Email Marketing 2020: Here Are 5 Tips Working Now!

I recently posted on Twitter that I have over 200,000 unread emails on my Iphone.

One reason I have so many emails is that I subscribe to a ton of email newsletters, mainly so I can “swipe” ideas for marketing and sales that I can apply to my own businesses and for consulting customers.

Here are five tips I have gleaned from subscribing to *LOTS* of email newsletters:

Send an Email Every Day

One reason I have 221,334 unread emails on my phone (as of this writing) is that many of the top marketers send an email to their list every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This must be working or else they would only send an email once a week or once a month like many businesses do. Anecdotally, I find that I tend to read the email from people who send me something every day…until I start noticing that they are repeating their content!

How do you keep your content fresh if you are sending an email every day? One way is to subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and use their content for inspiration. I’ll admit that an email with the subject line “5 Dumbest Email Marketing Tips” was actually one of the inspirations behind this post.

Longer Emails Are Better

The late Dan Kennedy famously advised to write long sales letters, the longer the better. Same is true with your emails, to a degree. Whatever length you need to make your emails, as long as you are providing solid content, potential customers will read.

Anecdotally, I find that I tend to read (or at last skim) the emails that are longer with the paragraphs limited to single sentences — this makes it easier to skim the content.

You can always include at “TL;dr” summary at the bottom of your email, where in one sentence, you summarize your email.

Send Emails to Your Entire List

The main idea is to identify a targeted, niche market for your email list. However, once you start building such a list, you don’t need to segment it any further. Your prospects will do that for you by opening/not opening and responding/not responding to your emails.

Test, Test, Test

Split-test every variable you can think of — subject lines, time of day sending your daily email, etc. There are no hard and fast rules. Because your email list is different than every other email list in the world, what works for someone else’s email list won’t necessarily work exactly the same way for yours.

Plain-Text Emails Are Better than Fancy Ones

This is something you can test yourself (see above), but the “boring” plain-text emails seem to work better that ones with photos or a fancy header. My gut tells me this is akin to the hand-written address on the envelope getting opened by your prospect as opposed to being tossed in the recycling bin with the rest of the junk mail. The plain-text email might be from a friend; the email with the fancy graphics is certainly someone trying to sell me something.

TL;dr

Okay, there you go…five email marketing tips you can start applying in your small business today!

Is there a a problem in your business that is keeping you up at night? Like “How can I build an email list?” or “How can I increase revenues from existing customers?”. Let’s have a chat and see if we can get it solved for you!