketing strategy and increasing the likelihood of generating sales.
If you’re reading this article, chances are you want to use email marketing for sales (not just because you want to send a lot of emails to strangers). In other words, a good email marketing strategy has an end goal — and that is usually to get more sales and, ultimately, revenue.
That’s why it’s important to couple your email marketing tool with a simple sales CRM system. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. In a nutshell, a CRM is a database of all your business contacts with any outstanding projects, sales opportunities, and the history of past interactions.
Here are a few things to consider when choosing a CRM system:
One of the great things about email marketing, and marketing in general, is that you can develop hypotheses and test them. It’s difficult to know for sure what will resonate with your customers, so there’s a lot of room for experimentation. That’s why A/B testing is so popular among email marketers.
A/B testing is the process of comparing the performance of two versions of one element of the email. You can test subject lines, layouts, call-to-action buttons, visuals, copy, and more.
But it’s essential to understand what you exactly want to test and why. Create a list of hypotheses and run tests one campaign after another. Start small, especially if you don’t have experience in A/B testing. For example, you can first test only the subject lines with vs. without emojis to compare the open rates.
Once you know whether your audience likes emojis, you can dig deeper and test specific words, phrases, or tone of your subject lines. It is also best to test one element at a time to be able to avoid ambiguous results.
Once you’re comfortable with email marketing, you’ll be able to automate many processes and turn your email list into a sales-generating machine that doesn’t need much manual involvement.
However, if you’re only starting out, you are not there yet — and your machine is most likely not a self-driving car. So to generate sales from your emails, you need to put some more effort into nurturing your contacts. One way to do this is through manual sales follow-ups.
Sales follow-ups need to target only the most promising leads and prospects. Look into which of your subscribers are most active and add follow-up reminders next to these contacts to connect with them outside of the email marketing context.
Adding sales follow-ups to your email marketing workflow can help you identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities and engage deeper with your audience. Your follow-ups don’t always have to be about sales — sometimes it can be just a quick check-in email with a prospect interested in your products (the one who clicks on many links) but is not ready to buy yet. Maybe they have questions you cannot answer unless you directly engage with them? A follow-up email will help you find out.
Emails are a very personal experience. According to data from Microsoft, office workers spend up to 8.8 hours a week on emails, so no wonder their inboxes feel like home — and no one likes intruders or impolite guests at their doorstep.
When you’re invited into someone else’s home, you need to know your host’s preferences. If they are not into sweets, you don’t bring them a chocolate box. If their name is Juan, you certainly don’t call them Molly.
The same applies to your email campaigns. But to be sure you’re bringing exactly the right things to the table, you need to segment your audience — that is, divide it into smaller groups. To do that, you can use different criteria depending on what works best for your business. Some popular criteria for segmentation include demographics, location, engagement levels, purchase history, browsing history, and more.
Segmentation is just the first step. Once your audience is divided into categories, you can customize the email content for each of these groups.
For example, if you run a coworking space and have offices in both New York and Los Angeles, you can send two different emails. One will go to your prospective customers based in New York and another one to Los Angeles. Your email to New Yorkers might have a bit more of a NYC vibe to it. Meanwhile, your LA email might be more laid-back (or mention something about taking a break from the sunshine).
Some other examples include using different images for different time zones, offering relevant information depending on personal preferences, and more.
By following up with the most engaged subscribers, you’re prioritizing what to focus on first. Lead scoring makes this prioritization more data-driven and precise.
In lead scoring, email marketers assign points to different actions taken by subscribers, such as opening an email, clicking on links, etc. The more points a subscriber gets, the more interested they are in what you offer.
You can score leads based on other criteria too. Maybe leads from a specific location are preferable to your sales team, so they can get assigned more points based on their location, lead source, or anything else that is important in your sales process.
One of the most common examples of personalization is when you call your internet provider and their support team addresses you by your first name. They don’t know you, of course, and are just reading your name off the screen — but you might instantly feel like they care more about you and your problem.
In email marketing, personalization is a powerful way to make each subscriber feel special. Some typical examples of email marketing personalization include:
Personalization is a good starting point but if you want to generate more sales through emails, you might want to take it a step further — and add a personal touch in your follow-up sales interactions. For example, when reaching out to a prospect, refer to your past interaction and what they mentioned during that conversation. If you receive an out-of-office reply from a customer, make a note in your CRM and the next time you speak with them, ask how their trip was.
Triggered emails are automated emails that use predefined behavioral triggers to deploy.
Put simply, behavioral triggers are specific actions (or lack thereof) performed by the users. Since email marketing (and sales!) is all about timing, you have a higher chance of converting an email lead into a paying customer with triggered emails that land in your subscribers inboxes at just the right time (i.e., after they’ve taken a certain action).
If you’re in doubt whether they’re worth a shot, here are some stats: according to a 2023 report by GetResponse, triggered emails get up to 45.38% open rates, which is considerably higher than the average open rates for newsletters (around 40.08%).
Here are a couple of examples of triggered emails you can implement:
Now that the foundation is steady and there are some good cards in your hand, we can look into some expert-level tips. They will help you save time, better integrate your email marketing efforts into your overall marketing strategy, and, ultimately, make email marketing in your company more effective.
When you’re only starting out in email marketing, it makes sense to have just a few essential triggered email campaigns. But the bigger your business becomes, the more diverse your audience is. And that calls for more sophisticated and advanced automation.
Since every customer journey is unique, you might want to offer your subscribers the most relevant information at the best possible time. With this in mind, you can create automated email workflows for different subscriber groups based on their customer journey stage. For example:
In addition to that, there are also transactional emails that are not considered marketing emails. They serve as notifications about a certain event or action relevant to the subscriber. These include order confirmation emails, receipts, and the like. Strictly speaking, transactional emails do not refer to automated email workflows. However, they also can — and should — be automated.
Advanced segmentation techniques are most effective when you have a big and highly engaged email list.
One such technique is RFM analysis where RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary. It uses the three factors (R, F, and M) to assign scores to subscribers. For example, a customer who has purchased recently, does this frequently, and spends a lot on every purchase will have a high RFM score. The RFM method segments customers into different purchase-intent groups (“loyal customers”, “at-risk customers”, “dormant customers”, etc.).
The second popular technique is the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) model. This model uses predictive analytics to estimate the expected revenue from customers. CLV is another way to prioritize sales engagement with email subscribers.
Referral marketing is about encouraging your loyal customers to bring in new customers in exchange for discounts or free products.
In referral marketing, the key is to make it a win-win situation. If you’re asking your current customers to spread the word, you need to offer them something in return without breaking the bank.
Here’s a typical example:
When crafting an email campaign, don’t hide the referral callout at the bottom of your email. Also, it’s important to provide clear instructions explaining how your referral program works, as shown in the example above. You might even consider having a separate email dedicated only to your referral program in one or several email workflows.
Integrating your email marketing tool with a sales CRM is only the first step in building an ecosystem.
Ideally, you want to have all apps with customer data seamlessly working together. Centralizing this data will help you increase sales because you’ll be able to have a full profile of every lead at a quick glance. So consider connecting with other tools like e-commerce platforms (Shopify or WooCommerce) or help desks (Freshdesk or Help Scout).
Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced email marketer, you can effectively generate sales with email marketing campaigns. Your success will depend on how much learning, testing, and adapting you’re willing to do. But nothing beats a solid foundation, which will set you on the right path and be the best predictor of future performance.
When done properly, email marketing is not just about sending emails into the void and hoping for the best. It’s an empirical and highly strategic approach to building and nurturing relationships with your customers and leads. Using the tips from this article will help you up your email marketing game regardless of your current skills, experience, and your overall email marketing proficiency level.
