I try to put aside at least half an hour every day to read the latest blog posts from my favorite bloggers and writers.

I read some articles meticulously, while others I only scan for a couple of minutes.

The Campaign Monitor Blog falls into the first category.

The team at Campaign Monitor works hard to bring their audience relevant information on creating email marketing strategies that work.

They offer tips on email marketing topics such as automation, email list growth, delivery, and so on. And, they highlight how real companies have gained value from email.

If you are new to email marketing, the Campaign Monitor blog has some great resources for you.

It has an impressive collection of blog posts that address most questions you probably have. If you’ve already dabbled in email marketing strategies and tactics but feel like you’re stuck and don’t know how to expand your business further through, this is a great resource as well.

Because I know that not everybody is lucky enough to have 45 minutes to spare every morning to catch up with the latest trends in email marketing, I’ve put together some of the best tips from the Campaign Monitor blog boiled down into bite-sized bits.

Segmentation

• Geographic Location. One of the main pillars of creating an effective email marketing campaign is reaching out to your audience with the right message and at the right time. Geographic location segmentations allows you to create categories for different locations, making it easier for your subscribers to have access to information that is intended specifically for them. If you want your subscribers to get emails at, for example, 10 AM, geographic segmenting can make sure that every subscriber gets the email at 10 AM in their time zone. This ensures your emails will be more likely to be read, rather than received at midnight and lost in an inbox the next morning.
• Demographics. Imagine you own a store. You probably won’t put women’s beauty products in the men’s hygiene section. The same goes for how you target your email campaigns. Demographic segmentation helps you match the right customer with the right product or service by separating your customer base into different segments that are more manageable and easier to work with (male, female or age groups).
• Past Email Activity. Past email activity segmentation is a great way to know how your email campaign performed by looking at what links your audience opened. That way, you can determine what type of content your audience is interested in and create content accordingly. You can use this to build a list of “VIPs” – people who will be more likely to open your emails.
• Market. Segmentation based on the market helps you adapt your message accordingly, based on the specific market or industry your subscribers activate in.
• Workflow Activity. Workflow activity segmentation works by addressing your subscribers by their workflow status, which can range from the date of their subscription to the time frame they access their email and so on.

For more segmentation tips, please read this full article here.

Automation

• Offering Trials. Most of your customers will not dive into buying your product or service straight ahead. Instead, you will need to convince them that your product/service is the solution they are looking for. To encourage them to start trusting your brand, they will need to see your product’s value and test it beforehand. Try this – welcome your new subscribers and urge them to take advantage of a trial period. That way, you can persuade them to buy the product. Then, set up an email sequence to go out over time showing highlights of the product. Once they’ve bought the product, you can end the email sequence.
• Collecting Feedback. Start to understand more about who your customers are by collecting information from them. The easiest way to do this? Ask! Whether it’s asking new members why they signed up for the service to find out what their expectations are and what they specifically search for, in a product, or it’s asking older members about their opinion on the quality of your product so far, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to get as much feedback as possible and then work with that on improving your email campaigns.
• Informing Customers, of Their Status. I’m sure you’ve at least once, subscribed to a newsletter to get something in return (a coupon or access to information), and then completely forgot about them. However, as a business you have to worry about informing your customers when and if their subscription expires. That way, you can make sure you don’t lose customers and engage dormant ones by offering deals or discounts.
• Sending Email Reminders to Subscribers. Keeping your customers is a lot easier than acquiring new ones. With that in mind, if your business offers a product or a service that is regularly used, you can use automated email reminders to let your customers know how and when they can make appointments.
• Persuading Your Customer to Buy. The act of persuading indecisive customers is a little more complex, but it helps you reach your target. Make sure you send your subscribers, regular emails and inform them of why they subscribed in the first place. Remind them how your product could help them solve their issues and achieve what they’ve set in mind, how your product works and why it’s better than similar ones out there. Let them know how others used your product and achieved their goals and ultimately, offer deals or discount to convince your customer to buy.
• Promoting Posts on Your Blog. If you run a blog, you will find that email marketing is a surefire way of expanding your audience. Whenever you have a new blog post, send an automated email to your subscribers and let them know that there is something new on the blog, just waiting to be read. You can set this email to be daily, weekly or monthly, depending on your needs and your subscribers’ preferences.
• Creating Email Courses. If you offer online courses, a very effective way of capturing the interest of your subscribers is to regularly display what you have to offer and encourage them to educate themselves by purchasing from you. Make sure you also have a form on your website that allows newcomers to subscribe on the spot if they feel the content is of good quality and relevant to them.

For more automation ideas, please read this full article here.

Cold Emails

• Understand the Inverted Pyramid Model. In a world where most people have the attention span of a goldfish, you need a framework that allows you to keep your audience engaged for as long as possible. The inverted pyramid model shows you how to structure the elements of your email campaigns so that you can deliver your key message effectively.
• Create a Killer Value Proposition. Your customers don’t have time to read long and boring newsletters, so you need to make it clear from the beginning. What do you offer? Why they should care about it? Use the email’s header to make a statement about the benefits of using your products/services.
• Leverage Imagery. Images are an essential part of the inverted pyramid model, and it’s not hard to understand why. Studies have shown that the human brain can process images 60.000 times faster than text. Make sure to leverage this biological text by adding relevant imagery in your email newsletter. Campaign Monitor, for instance, provides you with the tools to crop, resize, and brighten images to create professional-looking imagery in a matter of minutes.
• Write Great but Succinct Content. In today’s world of short attention spans, it should be clear that writing long sentences in your email newsletter isn’t going to be the most effective way to engage and convert prospects. Use copywriting formulas to create compelling content that gets results.
• Don’t Forget About the Call to Action. The final step in creating any newsletter campaign, whether we’re talking about cold emails or regular stream of emails, is including a prominent call to action. According to Campaign Monitor’s testing, large CTA buttons can increase conversion by 28% as opposed to a simple text link. Make sure to customize your buttons so that they work on all devices.

If you want to learn more about the inverted pyramid model and how it can help you create effective cold emails, please check this article.

Deliverability

• Use a Trustworthy Email Service Provider. You don’t need an entire IT department to avoid spam filters and improve the open rates of your emails. A reputable email service provider, such as Campaign Monitor, allows creating and modifying your emails, targeting your audience, and achieving great performance on mobile devices, a breeze.
• Balance Text and Images. Some of the best performing campaigns use the right mix of images and text to prompt people to open the email and take further action. However, there isn’t a magic text to images ratio that guarantees delivery. You need to test and determine what works for your audience.
• Pay Attention to Text to Link Ratio. A surefire way to end up in the spam folder is to write only a couple of lines of content and fill your message with numerous links. As with text and images, there’s no golden rule for the perfect text to link ratio. Make sure your emails contain relevant copy and contextualized links.
• Avoid Using URL Shorteners. Try to avoid using URL shorteners in your email campaigns. Instead, hyperlink certain keywords in your copy to make the reader, click on them.

For more tips on how to boost your email deliverability, check this insightful article here.

Compliance Rules

• Ensure You Have Your Subscribers’ Permission to Email Them. Whether we’re talking about implied permission (which is granted by current customers or community members) or express permission (given when customers themselves input their email addresses in subscription forms), you need to make sure you have this from all your existing customers, to be in the clear!
• Don’t Try to Deceive Your Customer. Header information refers to information you see at the top of your emails, such as the sender, the email subject and the address you can reply to. Many of us are everyday victims of email marketing campaigns that constantly try to trick us into opening their emails by using deceiving information in the header. Be careful! You’re allowed to be creative with your subject line and try to spark the interest of your customers but make sure you do not do this aggressively or use misleading information. You may fool a subscriber once. But do it a second time and they’ll probably unsubscribe.
• State What Your Email Is About. Make the nature of your emails clear for your customers. Stating that your email is an advertisement could be done bluntly just by specifying this or in any other subtle ways that let the customers know that the emails they are about to open are promotional and not personal.
• Always Make Sure to Incorporate Your Address. If you’re a legitimate business, then it’s common sense to include an authentic and legally accepted address of your business in your email newsletter to further prove the legitimacy of your services.
• Give Them the Possibility to Unsubscribe. This is a very important rule you need to make sure you follow – always include a way for your customers to unsubscribe in case they want to do so, for any reason whatsoever. That means including links for unsubscribing, buttons they only need to click or other clearly stated and visible methods for your subscribers.
• Promptly Unsubscribe Your Customers if They Do So. If your customers have opted to unsubscribe from your newsletter, there is nothing you can do to force them to continue using your service. Moreover, you are obligated to fulfill their request in ten business days, according to CAN-SPAM laws in the US, without charging any additional fees for this step, without requesting any personal information and without complicating the process for the customer and making them take further steps to unsubscribe. Everything should be kept as simple as clicking the unsubscribe button, replying to the email, or visiting a web page to finish the process.

To find out more about the laws around email marketing, please read this full article here.

Conclusion

It’s not an overstatement to say that the Campaign Monitor blog is a great resource for both novice and experienced marketers.

Their articles are helpful, insightful, and packed with actionable steps you can take to improve the performance of your email campaigns.

I’ve included the reference posts on Campaign Monitor blog for every topic.

So, if you want to study the subject further, I recommend you reading the entire piece.

There are also a ton of other great resources out there with tips on email marketing.

Of course, I also encourage you to subscribe to their newsletter since they always come with new perspectives and helpful tips on everything email marketing related.