28 Must-Learn Email Marketing Tips to Turn Leads Into Customers and Brand Promoters

If anyone tells you that email marketing is dead, well, they really don't know what they're talking about.

Email marketing still has the highest ROI of any form of marketing. It's really effective when it comes to communicating with your prospects, leads, and customers. However, like any other area of inbound marketing, email best practices have evolved significantly over the past decade.

28 Essential Email Marketing Tips

For budding inbound marketers, marketing managers, small business owners, and anyone else tasked with "using email to generate revenue," we've compiled a list of must-know skills to hack your way to the top. In this blog, you'll learn 28 must-have skills to help you explode your email marketing KPIs.

1. How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Tools

Before you can get started sending emails, you need a tool for list management, email design, analytics, and a few more "must-have" features.

However, those are really just overviews of a whole bunch of products. To educate yourself on the email process, end-to-end, check out The Evolution of HubSpot's Email Marketing Strategy: An Insider's Story.

2. 8 Fuss-Free Steps to Manage and Maintain a High-Quality Email List

There's a lot of ongoing work involved with list management. You've got to keep your list organized, accurate, cleaned, and segmented. Fortunately, the right email marketing tool or all-in-one marketing solution can make your job much easier.

3. How to Create the Perfect Welcome Email

Once someone's subscribed to your list, what now? You've got to send a "welcome email" to describe the perks of being a contact, and get them excited about future communications.

4. Why and How to use Email Workflows in Your Marketing Automation

If you're not using email workflows to nurture and engage your leads, you're either missing out on critical revenue opportunities or working way too hard. And no one wants to be doing either!

For a broader view of automation for inbound marketers, we recommend 7 Marketing Tasks You Should Automate Right Now.

5. How to Structure Your Email Series for The Buyer's Journey

Your emails will be a primary tool for guiding your contacts from lead generation to closing on a sale, and beyond. Learn how to align your marketing communications with your unique sales funnel, or buyer's journey.

6. The Secret Tips to Using Images in Email Marketing

People are naturally attracted to visuals. Including images in your emails can build engagement and interest.
Images in Emails

7. How To Create Emails for Every Stage of the Buyer's Journey

Before your leads can become customers, they will pass through stages of awareness, consideration, and decision. Your emails must lead the way.

8. How Often Should You Send Email to your Prospects? The Ideal Sending Frequency

Meet email savvy Emma. Apart from being a self-confessed technophile, she's also selective and fickle. But she’s loyal to brands who consistently provide value and create engaging email content. If she thinks you’re sending out uninteresting content in her inbox more often than you should, she’s quick to click the unsubscribe button!

How do you know if you’re not irritating Emma with your email marketing frequency? Is there a right frequency?

Prospects like Emma willingly subscribe to your email list because you’ve captured their attention through one of your marketing campaigns. Plus, you promised consistent delivery of value without being meddlesome.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to keep Emma from flagging your email as spam by finding out the ideal frequency of your marketing emails...

9. The Beginner's Guide to Writing Marketing Emails That Quickly Increase Opens, and Click Throughs

 Image from GetApp

How many calls-to-action should you include in your emails? Should you focus on one topic, or compile a digest? Learning the anatomy of the perfect email marketing message is crucial.

10. How to Know Which Email Marketing KPIs Matter

Opens. Clicks. A/B testing. It's pretty easy to find yourself drowning in email marketing data. The best marketers know the metrics and KPIs to track, and how to optimize their campaigns to meet their lead generation and sales goals.

11. How to Figure Out the Ideal Length of Your Emails

Should your emails be 50 words or 500? There's a time and place for both long and short emails, and it's important to know the difference.

12. When to Use 'Soap Opera' Email Sequences

Also known as the SOS method, Soap Opera Email Sequences are a unique and incredibly effective series of 14 email messages used to "warm up" your brand-new leads and email subscribers.

13. What To Use the 'Sideways Sales Letter' Email Series

Jeff Walker's Sideways Sales Letter Email Series is designed to warm up prospects to the point where they're ready to purchase. Why does it work so well? It closely mirrors the concepts of the buyer's journey, from decision to awareness.

14. When to Use the 'Seinfeld' Email Series

Seinfeld famously said his show was about nothing; and he was right. It was totally random stories each episode. But people tuned in by the millions to see what was going to happen next. Sending emails to your list doesn't have to align to some over-arching focus. This series is about becoming a part of their life, giving them content to look forward to on a consistent basis.

15. How to Upsell with Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a dream machine when it comes to one-click upselling or cross-selling your current clients. The secret is often in the relevance and timing of your messages.

16. The Thank You Email: What You Need to Know

After your new leads click to download their eBook, what next? Sending a link to download an offer via email, as opposed to a landing page, can warm them up to future communications from your company.

Thank You email best practices (send downloadables links by email, not landing page)
After the Sale Transaction - Email Best Practices for Customer Satisfaction, turning a customer into brand promoter - sending NPS, surveys, etc.

17. What to Send After the Sale

Once you've won a new customer, the battle isn't over. Sending customer satisfaction surveys via email can help you measure and improve your satisfaction, to convert your new buyers into loyal brand promoters.

18. How to Write a Smashing Subject Line

Subject lines have a massive impact on your email performance, in terms of open rate, click-throughs, and lead generation. If you learn well from examples, check out these bright ideas from HubSpot.

19. How to Wrangle Preview Text

Preview text may be just as important as the subject line and sender when it comes to getting your emails opened. Learn how to optimize your message previews in this brilliant blog.

20. Email Openers That Convert

Once you've won the subject line battle, you still need to win hearts, minds and clicks to your website with a strong introductory paragraph or statement.

21. The Basics of Email Deliverability

Do you have the spam filter blues? Email deliverability can be a depressingly technical subject, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Learn the importance of checking your sender score, using double opt-ins, list cleaning, and more.

22. How To Re-Engage Lost or Cold Leads

Check out how real-life brands, including Pinkberry yogurt and Crocs, have re-engaged former customers who've gone quiet.

23.Warming Up New Email Contacts

Look, you can't just start blasting your brand-new email contacts with twice-daily coupons. You have to acclimate them to your brand and build a little trust with quality content first.

24. How to Avoid Being a Spammer

If you're blasting out irrelevant emails, stop. Read this blog, and learn how to avoid annoying your readers and spam filters.

25. The Power of Email Remarketing

Remarketing is a powerful type of targeted follow-ups, to elicit repeat website visits, lead re-conversions and repeat sales.

26. How to Turn Lost Leads into Sales

Every company has a list of leads that were really well-qualified, but just never converted. Learn how to reignite their passion with this blog on lost lead nurturing.

27. Ways to Effectively Segment Contacts

Not sure where to get started segmenting your contacts by job title, demographics, or interest? Check out this list of brilliant ideas to segment your contacts into infinity and beyond.

Feeling a little dubious that you actually need list segmentation? Check out Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing Stats from the email giants at MailChimp.

28. How to Grow Your Email List

Your email contacts expire at a rate of 25% each year. To keep your contacts moving in the right direction, check out these techniques to increase your sign-ups.

With these email marketing skills in mind, budding and established inbound professionals can gain the confidence and knowledge to nail their email marketing campaigns. From deliverability to effective workflows, your email can become a real workforce for your inbound marketing strategy.

Are there any important skills in this list? What do you think are the most important things for inbound marketers to know?