11 Email Marketing Rules You Shouldn’t Ever Miss

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There are some email marketing rules you must follow.

Checkout any of those email marketing stats and you’ll only wonder you didn’t start doing email marketing earlier enough. If you haven’t started building your email marketing list yet, that’s going be a big regret for you as time passes by.

In fact, you should stop doing anything else and focus on building that email list. Like, right now.

If and when you are doing email marketing, there are rules for you (and I) to follow.

Here are some of them:

Only on permission, please

If you thought you’d get away with purchasing email lists and send out blasts, that’s the stupidest thing you’d ever do with email marketing. Ever.

There’s a reason why email marketing works as well as it does: it’s sent out to subscribers who sign up “voluntarily” and that’s ore gold.

Sending out emails to everyone willy-nilly is an absolutely waste of money, server bandwidth, time, and opportunity.

Plus, it won’t look good on your brand.

It’s alright if you don’t want to do email marketing; just don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

Don’t oversell

Do you like Samcart? I actually do think that the product has value.

But Bryan Moran is ruining it for himself. Almost every email he sends is a “time-sensitive” pitch resting on FOMO (Fear of Missing out).

Every single email is a pitch. There are many more businesses and marketers who think that once someone subscribes, you can pitch your ass to them.

Don’t abuse your subscribers’ permission to send emails to them.

You won’t last long.

Use tag-based email marketing, when you have to

You can do email marketing in two ways: list-based and tag-based. Some businesses can do phenomenally well with just separate lists for separate kind of users. MailChimp is fantastic for that.

For businesses that make multiple offers (or want to), or if you want to do segments the right way, or if you have multiple segments, products, or customers — you need tag-based email marketing that Drip and ConvertKit do so well.

Give a way to unsubscribe

Let’s cut to the chase: people might sign up to be on your list, but they might not need you forever. They could change their mind, or just be interested in your products or services anymore.

They’ll want to unsubscribe, one time or the other, sooner or later.

Give them a way to unsubscribe. Once their unsubscribe, honor it — don’t send them any more emails unless they subscribe again.

I still know several businesses that continue to send emails even after I unsubscribe. Let’s not fall back on our promises, ok?

Clean up your email list

Subscribers will want to unsubscribe, and that’s natural. Sometimes, you might want to unsubscribe them yourself.

Cleaning up your email marketing lists is a sensible thing to do since not everyone on your list is worth sending emails to. As you grow and segment your lists, some of those email subscribers are bound to be inactive.

They don’t open emails, they don’t respond, they don’t click, and they don’t ever engage.

That’s why, you’d need to send out a single email to all your subscribers occasionally if they “want to continue staying on your list”.

Non-engaging and inactive subscribers are worse than not having any subscribers at all — they just eat up your resources and they cost you money to keep.

Why keep them when they won’t engage, respond, or buy from you?

No segments? You are losing money

There’s no point growing a huge list of customers without segmenting them appropriately.

For our full-stack agency, for instance, we segment subscribers based on whether sign up for our site-wide offer or for any of our particular content upgrades (if they do, we know what exactly our subscribers are interested in, against a blanket approach.

No point sending emails about blogging and SEO when subscribers are interested in Facebook ads, right?).

You might also want to segment subscribers based on whether they signed up for a free trial (and not yet a paid customer); paid customers based on different tiers of pricing; customers who’ve been spending upwards of $100 or more; and it goes in.

Segmenting customers enables you to send precise, personalized, and relevant emails.

Use Lead scoring (or you’ll go blind)

Email automation systems like Drip allow to automatically allow you to do lead scoring for your subscribers based on events that take place.

When you setup Drip, for instance, you’d assign values to each event (based on how important that event is for you).

Based on the values you assign for each event such as “open email”, “subscribe to a workflow”, “click on a link”, etc., each of your subscribers gets a “lead score”.

The higher the lead score is, the more active and engaged your subscribers are (which means they are a high-intent prospect).

Send out exclusive emails to those subscribers with a high lead score sets you up on a profitable path to email marketing.

Don’t Ignore your Transactional emails

Did you know that transactional emails have 8X pre opens and clicks than any other type of email? Transactional emails, if you use them right, can help you generate 6X more revenue.

If you are not paying attention to your transactional emails, get to it know. If you are already using transactional emails, here’s a quick list of changes you’d need to do to make your transactional emails work for you.

Use Marketing Automation

For more than, 82% of marketers and businesses worldwide, lead nurturing is a key objective. About 79% of the respondents of a Regalix research survey reported that they invest in marketing automation already. More than 64% of marketers report that they saw the benefits of using marketing automation within the first 6 months of implementation.

With tools like Drip, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and Zapier (which in turn connects with 1000+ other apps), marketing automation is not just reserved for large companies with deep pockets.

It’s all affordable and easy to use even for small businesses and Individuals with so many marketing platforms available.

Reads like a corporate memo?

Most emails are insipid. They are boring. There’s no life in those messages. You and I don’t have to waste time to open and read most emails since they “talk down to you” or have no life, sounding like a corporate memo — That’s the trouble with delegating something as crucial as email marketing to interns fresh out of college.

With email marketing, as with most digital marketing channels, you’d need a layer of personality.

Talk to real people, please.

Event Triggers + Follow up Sequences

Event-based email marketing is fantastic. Businesses that take the time to implement it do so much better than those that don’t. In the last few weeks, I must have visited a few websites and click on all sorts of buttons. I am sure I am also on a few “shopping carts”.

No email ever came through. No one followed-up. No one bothered to respond.

Why? Most businesses, publishers, bloggers, and eCommerce sites don’t even know.

It’s impossible to keep track of who came in, left a few products on a shopping cart, and then abandoned to never return again.

That’s why you need event-triggered emails & shopping cart abandonment emails.

After the first automated email goes out (triggered by someone clicking a button, visitors checking out your pricing page, or when a potential customer adds something to their cart), follow it up with a well-planned and strategy sequence of emails.

How does your email marketing look like?