A successful email marketing campaign can turn hundreds of people into customers and one-time buyers into big fans. It should come as no surprise, though. This is a direct and easy way of connecting with leads and converting them into loyal customers.

Below, you'll find a detailed guide to improving an email marketing strategy to help you generate leads and sales consistently. First, we'll cover why you should care about email marketing.

Next, you'll discover how to build a killer mailing list chock-full of leads and repeat customers and how to optimize each email for high open and click-through rates. 

Last but not least, you'll learn how to automate the entire process of nurturing leads and boosting the customer loyalty of existing customers with email marketing software.

Also, be sure to check out the corresponding Plutio Email Optimization Task Template so you can build these tips into your processes to make sure each and every email campaign is optimized.

Why Email Marketing Is So Important

So, what is so special about email marketing? Despite the popularity of social media marketing, email marketing efforts remain a great way to generate leads and increase customer loyalty, whether you are providing HVAC services or a link-building company. Here are the top three reasons you should make it a top priority.

First, around four billion people use email daily, which can't be said about many other communication channels. 

Second, the mailing list you build is something that you truly own. No one can take it away from you. On the other hand, any social media account that you create can be suspended or deleted at any time, without notice. 

Third, successful email campaigns can generate up to $42 for $1 spent, which amounts to an astounding 4,200% return on investment.

All in all, email marketing is a great way to make sales online. Here's how you can make it work.

1. Segment Your Email Lists

To begin with, before you launch an email campaign, it's pivotal that you understand who exactly you are sending emails to. Will that person find the contents of the said emails useful? For instance, if you want to start offering discounts for retirees, you should consider segmenting email lists by age groups and making it so that only senior subscribers receive emails about retiree discounts. Supplying potential and current customers with relevant information is guaranteed to encourage fewer unsubscribes and helps you improve open and click-through rates.

2. Find the Best Time to Send Messages

To reach a target audience with email campaigns, you need to find the best time to send messages instead of randomly sending each message out. Doing so significantly improves open rates. If you have the time and resources to do so, you could start sending out emails at different times and see which ones have the best open rates. 

Alternatively, you could do what most companies do and either send out emails late in the morning or early in the evening. According to HubSpot, emails sent out at ten in the morning, at noon, and six in the evening have the highest open rates.

3. Use Concise and Compelling Subject Lines

Next, make each subject line compelling and concise. For example, you could include an offer that is hard to resist or write about a special event that will take place soon. The Summer Sale is on! We are starting in three days!

Another tactic is to make the email subject line pose a compelling question that draws the recipient in. It can be more effective if the question is relevant to the recipient's buyer persona. Will you save 60%? Are you making any of the six most common digital marketing mistakes?

In addition to that, you shouldn't overuse exclamation points and use all caps in email subject lines. It's not going to get people to open an email. Instead, it will probably get that email ignored, as nobody likes getting yelled at.

4. Avoid Noreply Email Addresses

If you want your email marketing campaign to be efficient, you shouldn¡¯t be using a noreply email address. Long story short, email service providers, network spam filters, and people's personal email security settings are often set up to automatically send noreply emails straight to the spam folder. Luckily, you can avoid running into such a problem with ease by creating a dedicated reply-to email address.

5. Remember the Preview Pane

Keep in mind that most recipients view emails that you send out through preview panes, which block images. Based on the from line, the subject line, and the preview pane, the recipient will decide whether an email is worth checking out. So, in order not to have key information and calls to action disappear under the preview pane, you have to keep things above the fold and visible even with the images blocked.

6. Make Emails Mobile Friendly

The emails that you send out should be mobile-friendly, regardless of screen size. Because mobile accounts for around half of web traffic worldwide, you can't afford to ignore mobile users.

You can make an email mobile-friendly in a few easy steps. First, make sure that it includes easily loadable media and that the subject line is not too long, as longer subject lines can get cut off on mobile devices. Second, use simple, single-column formatting and keep in under six hundred pixels wide. Third, use a larger font, as small fonts are rather difficult to read on mobile. Lastly, use large call-to-action buttons. Such buttons are much easier to tap with a thumb in comparison to smaller ones.

7. Optimize the Preheader Text

Have you tried optimizing preheader text while writing copy for marketing emails? If not, you absolutely should. In short, the preheader text is the copy that appears in inboxes right below the subject lines. It tends to be non-bolded or grayed. If you don't put anything in the preheader, the email service provider will pull the words from the beginning of the email, which can be a disaster.

However, the preheader text shouldn't be the same as the subject line. That way, it's just going to be a waste of words and a waste of space. As an alternative, you could use it to provide key details related to the subject line. To illustrate, imagine that the subject line of an email is about a big sale. You could use the preheader text to specify what kind of sale it is. What products are on sale? How long will the sale last? 

In addition to that, remember to keep it short. In general, preheader text can be up to 250 characters long, but it's recommended that you keep it under 90 characters.

8. Write Engaging and Clean Copy

To write email marketing copy that converts, follow a logical structure while writing, keep paragraphs short and to the point, and include just one main idea per paragraph. 

Aside from that, you might want to proofread what you write to avoid things like embarrassing typos. To make it more efficient and less time-consuming, think about installing a typing assistant, such as Grammarly. 

In case you are not that great of a writer, don't worry. Hiring a copywriter to take care of it all for you is also an option. Just make an account on a website for freelancers, such as Upwork or Fiverr, and reach out to someone who has experience with email marketing.

9. Opt for a Personalized Messages

When drafting the subject line and the content of the email, it's easy to think of the hundreds or thousands of people who you are sending it to. Still, it's much more effective to write as if you were speaking to an individual, with a personalized subject line and message that shows that you understand that individual¡¯s problems, desires, values, likes, and dislikes. 

Remember that each person you send an email to is likely to start looking for a reason to ignore it. It's just how people are. But if you choose to appeal to that person on a more personal level, you'll stand a much better chance of having that email opened.

10. Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

If you want to improve your email marketing strategy, you should start keeping an eye on key performance indicators, also known as KPIs. KPIs are metrics that help you evaluate the success of any activity, including an email campaign. Here's a list of the ones that you should always pay attention to.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) ¨C The percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link in a given email. 
• Conversion Rate ¨C The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in a given email and completed the desired action, such as filling out a survey or buying a product.
• Bounce Rate ¨C The percentage of total emails sent that were not delivered to the recipient's inbox. The most common reasons for that happening are non-existent email addresses, full inboxes, and temporary problems with email service providers. 
• List Growth Rate ¨C The rate at which an email list is growing.
• Return on Investment (ROI) ¨C The return on investment for an email campaign. You can calculate it by dividing the total revenue generated by the campaign by the amount of money you spent on it.
• Open Rate ¨C The percentage of people who received a given email and actually opened it.
• Unsubscribe Rate ¨C The percentage of people who received a given email, opened it, and decided to unsubscribe from the send list.

11. Keep Email Lists Updated and Clean

To keep email lists that you use updated and clean, you should be getting rid of email addresses that have not opened any messages you sent in a year or longer. Doing that will help prevent the engagement rates of your email lists from dropping, as well as prevent inactive subscribers from messing with your key performance indicators.

12. Make Use of Email Marketing Automation Tools

Lastly, you should be using email marketing automation tools. Such tools will prevent you from having to type in recipients' email addresses and updating the mailing lists that you use by hand, which is a huge plus. The software will take care of it all on its own, sparing you from spending hours sending emails to hundreds or even thousands of people. 

Furthermore, such software can send out highly personalized emails using the recipient¡¯s real name or username, as well as help you target people based on their age, location, and past purchases. The best email marketing automation tools on the market include HubSpot Marketing, Sendinblue, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and MailerLite.

Email Optimization Checklist

To sum up, email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool that helps you improve your business by boosting sales and customer loyalty, among other things. With just one successful email marketing campaign, you'll be able to better connect with potential customers, as well as turn current customers into loyal fans. 

To make the most out of it, though, you have to keep quite a few things in mind. It's important to segment your mailing lists and send out personalized messages, as well as to come up with compelling subject lines. Moreover, you'll need to find the best time to send emails, write engaging and grammatically correct copy, and make sure that each email is optimized for mobile devices. 

Lastly, don't forget to track key performance indicators and keep your email lists updated and clean. By doing all the things listed here, you should be able to take your email marketing campaigns to a whole new level in no time.

If you're looking to optimize your email campaigns, make sure to check out our Email Optimization Checklist, which will help you to ensure single campaigns are optimized according to this blog post's suggestions. 

Ready to get started? Check out our free email optimization task template here.