7 Email Marketing Strategies That Will Actually Grow Your Sales

Email marketing can be wildly profitable, but the payoff depends entirely on the tactics behind it. Done right, it's one of the cheapest ways for a business to bring in real revenue, which is why so many marketing specialists swear by it.

For every $1 spent on email, the return can come back several times over. That tracks, since most people check their inbox several times a day, every single day. And here's the kicker: the customers who actually buy from email offers spend far more than the ones who never get them.

So if you want to pull ahead of your competition, these are the moves that get you there.

1. Show them you actually care

Believe it or not, something as small as using a customer's first name makes them far more likely to open and engage with what you send.

When Experian Marketing Services put generic promo emails next to personalized ones, the personalized versions pulled noticeably higher unique open rates and considerably higher click rates per person. That's not a rounding error. That's the difference between a campaign that pays and one that flops.

And according to the Harvard Business Review, personalization can deliver several times the ROI on your marketing spend and give sales a real lift. Nobody wants to feel like a faceless name in a sea of customers. They want to feel respected. If your brand won't go the extra step, trust me, your competitor will be happy to fill the gap.

2. Data is power

Remember 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed the NSA was scooping up mountains of private information on millions of people? Morality aside, the agency understood data for what it really is: a key to power.

You don't need to go anywhere near that far, but the principle holds. The more you learn about a person or a business, the more you have to work with when you're building a relationship or closing a sale.

It sounds like a ton of work for one outreach campaign. It isn't. With automation and a few application programming interfaces (APIs) doing the heavy lifting, you get serious results for almost no effort.

3. Write subject lines worth clicking

Any decent marketer knows the mantra: provide value, solve problems. Nobody likes clickbait, and the second you use it, get ready to watch your open rates die.

A subject line like "Ten ways to melt body fat in five minutes!" is begging to be flagged as spam. Even if the email inside is genuinely helpful and lays out real ways to drop fat fast, that headline cheapens everything. If your subject line reads like a National Enquirer cover, people won't open it, and honestly, they're right not to.

4. Make it work on mobile

Everybody owns a phone now. Some people carry three. Back in 2014, the U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report found that most emails were opened on phones, and that number has only climbed since. If your emails aren't easy to read on a small screen, you're losing a big chunk of your audience before they read a word.

5. Segment your list

The Data & Marketing Association found that segmented email campaigns drove a sizable jump in revenue for marketers. That's a number worth chasing.

When you sort your subscribers, readers, or buyers, you can zero in on who they are and group them by what they care about. Say 10 of your subscribers keep opening emails about SEO keyword optimization. Drop them into their own bucket. From then on they only get SEO content built for them, while your other segments get something different that fits them.

Match your promos and offers to the segment they belong to. The days of casting one giant net and hoping 10 out of every 100 people bite are long gone. People expect you to know them.

6. Test everything

If you never test your messages, subject lines, or anything else in your emails, you're flying blind. You simply won't know what works and what doesn't.

Studying those metrics is called A/B testing, and it's a tool every email marketer needs in their back pocket. You can test which subject lines get opened and which get ignored, and that's gold. Just remember, what wins today isn't a universal law, which is exactly why you keep testing.

Dig into your inbox placement, open rates, bounce rates, reply rates, and unsubscribe rates. Those numbers tell you precisely where to tighten things up and make every campaign hit harder.

7. Follow up, but stay reasonable

Picture a perfect world for a second. Your emails get a 65% open rate (I said perfect, not unrealistic), solid reply rates, and a better-than-average subscribe rate.

People are buying the products your emails promote. Now imagine you start tacking on an extra email or two every couple of days. The numbers dip a little, but you keep sending anyway, trying to "stay in front of their faces" and become as familiar as Coca-Cola. Within days, your emails aren't getting opened at all. Dozens of people hit "Spam" or toss your work straight in the trash.

The fix? Email tracking tools. Use them to schedule reminder emails on a cadence that adds value without wearing out your welcome.

Back in the day, we gave emails the benefit of the doubt. We might not have known who sent it or how they got our address, but as long as it served our interests, we didn't care. Those days are over. Now, hyper-personalized emails that genuinely add value are what win customers and keep them coming back.