Email Marketing Best Practices — How To Increase Click Through Rate In Emails | TBS #143

I always laugh when people say that email marketing is dead.

Email marketing is far from being dead. Most of the businesses and companies I work with in my marketing agency heavily rely on email marketing to drive e-commerce sales and make money.

However, it’s also true that open rates and click-through rates have been decreasing continuously over the last decade or so.

So let me share some email marketing tips:

1) Move people around

One huge concept I learned from Jeff Walker is the idea of recency. The more recent an email list is, the more responsive it will be. Right after people opt-in to your list, that’s when the attention spikes.

If you build a huge emails list then it goes stale over time.

Why?

Because of recency.

Let’s say you have an email list of 250,000. It took you five years to build that list through advertising and organic traffic.

The only problem is that your open rates and click-through rates are getting worse and worse because you aren’t moving people around and getting them to opt-in to new lists and sub-lists consistently.

Create special waiting lists for new products and get people to opt-in to those lists. Host webinars and get people to enter their details again. Send additional lead magnet offers to your existing email list and get them to opt-in to a new list. Make sure there’s movement.

The moment your subscribers stop moving, your list dies.

2) Keep your list small and up to date

The size of the list is less important than the relationship with your email list. I’ve run promotions for clients with 250,000 subscribers who got almost no opens and no clicks because their list was so big.

The bigger your list grows, the more outdated and old emails you’ll have in there. And those emails will bounce and hurt deliverability.

And of course, bigger lists almost always have less recency.

Don’t aim to build a big list, aim to build a relevant list. Keep a good list hygiene and consistently purge your email list from subscribers that haven’t opened any emails in the last 12 months. And get rid of any emails that bounced, to improve your email deliverability.

Always remember: Quality over quantity.

3) Segment your email list

Another reason why your email marketing is not working is because people simply don’t care about the messages and promotions you are sending them. If they don’t care, you get no opens and no clicks.

Your content, offers and products have to be relevant to your list.

And the key to achieving this relevance is segmentation.

Most people create a general email list and then blast out promotions about all their products. They cross-sell, market and send out tips that aren’t necessarily relevant to everyone on that general email list.

Let’s assume you own a fruit store.

Don’t create a general email list about fruits and vegetables.

What you should do is create a segment or separate list for apple lovers, pear lovers, broccoli lovers and strawberry lowers.

Then send out relevant offers and tips to each segment.