When it comes to email marketing, success doesn’t come easy. Poor open rates, high unsubscribe rates, and messages landing in spam folders can leave even the best marketers frustrated. But here’s the good news—these are not permanent hurdles. With the right approach, you can transform your email marketing strategy into a well-oiled machine that drives engagement and achieves your business goals.
Recently, we took a close look at our own email marketing strategy and made significant improvements. The result? Dramatically better deliverability rates, higher engagement, and a healthier email list. To help you do the same, we’re sharing our top 15 lessons learned, organized into actionable steps.
Understanding Your Business and Email Goals: The Why Behind Your Emails
Every email you send should serve a specific purpose. Whether it’s generating leads, building brand awareness, or driving customer retention, having a clear goal in mind ensures your efforts are focused and effective. Emails are not just about communication—they’re a critical tool for driving action and supporting your overall marketing strategy.
Lesson 1: Define clear objectives for every email you send. What do you want your audience to do after reading your email? Whether it’s clicking through to a landing page, signing up for an event, or simply staying engaged with your content, having a specific goal makes it easier to craft a compelling message that resonates with your audience.
Lesson 2: Ensure your email strategy aligns with your broader business goals and metrics. Your emails should complement your overall marketing efforts, contributing to bigger objectives like revenue growth, customer loyalty, or increased visibility in your market. By linking your email campaigns to these goals, you ensure that every message adds value to your audience and your business.
By keeping these goals top of mind and continually refining your approach, you'll be able to build an email campaign that is not only consistent but also impactful, driving measurable outcomes over time.
Know Your Audience (and Their Engagement Patterns): The Right Message, to the Right Person, at the Right Time
Understanding your audience is the foundation of any successful marketing strategy. Sending emails with irrelevant content, poor timing, or no personalization is a guaranteed way to have your efforts ignored—or worse, sent straight to spam. To create impactful email campaigns, here are a few key lessons to keep in mind:
Lesson 3: Clean and organize your lists regularly. A clean email list helps ensure you're reaching out to active, interested recipients rather than outdated or inactive contacts. Regularly removing invalid addresses and disengaged users not only improves your open rates but also protects your sender reputation, reducing the chances of your emails being flagged as spam.
Lesson 4: Use audience segmentation to improve relevance and deliverability. Segmenting your audience allows you to tailor your messaging based on factors like demographics, engagement history, purchase behavior, or even interests. This ensures that your emails are more relevant to the recipients, leading to higher engagement and better overall deliverability rates. Personalized emails perform significantly better, so segmentation is something you can’t afford to skip.
Lesson 5: Identify engagement trends to refine email targeting. Metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates are goldmines of information. Use them to analyze which email types, subject lines, or campaigns work best. Look for patterns in engagement trends and use those insights to continuously refine your targeting and messaging strategies. This data-driven approach ensures your campaigns stay effective and relevant over time.
By focusing on these strategies, you can ensure your emails not only reach your audience but also resonate with them. After all, the goal isn’t just to send emails—it’s to spark meaningful connections that drive results.
How Contacts Enter Your Database Matters: Quality Leads = Quality Results
Not all email contact lists are created equal. Using purchased or outdated lists might seem like a shortcut, but it can seriously backfire. These lists can harm your delivery rates, increase the chances of emails landing in spam folders, and ultimately damage your brand’s reputation and audience trust. Building a strong email strategy starts with ethical practices and focusing on quality, not quantity.
Lesson 6: Avoid purchased lists—only email contacts who have opted in. Sending emails to people who haven’t chosen to hear from you not only violates their trust but can also lead to compliance issues with data protection laws like GDPR or CAN-SPAM. Focus on building your email lists organically by engaging with your audience through valuable content, clear opt-in forms, and lead magnets. This ensures you’re reaching people who genuinely want to hear from your brand.
Lesson 7: Ensure forms collect high-quality data to prevent fake or inactive emails. Lead capture forms are your first point of contact with a potential subscriber, so make them count. Review your forms to ensure they’re simple, clear, and collect accurate, actionable data. Use validation tools to prevent fake or inactive emails from being added to your list. This extra step will help maintain the quality of your list and improve the performance of your email campaigns in the long run.
Platform & Deliverability Tools: Do You Have the Right Tech Stack?
Great email marketing requires great tools, and choosing a robust Email Service Provider (ESP) is a critical step. A powerful ESP can help you save time by automating repetitive tasks, enhance your email campaigns, and improve your message deliverability to ensure your emails land in your audience's inbox.
Lesson 8: Authenticate your domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to improve trust. Authentication is essential for establishing trust with email providers. Setting up protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC ensures that email providers recognize you as a legitimate sender, reducing the chances of your messages being marked as spam. This step significantly boosts deliverability, helping you maintain a reliable reputation as a sender.
Lesson 9: Use email validation tools like Kickbox or Neverbounce to clean old lists. Keeping your email list clean is crucial for maintaining a healthy sender score. Email validation tools like Kickbox or Neverbounce allow you to identify and remove invalid, old, or fake email addresses. Regularly validating your list ensures your emails reach active users, reduces your bounce rate, and improves engagement rates in the long run.
Email Frequency & Cadence: How Often Should You Hit Send?
Emailing too frequently can overwhelm your audience, causing them to tune out or even unsubscribe. On the other hand, emailing too infrequently risks losing their interest and engagement altogether. Striking the right balance is essential to maintaining a strong connection with your subscribers.
Lesson 10: Test and refine your email cadence based on engagement data. Use metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates to gauge how your audience is responding. Experiment with different sending schedules—weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly—and analyze the results to determine what works best for your specific audience. Remember, your email strategy should adapt to their preferences.
Lesson 11: Don’t overwhelm subscribers—prioritize quality over quantity. Instead of focusing on how often you email, focus on the value each email provides. Whether it’s an exclusive offer, helpful tips, or personalized content, make sure each message serves a purpose. If that means sending fewer emails, so be it. Your goal should always be to engage and delight your subscribers, not to exhaust them.
Addressing Common Deliverability Challenges: Keeping Your Emails Out of the Spam Folder
High bounce rates, spam complaints, and unengaged subscribers can seriously harm your sender reputation, reducing the chances of your emails reaching inboxes and increasing the likelihood that they end up in the dreaded spam folder. To avoid this, it’s crucial to take proactive steps to maintain a strong sender reputation.
Lesson 12: Remove unengaged subscribers to maintain a healthy sender reputation. An engaged subscriber list is the foundation of successful email marketing. While it may feel counterintuitive to remove users from your list, keeping unengaged subscribers can hurt your deliverability. Focus on quality over quantity—it’s far better to have a smaller, highly engaged list than a large one filled with inactive users who don’t open or interact with your emails.
Lesson 13: Monitor spam complaints and adjust your email content accordingly. Spam complaints can quickly damage your reputation as a sender. Regularly review complaint metrics to identify patterns, such as specific subject lines or content types that may be triggering negative responses. Understanding what isn’t resonating with your audience allows you to refine your emails and create content that aligns better with their preferences, reducing complaints and boosting engagement.
Measuring Success and Continuous Improvement
Tracking results is a crucial step in improving your email marketing efforts over time. Rather than adopting a "set it and forget it" approach, make it a habit to regularly analyze your campaigns. This allows you to understand what’s working well—and what needs improvement—so you can refine your strategy and achieve better results.
Lesson 14: Focus on deliverability metrics, not just open rates. While open rates can give you an idea of how many people are seeing your emails, they don’t tell the whole story. Metrics like bounce rates, click-through rates, and conversions paint a more complete picture of your campaign’s success. Pay attention to how many emails are actually reaching inboxes, how many recipients are engaging with your content, and ultimately, how many are taking the desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.
Lesson 15: Continuously test subject lines, content, and sending strategies. Email marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all effort—it requires ongoing experimentation to find out what resonates best with your audience. Test everything, from subject lines and images to the tone of your content and calls-to-action. Even the timing and frequency of your emails can have a significant impact on engagement. By testing and optimizing consistently, you can tailor your campaigns to better suit the preferences of your audience and drive better outcomes over time.
Take Your Email Marketing to the Next Level
The email marketing landscape is always evolving. By applying these 15 lessons, you can build a strategy that not only drives results but also strengthens your connection with your audience.
Need help tailoring your email marketing strategy? Our team is here to support you every step of the way. Schedule a call with us today to explore how we can work together to take your campaigns to the next level.
