The Article ‘7 Email Marketing Hacks to Multiply Your Impact’ was originally published in 2019. It has been reworked and modernized for 2022.

Email marketing gets talked about non-stop. There’s a ridiculous amount of information out there – much of it contradictory – and it can be hard to sift through it all.

It’s no wonder, email has been around since the 1970s and is still used by 93% of B2B marketers.

We’ve put together a list of email marketing hacks you can use to get the most value out of your campaigns.

7 Email Marketing Hacks to Multiply Your Impact

1) Diligently & Regularly Clean Your Contact List

The formula for success with any marketing is getting the right message to the right audience. Your email might be spectacular, but if the person reading it has no interest in what you’re saying, it’s wasted effort.

On top of that, if your list is full of junk data like invalid addresses, spam traps, honeypots, role-based addresses and so on, your email is going to get no engagement and you’re hurting your deliverability for future sends.

Sending to a list like that is not only shooting yourself in the foot, it’s shooting yourself in both feet. Particularly if you’re using a cold email strategy (more on that later).

Email service providers (ESPs) look for signals that your emails are legitimately useful and interesting to the people on your list. If your campaigns are being sent to all kinds of bad addresses, you’ll see even less success as ESPs start flagging your sends as spam.

Maintaining a high-quality contact list full of relevant contacts should be a top priority. A few ways you can do this are:

• Weed out unengaged contacts: If a given contact is just not opening your emails, get rid of them. Every unengaged contact you cut out increases your overall engagement rate – which helps deliverability!
• Remove hard bounces: A hard bounce occurs when your email permanently fails to reach the targeted address, usually because the address has a typo in it or otherwise doesn’t exist. When this happens, get rid of those contacts right away.
• Use a cleaning service: Email list verification is absolutely crucial – especially for cold email marketing. It works like this: you upload your contact list, the service checks all the addresses and removes all that bad data, and you get a nice clean list back.

2) Don’t Fire and Forget

If a recipient doesn’t open your email, to them it doesn’t really exist. Why not maximize the return on the effort you put into crafting it, and resend it later to the people who didn’t open it?

Of course, this depends on the content of the email – don’t resend campaigns if it doesn’t make sense, like timed or seasonal offers, temporary content, etc.

3) Check Your Formatting on Different Platforms

Just because your email looks stellar in your authoring tool or in your own inbox doesn’t mean it’s going to look great everywhere.

You’re asking people to take time out of their day to read your email. If they open it and the styling is messed up, they’re going to close your message and you come across as unprofessional.

Use a tool like Litmus to check how your email looks across different clients. That way, you’ll be able to catch formatting problems before you send your campaigns off.

4) Try Cold Email – But Do It Right

Yes, really. Cold email gets a bad rap; people often assume it’s the same thing as spamming. It isn’t, and that misconception is keeping many marketers from leveraging an incredibly powerful tool.

Cold email provides a major opportunity to scale up your lead influx. It’s especially effective for small businesses looking to boost growth.

As we mentioned earlier, the quality of your contact list is paramount. The difference from inbound is that instead of waiting for people to sign up to your list, you go purchase a list from a reputable provider.

This means that your reach is only limited by how much budget you’re willing to invest in contacts. You could start reaching an audience of 500,000 contacts immediately if you wanted.

You need to make sure that the contacts in your list are as close to your ideal customer profile as you can manage. If your solution is aimed at marketers, make sure you’re buying a list of marketers.

Cold email does have a major challenge: deliverability. Many marketers find their emails getting aggressively penalized by spam filters and only rarely reaching inboxes.

The secret to avoiding this situation is to follow cold email best practices and to use an email sending platform designed specifically to solve the deliverability problem.

That platform is called Clickback. It’s built to maximize deliverability – that is, to get emails to inboxes instead of spam folders.

See it in action for yourself with a free 1-on-1 live demo.

5) Get Someone Else to Proofread

This applies to emails, blog posts, landing pages, and anything else – get someone else to proofread your work. Especially if it’s going to be public-facing.

A fresh pair of eyes is a very valuable thing. You’re used to how you write, and you’ll gloss over some of your errors when proofreading your own work. Someone else – preferably another writer – will catch mistakes you didn’t realize you made.

It’s simple and easy, and a quick way to improve your email content.

6) Change How You Approach Subject Lines

Odds are that you spend a lot of time crafting the body of your email, and then tack on a subject line afterwards, right? That’s how many marketers operate.

Flip that around.

The subject line is your chance to convince someone to open your message. You should put at least as much effort, if not more, into your subject line as you do the rest of the email.

Don’t make it too informative. You want it entice the recipient to read the whole email. If the subject line conveys your whole message, there’s no sense of curiosity.

Instead, give them just enough information to make them feel like the email will give them something valuable. If your subject line hits the nail on the head with one of their pain points, they’ll want to know what you have to say on the topic.

If your subject line isn’t good enough to generate opens, all the time you spent on your body content was for nothing.

7) Automation, Nurturing and Segmentation

Marketers love automation. Why not? Set something up once and let it do all the hard work for you. It’s a great deal.

Instead of just sending off solo emails, make them part of a bigger machine. Send one email, then segment people who clicked it into one group, people who opened but didn’t click into another, and people who didn’t open it into a third.

Create a strategy for each group, encouraging them to take the next step – whether that’s reading a blog post, attending for a webinar, opting in to your newsletter, or signing up for a free trial of your software.

Your goal should be to send each contact an email that facilitates them taking another small step towards ultimately making a purchase. Having separate nurturing drips in place, based on the contact’s previous action, is a great way to do that.