12 Tips We Wish We Read Before Launching Our Last Email Campaign

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What takes a marketing email from good to great? Successful email marketers tend to agree on a few things. For one, great emails read like a note you would jot down to a friend—sincere and conversational. They are short rather than long. They are also punchy and direct.

There’s no single formula for writing great marketing emails. That creative freedom is liberating when campaign inspiration strikes. It can also be a source of frustration when ideas aren’t gaining traction.

We gathered email marketing advice from a dozen guest experts on rasa.io’s Pushing Send podcast to help you crack the code and provide inspiration for your next email marketing campaign. Here’s what they had to say.

Advice for refining your approach

Ryan Farrel
Marketing Strategist
LinkedSelling

“The goal is to help people be successful. The more successful they are, the more they’re going to trust us. The more they trust us, the more likely they are to become a client.”

Kurt Elster
Senior Ecommerce Consultant/Shopify Expert

“I’ve never really asked people to buy something or to go register for something or to go do something 99 times out of 100. I am simply working in public. That’s how shared value is. Just ‘Here’s what’s working for me. Here’s this thing that excites me.’”

Josh Spector
Digital Marketing Consultant

“I’ve always felt like someone who sort of had like one foot in the art world, one foot in the business realm… You have to create a good product. That’s a baseline. You’re not going to market your way to success if you have a crappy newsletter, but you also can’t just create a good piece of art or a good product and then think that it’s just going to take off because it’s not. You really have to straddle that line and figure out both.”


Advice for email copywriting

Lianna Patch
Copywriter
Punchline Conversion Copywriting

“I think a lot of people but, especially in SaaS have this disconnect between the way they would speak to a human being and the way they would sit down to write… The number one thing that I think people should be doing across whatever emails they’re sending is giving their readers a chance to give feedback. [Start that feedback] as soon as you can, either letting them segment themselves into categories that allow you to serve them better or just saying, ‘Hey, why are you here?’”

Bill Macaitis
Marketing Consultant
Former CMO, Slack

“We always try to be really cognizant about… [the fact that] this is a real person. Whether we’re talking to them in person, whether it’s in the product, whether it’s via email. We want to recognize real people. We want to spend the time to make him laugh or smile. When they do say “Hi” back, let’s respond to them. That’s the type of software I would want to use.”

Grant Baldwin
Host
The Speaker Lab

“Keep your emails short and sweet. A line or two. We really want people, especially on your reaching out to potential events, to do more than just a copy/paste, spray and pray approach. Really try to tweak and customize to the person, to the event, the context.”


Advice for connecting with your audience

Jay Acunzo
Founder
Marketing Showrunners

“If you can find a small audience and serve them deeply, you’re done. They get you more people. You find more insights that can win you over with new people. Everything else actually does take care of itself.”

Dan Oshinsky
Email Consultant

“If somebody signs up your email list and you’re not welcoming them—you’re not introducing them to your voices, your expertise, the way you can serve them—you’re missing an opportunity to win over that reader and convert them into a paying supporter and someone who could be a fan of yours for a very, very long time.”

Joanna Wiebe
Founder
Copyhackers

“Relevance is everything… Are you sending [customers] something when they’re very interested in that most seducible moment? The honeymoon period after someone signs up? That can help a lot with sales. The newer someone is on your list, the shorter the amount of time they’ve been on there, the more likely they are to buy versus someone who’s been on for seven months and hasn’t purchased anything yet.”

John Lee Dumas
Founder
Entrepreneurs On Fire

“These people subscribed [to your email list] because they want to hear from you. They want to be part of your life. Bring them in. Make them part of your life. And the one’s that unsubscribe? They really weren’t that valuable anyways. I adopted that mentality for years and, as a result, I really had spectacular open rates and click through rates, and a lot of great engagement and replies and interactions.”


Advice for email personalization

Sachit Gupta
Founder
Platforms Media

“Whenever I’m writing an email—or any sort of communication—I try and think of two to five people that represent the composite of who I’m trying to reach. And then whatever I’m writing is specifically addressed to those people, instead of trying to write for it everyone.”

Brennan Dunn
Founder
Double Your Freelancing

“Personalization done right, is really just the reaction to segmentation data. So if you know that this person is an agency, you can send them a better worded email about agency stuff. But before you even think about doing any of that stuff, start collecting this data… If we were to say, ‘All right, can you pull up any given subscriber and show me what kind of business they run? What stage their business is at? So very few people can do that. I would start by getting that data so that you can make these kinds of changes in the future. Figure out who people are and start actually associating that data with their individual contact records.”