18 Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing Performance

Segment Your Email List

Segment your email list for a personalized, targeted, and more effective email marketing campaign. Using SendGrid—a cloud-based email delivery service—we create specific customer segments at Ammo.

Segmenting our customer email list enables us to deliver personalized content to our subscribers based on their interaction with Ammo.com and their interests. With segmented emails, we now see an 11.3% higher open rate compared to non-segmented campaigns.

Additionally, there’s been a noticeable reduction in unsubscribe rates, which we attribute to customers receiving content that is more relevant to them.

Craft Personalized Email Content

Personalization creates a sense of connection between the brand and the consumer. Understanding the customer’s behavior and preferences allows for the creation of targeted content that makes the customer feel valued and understood.

A practical example is the successful campaign for Concert.ua, where the email campaign was customized to deliver personalized recommendations based on users’ browsing behavior. The result was a 30% increase in conversion rates, demonstrating the effectiveness of understanding your audience and personalizing your emails.

Therefore, it is beneficial to invest time in getting to know and understand your audience to craft personalized emails that resonate with them.

Optimize Your Email Timing

Test different times and days to determine when your audience is most responsive. Analyze data to understand when your target audience is most active online. Look for patterns in open and click-through rates based on different days and times.

If your audience is spread across different time zones, take this into account when scheduling emails. Sending emails at a time that aligns with the majority of your audience’s local time can improve engagement.

Conduct A/B testing to experiment with various sending times and days of the week.

The purpose of your email may influence the optimal sending time. For example, promotional emails might perform better during weekdays, while weekend emails might be more effective for leisure or non-urgent content.

Minimize Using HTML Email Templates

Do not use HTML templates in your email. Nowadays, scammers are searching for easy-to-send emails, and using HTML templates for emails is their preferred choice.

With tons of emails coming into our inbox every day, platforms are becoming smarter. They can easily identify what is spam and what is not. The use of HTML in excess in your emails might trigger the spam filter, and the filter can mark your email as spam.

Hence, it might not even reach your customer’s inbox. Instead, use more text-based templates to boost your email marketing performance. You can also use a few images, and that will be totally fine.

Clarify Your Call to Action

Clearly state the action you want the recipient to take, and make your call to action prominent. Whether it’s making a purchase, downloading a resource, or signing up, the CTA should be clear and compelling.

One of the major reasons for unsuccessful email marketing campaigns is that there is no clear action for the target audience. This often increases confusion and can cause the recipients to ignore future emails.

Answer All Emails Promptly

You can make the most out of email marketing by making the messages personalized. This makes the recipient feel special and more motivated to read and respond to your email. Come up with catchy promos and initiatives to increase customer interaction, and make it a point to answer all emails promptly.

Connect Beyond Promotions

Don’t be an advertising robot! I see a lot of people thinking of an email list as a promotional tool. That means sending out email after email promoting products or services, and that just leads to spam down the line.

When someone sees that every email from you is based on a promotion, they’re more likely to hit the unsubscribe button. You need to connect with your audience, share personal stories, and ask them how they’re doing, or perhaps how they are finding a specific product or service they got from you. Being more personal with email marketing helps a lot—and throw in a promotion only now and then.

Engage with Interactive Emails

Interactive emails have proven to be more effective at capturing and maintaining customer attention at RoverPass compared to traditional emails. They provide insights into our customers’ preferences, allowing us to proactively tailor our services.

When customers engage with interactive emails, they feel a more personal connection, as it seems less like they’re communicating with automated systems. This approach has led to an increase in our engagement rate and a 7.3% improvement in our email marketing conversion rate.

Offer Easy Unsubscribe Options

You don’t want your existing and future customers to feel as though they are trapped when it comes to receiving your emails, so make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe if they wish. Clear and accessible unsubscribe options not only comply with regulations but also contribute to a positive user experience.

Not allowing customers to unsubscribe at any time can hurt your brand image and make it tough to see success from your email marketing campaigns.

Ensure Mobile-Friendly Emails

To enhance your email marketing, it’s crucial to focus on making your emails mobile-friendly.

Considering that a significant number of people—nearly half or more—tend to open emails on their mobile devices rather than on desktops, optimizing for mobile is key.

This means ensuring that your emails are easily readable and visually appealing on smaller screens. By adapting your design and content for mobile users, you increase the chances of engaging a wider audience and improving the overall impact of your email campaigns.

Customize with AI Technology

Open rate is incredibly important for email marketing. One way to boost your open rate is to make all emails different so they don’t come off as spammy to spam blockers. You can generate 100% customized emails by providing a few data points to ChatGPT. You can automate this by using Zapier and OpenAI to do it at scale. Your open and response rates will go through the roof.

Use Personal Email Addresses

Avoid using a company email address. Many startups use a company email address like marketing@company.com to sound more professional, but it actually hurts your performance. Emails from a real person are less likely to end up in the spam folder, and numerous tests have shown that this practice improves your open rate.

The average professional receives so many emails a day that they proactively filter out company emails, which negatively impacts your ability to reach them. Personalizing your emails can also be more effective. Even if you greet somebody by name in the email with one of the many auto-send tools on the market, they’ll know it’s auto-generated if it’s coming from a company address. However, using a personal email can make your message seem more trustworthy.

Avoid Spam-Triggering Language

Avoid spammy words in your subject line and email (e.g., OFF, FREE, Discount). They are often flagged as spam and can get you blacklisted. Also, don’t overly use visuals in your emails; such emails look promotional. Your subject line should accurately reflect what the email is about but be concise and short.

Keep Initial Emails Concise

Short and effective emails will vastly improve your email marketing. Although initial emails are important, and you want to share knowledge about yourself and your reason for reaching out, there are different ways to format them.

Let your initial email be straightforward about what you are asking for; from there, you will know who is interested. Once people reach out, you can then further explain yourself, your company, and more. This helps break it down better for the intended target, and you will see a better increase in engagement.

Integrate Social Proof

As someone who has been involved in email marketing for a few years now, I can confidently say that one of the most important things you need to do is to integrate social proof into your campaigns.

Social proof is a powerful psychological phenomenon that states that people often look toward the behavior and actions of other people when making decisions themselves. Incorporating social proof into your emails boosts credibility and builds trust with potential customers by giving them real-world examples of existing customers who have had positive experiences with products and services from your company.

This helps make it easier for them to make an informed decision about what they’re buying, which leads directly to improved conversion rates.

Warm Up Your Inbox First

If I had to boil it down to one vital piece of advice, it would be to focus on effective inbox warming before ever hitting send on a large-scale campaign. Few appreciate just how crucial the initial 2-3 week mailbox ramp-up phase truly is.

I’m also extremely bullish on leveraging AI, like Apollo, to unlock more personalized, humanized email experiences at scale. The ability for advanced segmentation based on intelligently scraped attributes makes outreach feel tailor-made.

Use Alternate Email Domains

A piece of advice that I’ve seen time and time again is to use a different domain from your website to ensure that, over time, the emails associated with your website do not get sent to the spam box of those you are trying to reach. This piece of advice, on top of using simple, written-out emails with no template, can ensure both high click-through rates and prevent high bounce rates.

Maintain a Consistent Email Schedule

Be consistent with your sends. If you tell a subscriber that they will receive a weekly email, send a weekly email that’s relevant and useful to them.

We sent a monthly email sporadically throughout 2022. Since recommitting to sending monthly in 2023, we have not only seen an increase in leading indicators like open rates and clicks but we’ve also seen an increase in leads from the email. Subscribers are up, and unsubscribe rates are down, too.

When we were not consistently sending regularly in 2022, our email open rates were as low as 9%. By consistently sending in 2023, we see 30.9% or better open rates on these newsletters. We are delivering on the promise we gave to our audience, and that audience is responding positively.