3 Simple Email Marketing Tactics You Can Implement Today

Email marketing is here to stay. We’ve already established that in the latest email marketing statistics. Here, you’ll learn 3 simple email marketing tactics that you can apply today to get better results.

3 Simple Email Marketing Tactics to Improve ROI

1. Segment You Email List

Segmenting your list is one of the things that might sound complicated but really so simple to do.

Segmentation is grouping people together based on similarities and/or differences.

For example, you can group people by their problems, products purchased, or their status in relation to your organization (lead vs customer vs repeat customer).

Of course, segmentation goes deeper than that. But that’s for another time.

The easiest way to segment your email list is to add fields or data points on your forms so you can start collecting this information.

Example 1: ariel-lim.com

This is a landing page on my site. If you look at the form, apart from the first name and email that we all ask, I have a dropdown field that asks the person which among these statements describe them best.

The options I used are as follows:

1. Works in marketing
2. Plans to work in marketing
3. Does some marketing work
4. Owns the business
5. Others

The rationale for this is I want to know who I’m talking to.

My business is consulting. The way I communicate will be different if I’m talking to someone who owns the business vs someone who plans to shift to the field of marketing. It’s like asking for job titles but presented differently.

Example 2: Lazada

It can also be as simple as asking for gender like Lazada does in their account creation page. This allows them to tailor-fit their messages to you.

If you select male, I highly doubt you will receive any pink, cute stuff — except maybe when they send out a campaign for gift ideas Valentine’s Day. (Sorry, I’m generalizing to make a point)

Start thinking about the segments that matter to your organization and how you can gather this information through your forms.

2. Send from Your Email Address

This is probably the easiest change you can do today if you want more opens and clicks. And who wouldn’t want that, right? One email marketing statistic that you should also be familiar with is that the simple use of a person in the email address increases open rates by 68%.

It’s as simple as replacing “Company Name” with “Your Name” and replacing “[email protected]” with “[email protected]”

This tactic had one downside: you’ll get people replying to your emails. This isn’t really a bad thing though — even if you get dozens or even hundreds.

But, as with the other tactics, the benefits outweigh the risks.

You get to hear from your email list. That’s invaluable feedback. You develop a relationship with them. They get to know you. They can put a face to your company.

Try different variations. For example, if I work at Apple. I can try out the variations:

• Ariel from Apple
• Ariel Lim, Apple
• Ariel Lim from Apple

Once you find which one resonates most with your audience, use that. Stick with that convention. If you’re using ConvertKit, you can do this in two ways:

1. From the email you’re sending (e.g. broadcast email)
2. From the account settings itself

Option 1: From a Broadcast Email

Let’s say you’re about to send a broadcast email. Click on the who will this broadcast be from? and add a new sending address.

You’ll see a popup that will ask you to enter a name and email address. Experiment with different versions. Don’t hide behind a company. Use a real person instead.

Option 2: From Account Settings

You can do the same thing in your account settings. Click on the dropdown where your account name is, then click on email. On the screen, click on +add from address. Then, you’ll see a popup just like above.

Don’t have a ConvertKit account? You can create a free account here. No credit card required. ConvertKit has everything you need in an email marketing software—from landing pages, form builders, automation tools, and segmentation. In a matter of minutes, you can launch a lead generation campaign without having to go through any coding.

3. Work with Other Departments

Working with other departments is simple but not easy to do.

Depending on how your organization is set up, this may involve multiple departments or just one. Or it may not actually be a “department” — which holds true for smaller organizations. But the point here is to collaborate with different people so they can offer different perspectives.

For example, marketers often don’t work with their sales team. Or even their customer service department. Start with those groups.

A simple activity you can do is set a weekly 30-minute alignment meeting with your sales and customer service team to discuss and share what messages and/or problems prospects and customers have for that week.

I know what you’re thinking: 30-minutes is too long. You’re busy. Adding more work and meetings won’t help. But trust me, this has a huge ROI. Here’s what you do:

Overview of Weekly 30-minute Alignment Meeting

1. Create a shared Google Spreadsheet
2. Customize the columns to fit your organization. For example, you can have the following columns
   • Date added
   • Question/inquiry
   • Answer
   • Topic
   • URL
3. Share the spreadsheet with everyone who has direct communication with leads and customers (usually marketing team, sales team, and customer service team).
4. Explain the purpose — better serve customers by aligning departments and having a unified message across all channels
   • Short-term objective: consensus on how to answer FAQs/customer concerns
   • Mid-term objective: create short articles answering these FAQs. These can be used by marketing, sales, and customer service when they encounter the FAQs again
   • Long-term objective: create long-form content (like marketing offers) based on a collection of these FAQs.

Let’s use my favorite example of a pet store with an e-commerce website. Based on your first alignment meeting, you realized that your sales team (in this case the staff inside the store) keeps getting asked about payment options, delivery times, and delivery fees.

In this same meeting, your customer service reps wrote in the spreadsheet that they usually get asked about how much food do they need to feed their dogs.

Here’s what you do with that information:

• Short-term
  • Make the payment and delivery information more prominent
    • Add to homepage;
    • Create a poster highlighting that information for in-store displays;
    • Send a one-time dedicated send email highlighting payment options and delivery times and fees;
    • Add an email to your lead nurturing series highlighting payment and delivery information
  • Create content about proper diet
    • 3 Reasons You Should Weight Your Dog’s Daily Serving of Food
    • How to Determine the Amount of Food You Should Feed Your Dog
• Mid-term
  • Write content about the different payment options you have and delivery information
    • Cash on Delivery (COD) Available at Awesome Pet Store
    • I live in ____ city, how long will I receive my order?
  • Create a feeding guide per dog food
    • Online — feeding guide calculator where people enter the age, weight, activity level. Then they get the recommended amount of dog food in volume and weight.
      • Do this for every brand as a separate page on your website; or,
      • Add a field to select the brand/type of dog food
    • Offline — create a tri-fold banner that acts as a worksheet so owners can enter their pet’s name, age, weight, etc. Then, they can easily compute for the recommended amount of dog food.

When you finished creating these content, share it with the rest of the team, and update the spreadsheet. That way, when your customer service rep received another question about feeding their dogs, they can simply provide a quick answer then link them to the interactive calculator you just made.

And this is only for the first week and on two topics alone. Imagine doing this for the next 6 months. You’ll have a lot of feedback from your customers. You don’t need to “research” anymore and simply focus on creating content.

So, What Are You Going to Do Now

These are simple examples of what you can do with your alignment meetings. Like I mentioned above, the purpose of this is to better serve your customers. This is done by making it easy for them to find information about what they need (FAQs) and their concerns.

Once you have that information, you can use them to your advantage to provide more value to your prospects and customers. In addition, because you’re getting feedback, you can quickly adjust what content is resonating well with your customers.

In the midst of all these, you will also get some negative feedback. And that’s a good thing. You can quickly act on it, change and improve.

These quick, small changes are what will keep you ahead of the market and stay ahead of the competition.