This guide discusses the top 7 email marketing hacks to level up your email strategy and triple your sales.

Email marketing is one of the earliest marketing strategies but continues to deliver an impressive return on investment (ROI), averaging $36 for every $1 spent. Companies of all sizes and industries utilize this strategy to attract potential buyers, convert leads into buying customers, and build sustainable relationships with them. Growth hacking email marketing is also gaining popularity, helping businesses grow rapidly in a short period of time.

However, not all brands and businesses know how to leverage this powerful tool to engage customers and boost revenue. Just think about all those unopened promotional emails in your mailbox.

Don’t worry! This article will walk you through the top 7 email marketing hacks to drive sales.

Build A High-Converting Email List

A high-converting email list is fundamental to successful email marketing because it allows businesses to send messages to those who are open to receiving them, which helps maximize deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Businesses should utilize various approaches to attract email subscribers, such as:

• Website opt-in forms
• Targeted landing pages
• Social media promotions and contests
• Referral programs

Lead magnets are also an effective way to convince people to leave their email addresses and turn them into leads with your high-quality freebies, including:

• E-books
• Handbooks
• Reports
• Webinars
• Free consultations
• Free trials

Retailers often take advantage of eCommerce POS (point of sale) data like customers' order history to understand their preferences and offer suitable omnichannel loyalty program strategies in the nurturing emails. You can also connect your POS with the CRM tool to collect customer emails and build a detailed email list. 

To make sure your subscriber base is high-converting, you should obtain recipient consent via an opt-in form and then confirm their consent via a separate email before officially putting them on your list. Nowadays, many businesses have adopted this double opt-in process. Furthermore, it’s advisable to remove inactive and invalid contacts to ensure email list hygiene, which leads to better deliverability and higher engagement. 

Segment Your Audience 

After building a healthy subscriber list, the next step is segmentation. List segmentation, or email segmentation, involves dividing email subscribers into groups based on their demographics, interests, purchase history, and behaviors. 

The best marketing message has clarity.

Talk about ONE thing to ONE segment of your audience.

Cut the crap. Trim your message. Remove the bs.

A clear message goes a long way.

— Alimuddin Zafrullah (@TheAleem) July 12, 2024

The purpose of list segmentation is to tailor messages for specific audiences, ensuring that your customers only receive content that is relevant and personalized to them. The segments can be large or small, depending on your segmentation criteria. However, more detailed and specific segments help you craft content that resonates more with customers. 

By enabling businesses to deliver the right messages to the right audience, email list segmentation helps businesses to:

• Increase email open rates
• Increase click-through rates
• Increase conversion rates
• Decrease unsubscribers
• Avoid spam filters and improve deliverability

Let’s walk through some popular email segmentation strategies:

• Demographics: group your subscribers based on their demographic information, including age, gender, hometown, job, salary, etc. 
• Geographical location: segment your list based on country, zip code, city, or time zone
• Behavior: divide your audience depending on their actions on your site or their buying behaviors. For example, you can segment customers by their recent purchases, items they’ve viewed, items they’ve left in their cart, purchase frequency, where they shopped (online or in-store), what they’ve clicked on (in emails, on social media, on your site), etc.
• Customer journey stage: break your subscriber base into groups depending on their customer journey. If they’re in the Consideration stage, you can send product demos, explainer videos, or customer testimonials showcasing product benefits. Meanwhile, emails for customers in the Decision stage may include free delivery vouchers and limited-time offers to incentivize purchases. 
• Organization type: segment your B2B audience into different organization types, such as small businesses, enterprises, franchises, non-profit organizations, etc.

Embrace Personalization

As discussed above, email list segmentation empowers email personalization - the art of sending highly relevant content to the right audience. 

A study by McKinsey shows that personalization results in a 76% increase in purchase likelihood and a 78% boost in recommendations and repeat purchases. Even the most subtle details, like a personalized email subject line, lead to a 26% increase in open rates.

The key to email personalization is customer data. Businesses should collect valuable data, such as demographic information and buying behaviors, and then segment customers accordingly to send them personalized emails, product offerings, and promotions. Please note that it’s essential to obtain consent before collecting data, as online privacy is now among the top concerns of 90% of U.S. consumers. 

Some email personalization techniques include:

• Addressing the subscriber by their names, especially in email greetings and subject lines
• Reminding them of the items they’ve recently viewed or put into their cart
• Offering exclusive deals and discounts based on their purchase history 
• Sending limited-time unique offers 
• Using a real sender's name and photo (instead of the company’s name and logo) to build trust
• Celebrating important days, such as their birthdays and the day they first subscribed or bought from you
• Delivering engaging content with a personal touch, a less formal tone of voice, and humor
• Personalizing email timing and frequency

Implement Email Retargeting Campaigns

An email retargeting campaign targets subscribers who have previously engaged with the brand but haven’t taken the desired actions, like making a purchase. Email retargeting works by tracking user behaviors to create highly relevant and targeted emails to re-engage subscribers. For example, when a shopper adds items on your product page to their online cart but leaves without buying, you can re-engage them with cart abandonment emails to encourage them to complete their purchase.

The top 3 factors for a successful email retargeting campaign are:

• Urgency and scarcity: These are powerful psychological triggers that create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out). You can use limited-time offers, add countdown timers, emphasize low stock, and highlight exclusivity to incentivize your subscribers to take action before it's too late. 
• Compelling calls-to-action (CTAs): Strong, clear, and direct CTAs encourage the recipients to take the desired actions. Remember to make it stand out by using attention-grabbing CTA buttons and placing them in strategic positions in your email.
• Personalization: Dynamic content like abandoned cart items and browsing history can lead to higher conversion rates. 

Integrate with Other Marketing Channels 

Email marketing growth hacks should be part of a comprehensive marketing strategy rather than an isolated tactic. To amplify the power of email marketing, it should integrate with other marketing efforts such as social media, branding, and cross-promotion. 

For example, social media and email marketing make a great collaboration. You can grow your email list through social media advertising, promotions, and contests. On the other hand, a social sharing button in your email can help you reach a wider audience beyond the recipients in your database, increasing your brand and content visibility significantly. 

Leverage Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Nowadays, businesses can utilize email marketing software to automate tasks based on predefined triggers and conditions. These tools free you from manually crafting and sending emails, thereby reducing human errors, improving efficiency, and enhancing your email campaigns and workflows.

With email automation tools, you can trigger emails based on certain actions or events, such as signing up, registering for an event, making a purchase, abandoning a cart, or celebrating a birthday. For example, imagine a customer abandoning their cart. This action would trigger an automated email series, reminding them about the items after 1 hour, 24 hours, and 48 hours of cart abandonment, with discounts and free-shipping vouchers to incentivize purchase. 

Besides automation, artificial intelligence (AI) can help improve email marketing campaigns in many ways, such as personalizing messages, predicting behaviors, optimizing email timing and frequency, and executing campaigns at scale. Various types of AI agents, including natural language processors, predictive analytics models, and machine learning algorithms, work together to enhance email marketing strategies. For example, AI-empowered tools can use natural language processing (NLP) and data from past campaigns to tailor subject lines for optimal open rates. It can also learn a brand's tone of voice to craft engaging email copy as well as useful content. With popular AI image-generation tools like Midjourney or Dall-E, you can create appealing visuals for your emails within a few prompts. AI can also study past campaigns’ data and user behavior patterns to predict and suggest the optimal email send time and frequency for businesses.

Test and Optimize Your Email 

Your email marketing growth and success depend on data-driven decisions. Professional email marketing platforms allow you to track key metrics like open rates, clicks, conversions and unsubscribes to identify areas for improvement. 

From email reporting and analytics, it’s important to conduct A/B tests to discover what resonates best with your audience, ultimately driving higher engagement and achieving your marketing goals. Different elements to test in an email include:

• Subject lines: test different subject line content, length, style, etc.
• Linked pages: a landing page, a page on your website, or your social media page, etc.
• Formats: simple plain text, visual-rich email templates, etc.
• Email layouts
• Length of emails
• Calls-to-action
• Sender name and address
• Send times and frequencies

By constantly testing and optimizing your email marketing strategies, you can improve engagement, drive conversions, save time and resources, and eventually boost your bottom line.

Wrapping it up

Email is an essential part of modern daily life, so businesses shouldn’t overlook the impact that it can have on consumers. With well-thought-out email marketing strategies, you can build a strong relationship with your subscribers and drive traffic to your site or shop to increase sales. 

Through this article, we've explored the top 7 impactful email marketing hacks to not only drive sales but also foster customer anticipation for your emails, integrating your brand more seamlessly into their lives.