Is it an impressive number like 20,000? Great! 

But then, follow up by answering this question, “What percentage of subscribers, on average, open your emails? What percentage click on the links?” 

If these numbers make you a little embarrassed — you may have low engagement. But it’s not something to be embarrassed about at all. In fact, it’s an incredibly-common issue for everyone from small non-profit hobby clubs to behemoth enterprise retailers. 

But if you have single-digit open rates and microscopic click-through rates, it is time to take action. Your list is a valuable email marketing asset that needs to be nurtured and protected. Today, we’ll talk about how to overcome low email engagement. 

Why low email engagement is a big problem

A disengaged email list becomes problematic when you keep sending out emails that hardly anyone is opening or reading. To the email blocklists and spam filters, you’re beginning to look like a spammer. If the problem continues, they’ll begin filtering your emails into spam folders or even blocking your marketing emails from getting delivered altogether. 

This means you’ll not only have low engagement, but also poor email deliverability.

Poor deliverability will take your open rates from bad to abysmal. And, in fact, this may already be happening if you’ve had low email engagement for a while.

The more obvious problem with a disengaged email list is that if no one is opening your emails, you’re not achieving the intended results with your email marketing campaigns. You need your customers and subscribers to regularly engage with your emails. No one is going to open every one of them. But everyone is happier if your open rates can remain — at minimum — in the teens. But over 20-30% is even better. 

So, what can you do if you have a disengaged email list? 

It seems like a big problem, because you’re trying to get people who are already ignoring you to stop ignoring you — by sending them more of what they’re ignoring. 

Fortunately, there are strategies you can use to identify and fix an email list with low engagement.

How to fix low email engagement

If you’re committed to maximizing the impact of your hard-earned email list, you’ll want to improve engagement rates as soon as you notice a problem. It’s a system you should add to your marketing tasks on a semi-regular basis — perhaps annually — to achieve and maintain strong results. 

Here are the steps to improve low email engagement rates: 

1. Assess your current email marketing habits

Let’s consider a few questions you can use to assess your current email habits.

How often are you sending emails?

Some companies are sending too many emails, and their subscribers have tuned out. Others are sending too few emails, and their subscribers have forgotten about them. Others are very inconsistent. 

Do any of these describe your email sending habits? 

Which segments of your email list are you focusing on?

Are you just blasting out emails to your entire list every time, or are you attempting to send more targeted and segmented emails to portions of your list, at least some of the time? 

If all your emails go to everyone and you have low email engagement, this is a key area you can work on to get some pretty impressive results.

What type of content do you send?

Do you vary the types of content you send out, or is it mostly all the same stuff? If every email you send is about the best deals ever and how time is running out, you’ve trained your subscribers to ignore you. 

Are your emails over-designed? Too long? Too short? Again — look at what you’re doing, and 

consider alternative approaches to shake things up. 

Are you in a subject line rut?

There are many types of subject line strategies. Are you using the same basic approach every time? Look back at the subject lines for the last 100 emails you’ve sent out. See if you’re being too predictable.

2. Send a re-engagement email campaign

Create a segment of all unengaged contacts — subscribers who haven’t opened an email for at least six months. If you have low email engagement, this may be a majority of your subscribers. That’s okay. 

With that segment, create a campaign specifically designed to win them back and re-engage them. These are sometimes called winback campaigns. 

There are a few ways to run a winback campaign, but here are the main components:

• Use a crystal clear subject line like, “Do you still want to get our emails?”
• Create a desirable offer 
• Make it a three-email campaign to make sure most people in this segment see it
• Remove anyone who doesn’t open any of these three emails from your list

Yes, unsubscribe them yourself. This might be painful, but it’s super important. Why? Because by removing inactive subscribers, you’ll improve your open rates automatically, and get off the radar of spam filters. These people are likely never going to re-engage (at least not during this stage of their life) if they don’t respond to this campaign. 

The desirable offer could be many things — a discount, a contest, a special opportunity — but it needs to be something you can fit in the subject line. This is another reason to make this a three-email campaign. That way you can use three different attention-getting subject lines that will speak directly to a disengaged subscriber.

It’s their last chance. So give them every reason to respond before you remove them. 

3. Alter your content strategy

Whatever you have been doing isn’t working. So stop doing it. 

Maybe you’ve been afraid to make direct sales offers, and have been mostly sending out content you think is valuable and useful. That’s good to do. But if that’s all you’ve been doing, maybe most subscribers joined to find deals and they just need to get some straight-up great offers now and then. 

To be fair, that’s unlikely to be the problem. Sending valuable content is a great strategy. The more likely scenario is that you’ve overwhelmed your subscribers with lots of sales over time, so they’re becoming numb. 

Here are a few content strategy ideas you can try out:

• Introduce more interactive elements like polls and quizzes
• Use more humor, including GIFs and memes, as well as written copy
• Implement a wider, more unpredictable, range of content — sales, educational guides, fun stuff, shareable memes, great stories, etc.
• Speak to the problems and concerns of your customers

Email example from Really Good Emails

The bottom line here is simple — whatever you’ve been doing with your email content, stop doing it and try another approach. 

4. Adjust your sending frequency

If you’re sending inconsistently, you need to figure out a way to schedule time to create emails so you can start sending on a regular basis. A great way to do this is to write multiple emails all at once. 

For example, suppose you want to send out one email per week. That’s a good frequency. It doesn’t overwhelm your subscribers (or your schedule), but it’s enough to stay on their minds and relevant in their lives. Write all four emails for the month in one day, and then schedule them to go out once per week. This is much easier for you than sitting down every week and having to come up with an email. This will also improve your writing quality because you’ll get in more of a rhythm. 

If you’re sending too many emails, figure out a slower pace, and decide what you’re doing too often so you can reduce that type of content. 

5. Alter your subject line approach

Another cause of low open rates is that your subject lines just aren’t attracting enough attention. Maybe they’re too bland. Maybe they’re too extreme and everyone is numb to it. Maybe you’re putting their first name in every single subject line and it’s gotten old.

Just like with your email content, you can’t use any single subject line strategy for every email, because your subscribers will get bored and start feeling like they don’t need to open it.

So, vary your approach. Here are a few proven strategies to use:

• Curiosity. You won’t believe what this cat did
• Urgency. Respond by Friday the 11^th to keep getting our emails
• Humor. Forget about us? It’s okay, we forgot about you too
• Direct. Check out these brand new products
• Personalized. For parents — something to do after the kids are in bed
• Personality. Make this your own way of speaking

Again, if you use any of these exclusively, it gets old. Use all of them. Use emojis. Write something abnormal. Use all caps for one word now and then. Put their first name in there. Try all sorts of things. But don’t do anything every time. 

5. Start segmenting to increase relevance

Segmentation is powerful. Every business has categories of products, or various service options, or different subscription tiers, or customers who have been there for vastly different amounts of time, or demographic data on your subscribers. You have some way to segment your subscribers.

The simplest way to segment is by engagement level. You can create segments based on who has opened and clicked more emails. 

The next simplest is demographics, like the example above “for parents.” If you have data like this on your subscribers, you could send that email just to the parents on your email list. Then, it’s only being seen by people for whom it’s relevant. And, perhaps more importantly, people who aren’t parents won’t see messages that don’t mean anything to them. This combination results in higher open rates. 

Send stuff only to college students or only to people over 55 years old, or only to people who own their homes. Whatever information you have about your subscribers, you can create segments for those, and then send more targeted messages that’s designed only for them.

6. Create a video

This is a great item to put in your re-engagement campaign. Why? Because videos increase engagement.

Create a video expressing that you’re changing some things in your business, and you’d love to see everyone get excited about it and start participating with your marketing emails again. Or create a video for a new product, or to advertise whatever offer you’re putting in the campaign.

Whatever you do — get the word “video” in the subject line, because that will get more people to open it. 

7. Make sure your tech is working

If you’re going to re-activate dormant subscribers, the absolute worst thing would be for them to try to re-engage, and then the button doesn’t work, or the poll doesn’t work, or the coupon code doesn’t work on the checkout page. 

Be absolutely certain that whatever links and website assets you’re using as part of your campaign are working correctly. Preview your emails, click all the links, fill out your own forms, and make sure everything functions as it should.

8. Make CTA buttons clear and compelling

If you get even a fair number of your dormant subscribers to re-engage, you have done a mighty deed. 

You’ll have a much better chance of making this happen if you write excellent button copy for your call to action. This isn’t the place for bland and generic stuff like “learn more” and “buy now.” 

Email example from Really Good Emails

No. You want something more like this:

• Grab your 25% off coupon today!
• Yes! I want in!
• Gimme my discount
• Take the quiz and see your results

Be specific with your call to action, based on whatever your email is offering. 

10. Attract new email subscribers

Really, this is what it may come down to. If you have an email list with 20,000 subscribers, but your open rates are consistently around 5%, that means only a few thousand of those people are regularly engaging with your emails. 

So if you run a successful winback campaign, you may still end up having to delete half your email list if large numbers of them don’t respond. And that could happen. If your marketing emails are already going to the spam folders for many of those subscribers, they may not see any of these re-engagement emails. They’re done. It doesn’t serve you to keep them on your list because it draws away resources and dilutes your data about what’s working well for those who are still engaged. 

What you can always do is attract new subscribers. And if you use the strategies from this article, you’ll be much more likely to keep those new subscribers engaged and interested, and looking forward to hearing from you. 

Cutting inactive subscribers and adding new ones is the fastest way to dramatically increase your open rates. 

Learn more: How MailPoet can help you manage your inactive subscribers

Think about it: Just a few of the many tasks on your plate include marketing, customer service, communication, and nurturing leads and new prospects. Each of these can quickly monopolize your time and leave other critical aspects of your business unattended. Marketing automation software enables you to manage those tasks more effectively. 

And it works. The average ROI from marketing automation is $5.44 per dollar spent, according to Nucleus Research, and email is the most frequently utilized form of marketing automation, with 65% of marketers taking advantage of it in some form. 

Use this guide to learn all about email marketing automation – what it is, how it works, and the steps you can take to grow while opening up more time for other parts of your business and life.

What is email marketing automation?

In essence, email marketing automation tools allow you to send out messages without you needing to be involved each and every time. You create an email once, and through the use of triggers that fire when a visitor takes certain actions on your website or in response to other emails, your email automation software sends that message automatically. 

When you hear about people running businesses online in their sleep, email automation is part of what they’re talking about. You could be on vacation, out for dinner, or sleeping at 2:00 in the morning, and if a website visitor takes a particular action, they’ll receive an appropriate email from you right at that moment.

That’s email marketing automation. 

It’s a trigger-based approach to email that enables you to stay in touch and respond to customers across a vast array of situations, all without having to lift a finger – once your automation structure is in place. And that part does take some work on the front end. But once it’s set up, it just keeps running.

What is the difference between automated and broadcast emails?

Broadcast or batch emails are marketing emails that go out to your entire email list. They usually get sent out in batches, not all at once, to improve deliverability. Segmented emails go out to portions of your customer base. Both these types of emails are typically created by an email copywriter, and perhaps a larger marketing team. If you own a small business, you may do this yourself or hire a freelancer. 

Then, these broadcast-style emails are sent out or scheduled manually. If it’s to a segment of your email list, your team will have to identify and create that segment if it doesn’t already exist. 

These have their place in your email marketing strategy, but are separate from true email marketing automation – a person still has to do the work in order for that email to go out.

With automated emails, they go out even if no one is working at your entire business. They’ll go out even if the power is out, because your email servers aren’t located at your business, but through an email service provider such as MailPoet. 

Examples of automated emails

Here are a few of the most popular and effective types of automated emails that just about any business can use to nurture leads, engage customers, and make more sales.

Welcome emails 

When new customers visit your website and fill out a form to join your email list, what happens? In addition to being added to your list, they should receive a welcome email, or even better, a welcome series.

The welcome email introduces new leads and prospects to your business. It should offer them some type of reward for signing up, such as a coupon, a free guide, a video, or some other quick win. Your welcome series could also introduce your brand, products, and services, connect them with your social media accounts, send them helpful information such as popular blogs or useful web pages, and make them feel welcome and valued. 

A good email welcome series will make sales on the spot, or engage and nurture the new customer so they make purchases later. And it goes out automatically to anyone who joins your list.

Webinar registration emails 

When someone signs up for a webinar, they should receive an immediate confirmation email in their inbox. This reassures them you know what you’re doing, for one, and that their registration didn’t get lost in the abyss. More importantly, it increases the chances they will actually attend the webinar. 

The best webinar automated emails will again be a series, not just single emails. You will create a series of messages before the date of the webinar, and they will get sent out automatically, as the date gets closer, to everyone who registers. 

Free gift or download emails

One way to grow your email list is to offer something free that’s useful or desirable to your target audience, in exchange for their email address. While this might seem like just another version of a welcome email, it’s a little different because this automated email will be written specifically to ‘re-sell’ whatever free item they just requested. 

If it’s an eBook, a guide, a video, a podcast, or a report, you’ll want them to actually read, watch, or listen to it. So this email will promote the benefits of your content and get your new prospects excited to consume it.

If it’s a promotional offer like a first-time customer coupon or special deal, the email will encourage them to use it. Again, just because you send out a coupon doesn’t mean the recipient will buy something. You still need to make the sale. The automated email series motivates that purchase.

Quiz or survey completion emails

If you run a quiz or a survey on your website or through another service, everyone who takes your quiz should receive an email once they have finished. This email might share the results of the survey. It might include a reward of some sort for completing it, and should connect them to other resources on your website. 

It should also just say “thank you,” because they took time to participate.

Post-purchase follow-up emails

After a customer makes a purchase, they need to hear from you. You need to thank them. You also want to give them the chance to send feedback or write a review about the product, or about their customer service experience. For some products, you may include a tutorial PDF or video. 

You can create a post-purchase email that’s specific to every one of your products. 

Email automation like this can be set up to send follow-up emails if the customer doesn’t respond to the first one. This type of email series can also be used to promote a subsequent purchase by offering them new deals or informing them about other products related to what they just bought.

Emails to lapsed or inactive contacts

You can also set up email automation that attempts to engage customers after they have been inactive for a certain amount of time, such as a year. These pre-written emails will offer some kind of deal or opportunity for the customer to re-engage. This could be a free offer, such as a video, interview, new report, or something of that nature. Or, it could be a coupon or one-time promotional offer.

These types of emails accomplish more than just re-engaging lapsed customers. They also help you keep your email list clean. When customers don’t respond to these emails, you may want to remove them from your email list, as they may have abandoned that account.

Abandoned cart emails

This is one of the most profitable types of email marketing automation. According to Experian, customers who receive abandoned cart emails are 2.4 times more likely to complete their purchase than customers who hear nothing. 

These emails can be set to trigger automatically after a shopping cart gets left with items in it for a certain amount of time. Here’s more about how to use abandoned cart emails. 

Personalized automated emails

Customers appreciate personalized marketing because it’s relevant to them. You can personalize emails based on a number of factors, such as:

• Categories of products they’ve purchased
• Demographics like age, gender, or family status
• Birthdays and anniversaries
• Past purchase dates

For example, you might have a couple of automated email campaigns built around each of your product categories. Each year, you can send out those campaigns to any customer who has made a purchase of something from that category. They’ll see this email as relevant to them, and be more likely to respond. See how to set up category-specific email automations.

Likewise, you can set up emails to go out automatically on birthdays, with special promotional messages and offers to make your customers feel special. 

Triggered automated emails

More complicated email automation systems may include workflows that involve a series of triggers that go out depending on what a customer does. 

For example, suppose you send out an email asking if a segment of your customers wants to receive a video that will be coming out soon. Each customer who clicks ‘yes’ will be added to an email sequence built around that video. And within that sequence, you could have another sequence that goes out to anyone who watches the whole video, and a separate one that goes to people who only watch the first few minutes. 

This sort of email marketing automation is much more complicated than most of the other types listed above. But once you have it set up, it can play a big role in growing your business. Not every email automation platform offers that level of complexity.

How email automation helps small businesses

What are the benefits of email automation? Here are a few of the biggest wins for small businesses that use email automation software.

Saves time

What you can achieve with email automation, you simply could not do any other way without abandoning all of your other important responsibilities. Imagine having to track all the shopping carts and send out emails to each customer manually, listing the items they left in their carts. That simply isn’t going to happen. 

Or imagine having to send out a welcome series every time someone joins your email list, or every time someone buys anything from your online store, if you have one. For businesses with consistent levels of traffic, you’d need a whole team of people to keep up with all this. 

Marketing automation software allows you to serve customers immediately in ways that matter to them, regardless of how small your business is or how much it grows. Scaling your business has little effect on how hard your email automation has to work.

Increases revenue

Back to the abandoned cart statistic we mentioned earlier – you make more sales by sending out automated emails. Welcome series and other emails that trigger when a customer requests something simply lead to more revenue. Promotional emails that go out based on product categories or other personalized information will help you make sales you would’ve otherwise missed.

You’ll be selling to more people, in more situations, and more frequently than you ever would if you tried to do all of this manually. 

Keeps customers engaged

Customers are bombarded with communications and marketing. You have to stay on top of their minds or they’ll eventually forget about you. Email is the single best way to do that because it costs so little to send messages out.

Automated email marketing enables you to keep existing customers engaged without you having to do all the work. They are reminded of your business and their past involvement, and you stay relevant to them.

Improves retention rate

Engaged customers are more likely to make second purchases. Email marketing automation thus increases your customer lifetime value. First-time customers become second-time customers. Members stay longer.

Encourages word of mouth

When customers feel well-treated, they’re more likely to write positive reviews and testimonials. With automated email campaigns, you can not only more consistently ask for reviews as part of your post-purchase email series, but you’ll get more good reviews because your customers feel important and valued.

How to get started with email automation

At this point, you’re probably pretty excited about adding email automation to your marketing strategy. Or if you already are using email automation, perhaps you’ve discovered a few new ideas to add to your existing efforts. 

Either way, here’s a step-by-step blueprint for how to create an automated email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Choose an email marketing automation platform

Lots of people wonder if you can automate emails in Gmail or Outlook. The short answer is “no.” Those aren’t designed for sending out mass emails for businesses, and you can’t set up triggers based on particular situations to individual customers. 

You need to use an email service provider that offers marketing automation, such as MailPoet. Different platforms offer different levels of automation, and you need to find one that has the capabilities that you’ll need. 

For example, for an online store using WooCommerce, MailPoet works very well because it fully integrates with the platform and offers many of the automated emails you’ll want to use. And even if you’re not an online store, MailPoet works seamlessly with any WordPress-based website. 

Other email marketing platforms may specialize in the more complicated automated workflows and trigger-based sequences that some businesses desire. The one you choose depends on the type of automated emails you want to send out, as well as cost, learning curve, and convenience. 

Step 2: Upload your email list

If you’re starting email marketing for the first time, you’ll need to upload your email list – whatever you have on hand at the time. The sooner you get your existing customers engaged with email, the sooner you can create automated email campaigns that will benefit them. 

What if I don’t have an email list?

That’s okay! Email automation actually makes it much easier to grow and maintain an email list. 

If you create some incentives for visitors to your website and social media pages to join your email list, you can use basic email automation like a welcome series to engage those new email subscribers and convert them into customers.

A study from VentureBeat found that automated emails produced 180% higher conversion rates than bulk or batch emails. Your welcome series, even if that’s the only email automation you use, will increase your conversion rate compared to what you’d achieve just by sending out regular marketing emails.

To grow your email list, start offering coupons, free guides or other valuable content, and various incentives that will make people want to join your list. Then, use a welcome series to engage and later convert them into customers.

MailPoet shines again here with easy-to-use email signup forms for WordPress. 

Step 3: Determine your campaign goal

The goal depends very much on the type of email automation and who will be receiving it. The goal of an abandoned cart email is obvious – to lead to a completed purchase.

But what is the goal of your welcome emails? It could be to get new email subscribers to follow you on social media. It could be to encourage clicks through to your website, blog readership, video views, requests for a free guide, sign ups for a free consultation, or demo or trial registrations. 

There are many more possible campaign goals for a welcome series. Decide what you want each of your automated campaigns to achieve.

Step 4: Create your email campaign assets

A successful email campaign of any sort, including automated emails, requires more than just the email itself. The assets for each email campaign may differ slightly, but here are the most common items you’ll need:

• Opt-in, registration, or other signup form on your website that triggers automated emails
• Landing page – the page you link to in your email
• Graphics – photos, charts, GIFs, other graphic design elements related to the campaign
• Free stuff like PDFs, eBooks, videos – whatever you promised that motivated the customer to trigger the automated email
• Call to action (CTA) text and buttons
• Coupon codes, if applicable

You have to think through what you’ll need for each campaign. When a customer or lead sees this email, what do you want them to do in response? What happens when they click on your links or buttons? Those are your campaign assets. 

And if anything on your website needs to happen in order to trigger an automated email, those are also campaign assets. 

Step 5: Outline your automated emails

Once your assets are in place, you can write the actual emails and subject lines. Some of these emails may be very short, such as last-minute webinar reminders or abandoned cart emails. 

But whatever you create, remember that once these are done, they are done and you don’t have to write them again. You may need to update them from time to time, but for the most part, automated emails are known as evergreen marketing assets, because they never expire or get old. 

Step 6: Create your emails

If you’re working with an email developer, they can custom code your messages and upload finished HTML emails into your email service provider (ESP).  

However, for the most part, you’ll work within your email service tool to design and create the emails using some type of drag-and-drop builder. MailPoet, for example, has a number of WordPress email templates you can use as a foundation to make this process much quicker. 

Depending on your ESP, you’ll likely be able to integrate shortcodes that automatically input information stores on their system – like the first name of a subscriber, the exact product the email recipient was looking at before they abandoned their cart, and more. 

Step 7: Create the triggers for each email

Each email service provider has its own method to create automated email workflows. There will be some sort of process for setting up triggers. 

For free downloads, registrations, opt-ins, and anything based on a button on your website, clicking that button must trigger email messages automatically. For automation based on something the customer clicks in the email itself, the trigger will fire based on that link or button. 

Abandoned cart emails get sent out based on how much time has elapsed since they put the items in their cart. So you’ll need an ESP that interacts with your WooCommerce platform. Same with emails based on categories purchased. 

Figure out the process for each automated email you create, and set up your triggers.

Step 8: Check your email automation setup and run a test

When possible, especially when you’re just getting started, run tests to ensure that your email automation is working. 

Use a personal email address and sign up for your newsletter. Does the welcome series arrive in your inbox? Does it show up in your spam or promotions folders, or in your main inbox? Do the graphics show up? Do the links work?

Put some items in a shopping cart on your online store, and leave them there. See if the abandoned cart email shows up when it’s supposed to. 

Category purchase emails and lapsed customer automated emails will be harder to test, but once you’re confident you’ve set up the simpler ones correctly, you’ll have more confidence you’ve done the other ones right, too.

Step 9: Sit back and watch it work

Every now and then, go in and monitor your automated emails to make sure they’re still working. You should see metrics such as opens and clicks associated with these emails over time, and that’s your best indication that they’re working.

If people start buying the things you’re selling through automated emails, using coupons, and returning to their abandoned carts, you’ll know it because the money will be in the bank. 

Plus, most platforms have an option to track metrics for email engagement performance. MailPoet even has a way to specifically track the real-world ROI of your campaigns. 

Get started with email marketing automation with MailPoet

According to the Direct Marketing Association, segmented, targeted, and automated emails account for 77% of the ROI from email marketing. So automated emails are one of the top three sources of revenue from email.

As you saw previously, some marketing automation platforms are very complex. Most small businesses and ecommerce stores aren’t going to need or want that, because those have steep learning curves and higher setup costs.

Sending out welcome series and abandoned cart emails doesn’t have to be that complicated. The faster you can start using email marketing automation, the sooner it will generate revenue that you’re missing out on right now. MailPoet blends seamlessly with WordPress and WooCommerce, is easy to learn, and you can have new email marketing campaigns working for your business fairly quickly. Want to try it? 

See MailPoet’s features

In this guide, we’ll take a close look at 10 incredible sales emails from companies selling both products and services in a variety of industries. I’ll share my thoughts on why each email is effective, if there’s anything the email could have done better, and what lessons you can take for use in your own sales emails. I’ll also briefly discuss some best practices for sales emails.

Let’s dive into it!

10 Sales promotion email examples

1. Evernote

What makes it great

This email from Evernote is great for a few reasons:

• High-quality visuals. The graphic at the top presents the offer in a bright, visually appealing manner, using contrasting colors for the text so that it’s easy to read. The smaller images throughout the text are also high-quality, simple images that emphasize the point each section is trying to make.
• Excellent organization. The text is broken down into a list, with each point consisting of a bold headline and a regular-text sentence expanding on the headline. This makes it easy for subscribers to scan the text and grab the information they need.
• Brevity. This email tells subscribers everything they need to know about Evernote Premium and the sale in just a few sentences. This is important when you consider that the average person receives 121 emails per day.
• Multiple calls to action (CTAs). There’s a CTA at the beginning of the email and another at the end of the email. This gives subscribers who are eager for the sale the opportunity to grab their discount without reading the full email while also making sure that subscribers who read the full email don’t need to scroll back up to take action.

All in all, this sales email presents the offer in a clear, visually appealing way while also making it easy for subscribers to take action.

What you can learn from it

The big lesson to take from this email is that your sales email doesn’t need to be complicated to be attention-grabbing. In fact, in today’s busy world, the simplest approach is often the best one.

2. MacPaw

What makes it great

This email from MacPaw is another great example of how much you can accomplish in a short email. All you really need is a headline, a sentence or two to explain your product and the discount you’re offering, and a call to action.

Moreover, this email offers immense visual appeal. The color scheme is vibrant and eye-catching, while also using contrast to make sure that all of the text is easy to read. The illustration of a jumping cat evokes a mood of action and also reinforces the MacPaw brand, while the gift boxes reinforce the message of “gift this to your friends” in the text.

What you can learn from it

This email is a great example of how you can use illustrations to create powerful visual experiences in your emails even if you run a service-based business and/or your work is difficult to turn into high-quality photos.

3. Quickbooks

What makes it great

This email from Quickbooks is a great example of how to make a longer email effective. Each paragraph is contained in its own box, with its own headline and accompanying image. This makes it easy for users to follow what’s happening and focus on the sections with the information they’re most interested in.

Every section also has its own CTA, and these change as the email continues, with each new call to action using stronger words than the last: find out more, learn more, buy now. This increases the level of urgency as the email goes on, encouraging the user to take direct action.

What you can learn from it

Long emails aren’t always a bad thing, but if you’re going to write a long email, you need to make sure it’s organized in a way that makes it easy for people to scan. This means dividing it into clear sections with visual cues like headlines, boxes, illustrations, or photos. You also want to make sure there’s a call to action in every section.

4. Collin Street Bakery

What makes it great

There are a few great things about this flash sale promotion from Collin Street Bakery:

• Bold colors. The bright colors used in this email make it feel almost like it’s popping out of the screen at you, drawing in your attention. These colors are used in the banner to draw you into the email itself, then again for the CTAs and other key pieces of information to make sure you see the most important parts of the email.
• A focus on urgency. This email uses a few different phrases to convey urgency: limited time, flash sale, 48 hours, now $5 off, hurry and order. Some of these phrases are also bolded and written out in capital letters to attract more attention.
• Multiple calls to action. You’ve probably noticed that I mention this in almost every description. That’s because it’s important! If your subscriber has to scroll down at any point, they should still be able to see a CTA when they do.

All in all, this is a simple yet powerful sales promotion email.

What you can learn from it

There are a lot of lessons you can take from this email. For me, the most important lesson is to carefully consider the colors you’ll use and where you’ll use them. Bright colors like the ones in this email attract the eye and make images feel like they’re popping right out of the screen. You can also use one of those same colors instead of the regular bolded black to make important parts of the text more eye-catching.

5. Headspace

What makes it great

The main thing that makes this email from Headspace great is the GIF of a person holding a cone filled with melting ice cream. The animated image is bright, colorful, and has just enough motion to draw the eye without it becoming too distracting. The image of someone watching their ice cream melt too fast conveys a sense of summer and a sense of urgency: this season, and sale, are melting away like the ice cream. And there’s a CTA built right into the GIF.

Another great thing about this email is the copy. In the GIF, you learn what the sale is and when it runs out. If you scroll down, you’ll see this information repeated alongside a quick explanation of how Headspace can help you. While this second section isn’t strictly necessary, it does a good job of reinforcing why you should buy Headspace in the first place.

What you can learn from it

Dynamic elements like GIFs can make your emails more interesting, holding your subscribers’ attention for longer so that you can make your pitch. If you want to try this out, check out our guide to best practices for using GIFs in email.

6. Homage

What makes it great

This email from Homage is a great example of how to promote a multi-product sale, whether you’re discounting a specific type of item or everything in your store. There are high-quality photos of each item, all paired with a title of the item and a call to action. The viewer knows right away what’s on sale and what they need to do.

Another thing I like about this email is how the color scheme of the email complements the color scheme of the products. The main elements of the email are black and red, colors which also feature prominently in the items for sale. This makes the email feel more cohesive.

What you can learn from it

The main lesson to take from this email is that if you’re going to promote multiple products in one email, each product needs to have its own CTA. You should also keep individual product descriptions and images small to make sure the email is a reasonable length.

7. Vinyl Me, Please

What makes it great

There are a few things that stand out about this email from Vinyl Me, Please:

• Excellent photography. The photo chosen for this email displays the products in a unique way and evokes a sense of community, tying it into the holiday it’s connected to.
• A unique way of connecting to the holidays. This email takes a different approach from most marketing campaigns sent around this time of year, tying the sale into the concept of giving thanks and Thanksgiving itself rather than the consumerist frenzy of Black Friday.
• Thematic colors. The warm colors of the background and the text reinforce the holiday theme of the email.

All in all, this is a simple, effective email that runs counter to a lot of the flashier marketing campaigns seen throughout the holiday season.

What you can learn from it

The big lesson from this email is that if you’re going to run sales during the holiday season, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from the million other sales happening at that time of year. And sometimes the best way to do that isn’t to make your email flashier, but to make it simpler.

8. Casper

What makes it great

The main thing I like about this email from Casper is the way it ties Casper’s products into the time of year without relying on big holidays that are frequently used for marketing. The emphasis on Daylight Savings Time and how it affects your sleep makes the email feel timely and serves as an excellent reminder of why having a good mattress is important.

Another thing I like about this email is the photography. The image is prominent enough to draw the eye, the bed looks extremely comfortable, and the model appears to be sleeping peacefully. If you’ve ever struggled with sleep, you’ll find yourself drawn in by the image, maybe even thinking that a Casper mattress might give you that same kind of sleep.

What you can learn from it

The big takeaway here is that when it comes to seasonal sales, you don’t always have to tie your promotions to a popular holiday. You can highlight a different seasonal event or a smaller holiday, like running a sale on World Book Day if you publish books.

9. Yellowbird

What makes it great

There are a couple of different things I like about this email from Yellowbird:

• Simple yet evocative imagery. The only image above the fold is the banner at the top, which uses a silhouette to make it feel like the email’s background is fire. This establishes a connection between the email and the idea of heat, or in this case, spice.
• Copy with character. The text of this email doesn’t simply tell you “our salsas are on sale”. It creates an image using words and phrases like “landed” and “a new flame to town”. This use of language gives the email, and the brand as a whole, a sense of fun and excitement. The CTA, “Get your dip on”, reinforces this sense.

All in all, this email is a great example of what you can accomplish when you commit to a specific brand voice.

What you can learn from it

The big lesson to take from this email is that your email campaigns can become even more powerful if you take some time to think about the character of your brand, then use language to build that character around your brand. You can create images, use descriptions that relate to a specific theme like fire or heat, and make your copy fun.

10. Moo

What makes it great

The main thing I like about this email from Moosend is that it uses a countdown to create a heightened sense of urgency. Three days might be a lot of time for some things, but the small number makes Moo’s subscribers feel like they need to act now or risk missing out. And the company isn’t using a countdown timer, which is important because countdown timers don’t work on the most recent iOS.

Another great thing about this email is how quickly it gives you all of the information you need. You learn how long the sale is, what’s on sale, and how big the discount is in two sentences. This allows subscribers to view the email and make a decision in a matter of seconds.

What you can learn from it

This email is a great example of what you can do with a simple countdown campaign. Moo doesn’t need to create a new email for every day; all they need to do is create the template, vary the text a little bit from day to day, and schedule the varied emails over the course of three (or more) days. You can learn more about this type of email marketing in our guide to countdown campaigns.

Best practices for sales promotion emails

Working on a sales promotion email of your own? Here’s a quick list of best practices to follow:

• Only use high-quality images. If you can’t get high-quality photos, pay for illustrations or create your own graphics using a tool like Canva. Remember, an image can be as simple as the discount you’re offering written in a fancy font.
• Don’t complicate the layout. In most cases, a one-column layout is best since it reduces distractions and keeps things easy to read on a mobile screen.
• Emphasize a sense of urgency. Encourage your audience to act right away by emphasizing when your offer ends and using words like “hurry” and “now”.
• Make sure your subscribers can always see a call to action. A CTA should be highly visible on every screen, including above the fold (before users scroll down).
• If multiple products are on sale, use multiple CTAs. Specifically, make sure there’s a link to each product you’re advertising.
• Organize your campaign so it’s easy to read. Use visual cues like boxes and headlines to separate different items or topics. You can also use bullet points to create white space and make text easier to read.
• Put extra care into your holiday sales. The steady stream of marketing emails people get throughout most of the year becomes a flood in November and December, with dozens of daily promotions for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Boxing Day. If you’re running a sale at this time of year, you need to put in extra work to make it different from what people are already getting. But that doesn’t mean you need to send an elaborate email. In fact, you might stand out more if you take the simple approach.
• Consider the brand experience. You want to use colors, images, and words that fit with subscribers’ existing understanding of your brand. These subtle cues reinforce subscribers’ ideas about, and relationship with, your brand.

If you’re gearing up to run an ecommerce sale, you might also want to look at our guide to WooCommerce emails.

Final advice on promoting your sales with email

These sales promotion email examples work for a variety of reasons, but they all have one thing in common: the people who created them were strategic about every word, image, and color. If you put the same time and care into every campaign, you can make email your most powerful tool for marketing sales.

In this article, I’ll help you figure it all out by exploring what each type of email does and when to use them, plus some of our favorite examples of these email types in action.

Newsletters

In MailPoet, “Newsletters” are one-time emails that aren’t triggered by a specific event or action. Or, more simply, they’re just regular emails. You can use this function to create a traditional newsletter, but there are many other uses for it as well.

When to use newsletters

When you want to announce an upcoming event

Do you have a sale happening in the near future? Some sort of community event? A newsletter is the perfect way to announce it to your subscribers.

When you’re looking to hire someone

Expanding your team? Want to find someone already in your community for the job? Sending the job ad out in a newsletter is a great way to get the right eyes on it. 

If your WordPress posts are sporadic

If you don’t hold to a consistent schedule, you might not be able to guarantee new content on a specific date, making it difficult to guarantee that there will be new content when a scheduled latest post notification email goes out. 

If you want to offer custom content for subscribers

One of the most effective ways to get more subscribers is to offer them content they can’t get anywhere else, such as additional insight into the process you use to create blog posts. This content can’t be added to the latest post notification emails, so you’ll want to send it in newsletters.

If you want to create a personalized marketing campaign

Welcome emails and latest post notification emails are highly automated, making it hard to do more than basic personalization. If you want to create a truly personalized email campaign, a newsletter is the way to go (or you can check out our WooCommerce emails).

If you want to schedule an email for a specific date

If you want an email to go out on a specific date, like the day before Black Friday, a newsletter is the way to go. 

For most other email campaigns

Newsletters are incredibly versatile and can be used for any purpose you can imagine. If you can’t think of a good reason to use a different type of email, you probably want to use the newsletter function.

How to set up a newsletter email in MailPoet

To create a newsletter in MailPoet, go to the “MailPoet > Emails” in your WordPress dashboard and click the “New Email” button near the top of the screen, then select “Newsletter” from the options provided.

This will direct you to the template library. Note that there are templates specifically for newsletters, including a variety of simple templates that can be used as a starting point if you want to create something fully customized.

Selecting a template takes you to the MailPoet email editor. This is where you can customize the design and content of your email. 

Finally, you’ll be taken to the email overview page. This is where you can choose the list you’re going to email, finalize the subject line and preview text, and schedule the email. When you’re happy with the details, press “Send”, and your newsletter is done!

Welcome emails

Welcome emails are emails that are sent out after someone subscribes to your list. In MailPoet, these emails can be sent immediately upon signup or scheduled to go out a certain number of hours, days, or even weeks later. 

MailPoet also lets you send welcome emails to people when they become WordPress users on your site.

When to use welcome emails

When you need to send your signup bonus

If you’ve created an opt-in bonus, you’ll want to make sure they get it right away. You can do this with a welcome email set to go out immediately after someone subscribes to your list. 

You can also use the welcome email function of MailPoet to send out reminders about your opt-in bonus. This can be particularly effective if the bonus you offer is only available for a limited time, like a one-week discount coupon.

When you want to create a welcome series

A welcome series is a great way to strengthen your brand’s relationship with new subscribers. You can use these emails to share your company’s story, profiles of your creative team, information about how your different products and services work, or any other information you want subscribers to know early on. 

If you’re sending an email course

You can also use the “Welcome email” function of MailPoet to send an email course, like the 4-part MailPoet course on email marketing. This is a great way to share your expertise, show people how to use your products, and provide value to your subscribers so they stay on your list. Check out our guide to creating an email course in MailPoet!

If you want to release content on a specific timeline

If you have a piece of long-form content, like an in-depth article series or a book with several chapters, you can use welcome emails to share this content with new subscribers on a pre-set timeline. For example, you might choose to send one chapter of your book every seven days, giving your audience plenty of time to read and absorb the information you’ve sent them.

How to send a welcome email

To send a welcome email, open MailPoet to the “Emails” area, click the “New Email” below the screen title, and choose “Welcome email” from the options provided. This will open a page where you can select who will receive the email and when they’ll get it. You can choose for users to receive the email either immediately after subscribing or a set number of hours, days, or even weeks later.

Click “Next” to open the template library, where you can find several templates created specifically for welcome emails.

Selecting a template opens the MailPoet email editor, where you can edit your welcome email the same way any other email is edited. If you’re not sure what to include, check out our guide to WordPress welcome emails.

When you’re finished, you’ll be taken to the “Activate” page. This is where you can review key information like your subject line, the list that will receive this email, and how soon after signup the email will be sent.

Latest post notifications

Latest post notifications are recurring, automated emails that tell your followers about your most recent content. This is typically used for blog posts, but in MailPoet you can also set these emails up to share your latest pages, products, or media.

When to use latest post notifications

If you want to automate more of your email marketing

Latest post notifications are automated, meaning that you set them up once and they get sent out repeatedly until you cancel them. This can save you a lot of time in the long run.

If you want to create an end-of-week or end-of-month wrap up

If you post a lot of content, it can be difficult for your audience to keep up with. An end-of-week or end-of-month wrap up lets people see content they might have missed otherwise. You can also create separate lists for these wrap ups, giving people the option to choose how often they’ll hear from you.

How to create a latest post notifications email

To create one of these emails, go to the “Emails” area of MailPoet and click “New Email”, then choose “Latest post notification” from the options provided. This will open a page where you can select the schedule your latest post notification email will run on.

There are four scheduling choices for latest post notifications in MailPoet:

• Immediately. This option will notify subscribers every time a post is published. This is a great option for bloggers who post less than once a week or who post on a sporadic basis.
• Once a day at a specific time. This is broken up into hourly intervals. For example, you might set your post notifications to go out at 8AM every morning.
• Once a week. If you choose this option, you’ll also be able to select a weekday and a specific hour of the day for your email to go out. For example, you might choose to send your notifications at 8AM every Monday morning.
• Monthly on the… This option lets you select a specific date for your newsletter to go out each month. For example, you might choose to have these emails go out on the first day of every month.
• Monthly every… This option lets you send emails on a specific weekday each month. For example, you might send latest post notifications on the last Friday of every month.

Once you’ve selected a schedule, you’ll be able to go to the MailPoet template library, where you’ll find several templates for latest post notifications.

Choosing a template will take you to the editor, where you can alter the design and content of your email. If you’ve chosen a Post Notifications template, you’ll note that it’s automatically displaying your three most recent posts. This lets you see the email exactly as it will appear to readers, although the list of posts will obviously change each time the email is sent ou.

If you’ve chosen a different template, you’ll need to use the “Automatic Latest Content” module. You can find this in the sidebar on the right side of the editor.

You can use this module to add your latest posts to any email. You can also use this block to display recent pages, products, or media. 

Clicking on the block opens customization settings in the sidebar editor. Here you’ll be able to specify how many pieces of content the block will show, what type of content it will use, and any categories or tags the block should specifically pull content from.

Note that in a “Latest Post Notifications” email, the automatic latest content widget will only display content not previously sent in other notifications. This means that if you send a monthly notification with a block set to display three posts but you’ve only published one post in the past month, it will only display the one post published since the last notification went out.

When you’re satisfied with the appearance of your post notifications, you can head to the activation area, triple-check that all of the information is correct, and schedule your latest post notifications!

Final advice on newsletters, welcome emails, and latest post notifications

The three main types of email in MailPoet all have their unique parameters and purpose:

• A newsletter is a one-time email that can be scheduled for a specific date and time. You can use this email type for sending event announcements, job postings, and any other one-time email you might need to send.
• A welcome email is an email sent out a specific number of hours, days, or weeks after someone subscribes to your list.
• A latest post notification is an email round-up of your most recent content. These emails can be sent immediately after content is published or on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.

You can use these three email types for the vast majority of your email marketing campaigns. 

If you sell products using WooCommerce, you may also want to check out our guide to WooCommerce emails.

So – how can you write an email subject line that grabs your subscribers’ attention and encourages them to engage with the rest of your email?

Well, there are some tried-and-true email subject line best practices that you can implement, which is the subject of this post.

Below, you’re going to learn 17+ best practices that will help you write effective subject lines, while still retaining your unique voice and style.

These tips will help you generate genuine interest and engagement from your emails, which is essential in a post iOS 15 world where it’s harder than ever to track your subscribers’ actions.

Let’s get to it…

How to improve your email subject lines

Here are 17+ email subject line best practices, presented in no particular order. You might not apply every single tip to every subject line, but you’ll want to try and implement as many as possible for maximum results.

1. Write the subject line first

When you’re setting up an email, it’s easy to create the body content first and then come back to the subject line once you’re finished.

While some people can work effectively that way, it’s generally a better idea to start with your subject line first. That way, you can ensure that you’re not just throwing it in as an afterthought.

Writing the subject line also gives you a chance to directly connect the subject line text to the body text, which can make for more engaging emails in general if the body builds on the subject.

If you don’t want to totally commit before you’ve finalized the body of your email, you can try brainstorming a few variations to start, rather than choosing a final version. Then, you can pick the option that works best once you see how everything comes together.

2. Add some personalization

Instead of sending off the same generic subject line to every subscriber, try addressing each subscriber by their name in the subject line. Or, you can also experiment with other types of personalization, depending on the data that you have about each subscriber.

There’s data suggesting that people are anywhere from ~20-30% more likely to engage with personalized emails over generic ones.

Most email marketing tools make it easy to dynamically insert each subscriber’s name in your subject line. 

If you’re using MailPoet, you can check out our email personalization guide to learn how to set it up. All you need to do is include the relevant shortcode in your subject line. You can also specify a generic fallback in case you don’t have a certain subscriber’s name:

3. Ask a question?

Why do questions make for engaging email subject lines? Mainly because every question needs a good answer. So if the question in your subject line intrigues the reader, they’ll be more likely to engage with the email to get the answer.

Of course, the key here is that the question needs to be compelling enough to generate interest. You can’t just add a question mark to any sentence like you’re in Anchorman (I’m Ron Burgundy?).

For example, let’s say your email list is in the strength training space. Consider these two emails:

• How to hit PRs every time
• How can you hit PRs every time?

PR = personal record.

It’s essentially the same subject, but formulating it as a question makes it a little more engaging and can get you more clicks.

To take things further, you can go with the question and answer one-two punch, which is a pretty common strategy. Here’s an example:

How can you hit PRs every time? Try these 9 tips

4. Keep it short

Shorter subject lines are more effective than longer subject lines for a couple of reasons:

1. A lot of people consume email on mobile devices nowadays, which means that there’s very limited screen space and longer subject lines will be cut off.
2. People will often scan subject lines rather than reading them word for word, so a shorter subject line makes it easier to engage someone who’s quickly scanning.

Nowadays, we recommend keeping your subject lines under 50 characters. Additionally, try to put the most important words/details towards the beginning to account for people who are quickly scanning.

5. Create a curiosity gap

A “curiosity gap” is the gap between what we know and what we want to know.

If you can create a curiosity gap where people want to know what’s in your email, they’ll obviously be more likely to engage with your content.

A lot of clickbait titles are excellent examples of the curiosity gap. For example:

“X-Ray Scans of Ancient Egyptian Mummy Reveal a Surprising Discovery”

The curiosity gap is the difference between our existing knowledge of mummies and this “surprising discovery”. What is the discovery? We need to know!

If the headline provided all of the information right away, we wouldn’t feel as compelled to open the article because we already know the information (so there’s no curiosity gap).

Stop Clickbait has lots of other fun examples of clickbait, which is where we sourced this one.

Now, we’re certainly not saying you need to go full-bore into clickbait to create engaging subject lines. That will quickly lead to diminishing returns and risk turning off your subscribers as they get tired of your shenanigans.

But we are saying that there’s a reason clickbait headlines work, and it can be useful to understand that principle so that you can incorporate it into your own subject lines in a softer way.

6. Mix things up for recurring offers (like sales)

If you have a lot of sales, it’s easy for subscribers to become “blind” to your deals if you’re using the same subject lines over and over.

For example, imagine that you send “50%-Off Sale Today Only” every time you have a sale – customers might eventually tune that out because they’ve seen it before.

To fix this, make sure to mix it up when sending emails for sales and offers. It’s still important to include the 50% off in the subject line, but you can play around with the other words and target your deals towards specific events or conditions.

7. Be clear when clarity makes sense

Above, we told you that creating a curiosity gap can be an effective subject line to drive engagement with your emails.

However, there are also times when it’s better to be clear and upfront.

This is the tough part of writing effective subject lines – there are no hard rules that apply to every single email. You need to adapt your strategies to your audience, as well as the content and purpose of your emails.

Let’s say you’re about to launch an awesome 75% off sale. You could try to create a curiosity gap by writing something like “Something big just dropped…”.

But in this case, it’s probably just better to lead with the 75% off sale detail because that’s already pretty engaging by itself! There’s no need to try to get overly creative – just let your awesome deal do the talking.

If you’re sending multiple emails, though, you can try mixing things up. For example, if you’re teasing the 75% off sale a week in advance, you might go with something mysterious like “There’s something big brewing…”.

But when it comes time to actually launch the deal, you want to hit them with that 75% off number in the subject line so that people know exactly what’s happening.

8. Add identity words

Identify words are words that connect with the self-identities of your subscribers. This can be especially powerful if you have a niche audience who you know are all focused on certain topics.

For example, let’s say your website is about helping freelancers grow their businesses. In this situation, you can be pretty confident that most of your subscribers will self-identify as freelancers (or at least want to get to a place where they can become a freelancer).

Instead of writing a subject like this:

How to work more productively

Try adding identity works like this:

How freelancers can work more productively

By including the identity of the reader, you build a connection and make your email more engaging to that person.

9. Include numbers (and use numerals)

Including numbers in your subject lines is a great way to boost engagement.

For example, Campaign Monitor A/B tested these two different headlines:

1. 3 steps to measuring the success of your email marketing with Google Analytics
2. How to measure the success of your email marketing with Google Analytics

They found that the first subject line (with the number) had a massive 57% higher open rate than the second headline.

Both high and low numbers can be effective, but in different situations:

• High numbers are effective when you’re providing value to the subscriber. For example, “17 tips for improving your subject lines” – more tips = more value so a higher number is better. The same is true for sales/discounts where a higher discount means cheaper prices.
• Low numbers are effective when you’re talking about the effort a subscriber needs to take. For example, “2 steps to a faster-loading WordPress website”. The lower the number of steps a person needs to take, the less effort they’ll need to expend. Less effort is good, which is why a low number is more effective here.

Finally, you always want to use the actual numeral instead of writing out the number. That is, “3 steps to…” is better than “Three steps to…”

10. Add some urgency or scarcity

Urgency and scarcity are tried-and-tested marketing tactics for driving engagement and interactions. You might also see this called fear of missing out, AKA FOMO.

If people feel like they might miss out on something, they’ll be more likely to take action to avoid having to feel FOMO.

For example, if you’re promoting your freelance business coaching services, you could try something like:

Only 3 freelance elevation coaching packages remain

Only if it’s the truth, of course. Using false scarcity isn’t cool, and might even run afoul of the law in some jurisdictions.

If you’re promoting a sale, you could use something like:

Our Sale Ends in 6 Hours

Adding those elements of urgency encourages people to click on your email right now rather than scrolling by (and maybe never coming back to your email).

11. Harness social proof

Social proof is a great marketing strategy across all of your digital platforms, including your email subject lines.

The basic idea is this – “other people think we’re great, so you’ll probably think we’re great, too”.

You can go with raw numbers – e.g. “lots of people think we’re great”. Or, you could highlight specific influencers – e.g. “George Clooney thinks we’re great”.

You can also play around with combining social proof with other strategies on this post, such as a curiosity gap.

For example, if we’re sticking with our freelancer coaching example, you could try something like “423 freelancers found a client using this strategy”. There’s social proof from the success of people using this strategy, and there’s a curiosity gap because people want to know what this successful strategy is.

12. Play around with emojis

Ok, there’s some debate with this one, which is why it’s “play around with emojis” instead of “you absolutely should use emojis in your subject lines because they always work.”

With that being said, a lot of brands have had success with incorporating emojis into their subject lines, especially if the brand has more of a playful brand personality.

There’s data showing that including certain emojis in your subject lines leads to higher engagement…but there’s also data showing that other emojis can lead to lower engagement than the alternatives.

If you want to learn the best practices here, check out our guide to using emojis in email subject lines.

13. Pay attention to sentence case and title case

One common question for optimizing subject lines is what capitalization you should use.

There are two viable options:

• Title case – How to Write Good Subject Lines
• Sentence case – How to write good subject lines

USING ALL CAPITALS IS NOT A VIABLE OPTION.

Both are ok to use and you’ll see both used quite frequently.

In general, using sentence case feels a little more personal, which can make it a good option when you’re trying to build a connection with readers.

On the other hand, using title case feels a bit more formal, which can make it a good option for business-focused emails or transactional emails.

We recommend playing around with both approaches to see which works better for your specific audience.

14. Use your FROM name and email

When people open their email inboxes, pretty much all email clients will show at least two pieces of information for each email:

1. Your subject line, which is what we’ve been focusing on in this entire post.
2. Your FROM name, which typically appears to the left of the subject line.

If there’s more space, some email clients will also show the preview text, which is our next tip.

This makes your FROM name another valuable piece of real estate for driving engagement with your emails.

You’ll want to choose something straightforward that people will instantly associate with your brand. Typically, your brand name itself is a good starting point.

Some people also like to use real names to create a more personal connection. However, using just a name alone can be confusing because people have no way to associate the name with a brand. If you still want to try it, consider a hybrid approach like “Colin at MailPoet”.

And no matter what, don’t use “noreply” as your FROM name if you want people to engage with your emails.

15. Connect the subject line to the preview text

Ok, this one isn’t exclusively about the subject line. But some email clients will display both the subject line and the preview text next to one another.

This means that you can tie them together to further boost your engagement.

For example, if you formulate your subject line as a question, you can use your preview text to tease users with the answer to that question.

If you’re using MailPoet, you’ll get a separate field to enter a custom preview text. This field appears right below the subject line:

16. Learn from other brands

One of the best ways to improve your subject lines is to be a little more mindful when you’re scrolling your own inbox.

Pay attention to which email subject lines make you the most likely to engage. Then, try to apply those lessons to your own subject lines.

If you don’t want to go scrolling in your own inbox, you can also check out our collection of the best email subject line examples to get some inspiration.

17. Avoid these pitfalls that negate your results

So far, we’ve talked about a lot of positive things that you can do to improve your email subject lines.

However, this post wouldn’t be complete without discussing some of the biggest email subject no-nos that could reduce the effectiveness of all your hard work.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you should not do in your subject line:

• Use spammy words/phrases – certain words or phrases have been abused by spammers and as such can hurt your subject lines. HubSpot maintains a pretty detailed list of spam trigger words and phrases to give you an idea of what can cause problems.
• WRITE IN ALL CAPITALS – this is pretty clearly annoying, right? Most users think so too. And if that’s not enough, using all capitals increases the chance of hitting the spam folder. In very rare situations, it might make sense to capitalize a single word. But you need to REALLY be careful if you’re doing that.
• Overuse exclamation marks!!!!! – one exclamation mark in a subject line is ok. But adding a bunch can look spammy (and is more likely to actually trigger spam filters).
• Don’t use a question mark and an exclamation – “Are you getting flagged for spam? Stop using exclamations after questions!”. This format naturally looks a bit spammy, which is why it can be an issue in your subject lines.

For more things to avoid, check out our post with 11 signs that you might accidentally be an email spammer.

Implement these email subject line best practices today

If you want to create more engagement with your emails, focusing on your subject lines is key.

Your body content could be the best in the world, but you won’t generate clicks unless your subject lines do a good job of grabbing your subscribers’ attention.

In this post, we’ve shared 17 different tips to help you write better subject lines and drive more engagement from your email efforts.

Try them out today and see how they work for you.

If you’re using MailPoet, you’ll be able to easily track the engagement for each email subject line so that you can find the formulas that work best for your specific audience.

If you’re not using MailPoet yet, sign up today for free to start getting more from your email marketing efforts.

Do you still have any questions about these email subject line best practices or getting the most from your email subject lines? Let us know in the comments!

To accomplish this, I’ll explore:

• What a countdown campaign is + when to use one
• Examples of high-quality countdown emails
• How to structure your countdown email campaign
• The thing about countdown timers

When you’re finished reading, you’ll have everything you need except an occasion to count down to!

What is a countdown email campaign?

A countdown email campaign is a series of three or more emails counting down to a specific event. Each email builds on the last one, increasing the sense of urgency and sometimes also offering additional incentives to win over people who are debating a purchase. 

There are several occasions when you might use a countdown campaign:

• In the lead-up to a product release
• When a limited-time offer is about to run out
• When you’re selling tickets for an event happening on a specific date
• In the lead up to a holiday sale
• If you’re counting down the days until the end of a sale
• If you’re only accepting people into a specific program or course until a certain date
• When a product/service is going to stop being produced or sold after a specific date
• When a product/service is going to increase in price after a specific date

And these are just the opportunities I’ve thought of; countdown email campaigns can be used to promote anything happening on, before, or after a specific date.

Countdown email examples

1. Casper

This countdown email from Casper is great for a couple of reasons:

• The email is visual. The most important information, the amount that users can save, is in big, bold letters, and the call to action is placed in a large button. Subscribers can see all of the information they need, including how to take action, in a glance.
• The email is short. Subscribers don’t need to scroll or read large blocks of text to reach the call to action.
• The call to action is specific. The button asking you to “Shop the Mattresses” tells you exactly what Casper wants you to do.

The language and branding also reflect the company’s personality, ensuring that subscribers have a consistent experience when they engage with Casper marketing campaigns.

2. Distributed

This email works for similar reasons to the Restream email: the content is highly visual, the text is short, and the call to action is highly specific.

However, the full email is more like a landing page. There are multiple sections, each with its own information and call to action.

This approach works because there’s a lot to say about a conference like the Distributed 2021 event. You can highlight different panels, different guests, and other aspects of the event experience. A similar approach could also be used to highlight different uses for a specific product or multiple benefits provided by a specific service. I do recommend that you use this approach sparingly though; the average person receives over 125 emails per day, so they don’t want to spend a lot of time on any individual message.

3. Clearout

This Clearout countdown email is another email that uses striking visuals to direct users towards the spaces where they can take action. The coupon codes in particular are large and use contrasting colors to make them, and the information about each coupon, highly visible.

The size of the coupon codes does mean that the first buy button appears below the fold (after a user scrolls down), but in this case, the quality of the discounts is enough to convince people to scroll down.

How to create a countdown email campaign

1. Establish your goal

You probably already have a goal for your countdown campaign: to sell a specific product or service, make a specific number of sales in a store-wide clearance event, or get people to sign up for an event. For true success, however, you’ll want to get specific about the number of sales you want. This will help you create focused content and make it easier to measure the results when a campaign is finished.

Generally, I recommend setting the goal for a countdown campaign as a percentage. This means that your goal doesn’t become too small if you receive an influx of subscribers or become unachievable if you lose a bunch.

What is a reasonable goal?

According to Barilliance, the average conversion rate for email marketing campaigns was 15.22% in 2021. However, that doesn’t mean every business should aim for a 15% conversion rate. There are a few factors that can impact the conversion rate of a specific campaign:

• List hygiene. If you haven’t cleaned your list in a while, inactive and junk email addresses can reduce your engagement and conversion rates. You might also be wasting money by paying to keep contacts you don’t need, so if you haven’t cleaned your list in over 12 months, take a look at MailPoet’s list of compatible list cleaning tools.
• The value of your offer. People are more likely to take action when there’s a clear benefit, and a more significant benefit will win over more people. This means that you can expect a higher conversion rate on a 15% off sale than on a 10% sale. And increased value doesn’t always mean an increased discount, either. A new product sold at full price can net more sales than an old product offered at a steep discount.
• The cost of taking action. If you’re not a luxury brand that caters exclusively to the wealthy, cost will probably be a factor for your subscribers. And cost isn’t always money, either. If you’re selling tickets to a week-long event, people might not buy in because they’re not available for that long or during that particular week. In other words, people are less likely to take action if they need to commit significant resources to something.
• The quality of the campaign. If your campaign is difficult to read, doesn’t look good on mobile devices, or doesn’t present your offer in a clear and compelling way, people are more likely to delete your email without taking action.

If you’ve run similar sales before, you can also use your email analytics to get an idea of how well they perform with your unique audience.

2. Plan the structure of your countdown email campaign

Next, you’ll want to outline the overall structure of your campaign. This will help you know what to write in each email and ensure that your emails don’t become too repetitive.

Most countdown email campaigns should include at least three emails:

The “countdown begins” email

Your first email should announce what you’re counting down to and explain the basics: how long the countdown will be, why subscribers should take action, what action you want them to take, and how they can take that action. And you want to explain it all as quickly as possible, like this email from Everlane, which features a short introduction and one-sentence descriptions of the products available.

Pro tip: If you’re counting down to a product release or a sale, consider giving subscribers a secret link so they can take advantage of your offer before anyone else. This is a great way to reward subscribers for their devotion to your brand.

The “countdown is on” email

This email, or series of emails, goes out during the countdown itself. You can use this email as an opportunity to share more information about your offer, such as new images of your products in action.

If you do a multi-day countdown, you can send one of these emails every day, varying the emails by focusing on different aspects of the products/services on sale. For example, if you’re selling a six-week course, you might use each email to provide an overview of a specific lesson.

Running a multi-day countdown also means you can also use a different sales tactic in each email. For example, you might send one email that focuses on the discount itself, another that shows your products or services in use, and a third that shares reviews or testimonials.

The “last call” email

This email tells subscribers that they’re running out of time to take advantage of your offer, using words like “last call” and “final hours” to create an increased sense of urgency. If you’re running a multi-day sale, you might send this email on the morning of the last day; if you’re running a single-day sale, this email might go out in the final 4-5 hours.

3. Create your emails

With your plan in place, you’re ready to start creating the emails for your countdown campaign!

There are several guidelines you can follow to create effective countdown emails:

• Only use high-quality photos and illustrations.
• Use a single column layout to avoid visual clutter.
• Make sure your call to action is large and placed in a spot where subscribers will see it quickly.
• Use visual cues like arrows and people looking in a specific direction to direct subscribers’ attention to your call to action.
• Establish the details of your offer in the smallest possible number of words. People are more likely to read to the end if they can tell it will only take a minute.
• Use phrases like “buy now” and “don’t miss out” to increase the sense of urgency.
• Proofread everything, especially graphics! There’s nothing more embarrassing than misspelling a word in the banner at the top of your email.

You may also want to consider creating multiple personalized campaigns with segmentation. This is particularly useful if you sell a broad range of items since you can create targeted emails for people who have purchased similar items in the past.

4. Skip the countdown timer

A countdown timer is an animation displaying the amount of time until your offer runs out. These timers count down in real time so that subscribers will see the seconds ticking by as they read your offer. This adds a visual layer of urgency, as well as showing subscribers exactly how much time is left in your sale/event.

In the past, countdown timers were one of the most powerful tools email marketers had for time-sensitive promotions. Unfortunately, the Apple iOS 15 update means that countdown timers no longer work in emails sent to Apple devices. Considering that 34.2% of all emails being opened in Apple Mail, this means that countdown timers won’t work for a significant portion of your audience. And there’s nothing like a broken email to convince people to unsubscribe from your list.

So, to make sure your campaign works for everyone, skip the animated countdown.

5. Create a series of countdown images

Instead of an animated timer, you can create a series of countdown images to emphasize the urgency of your promotion. You won’t be able to tell users exactly how many minutes they have left to take action when they’re viewing the email, but you can share how many days there are between when you sent the email and when the promotion ends.

The easiest way to do this is to create a single image template, then save different versions of that image with different numbers. The image doesn’t have to be complicated, either. Something as simple as a black box with “2 days” written inside in white text can attract viewers’ attention and convey a sense of urgency.

Your other option is to create a wholly new image for each day of the countdown. This is a great choice if you’re promoting a sale on multiple products, since you can use an image of a different product in each countdown email.

Final thoughts on how to create a countdown email campaign

A countdown email campaign is one of the most powerful ways to create a sense of urgency and encourage sales within a specific time period.

To make the most of your countdown campaigns, remember four rules:

• Get specific about your goal. Make sure that your goal is ambitious but achievable by basing it on your stats from previous sales campaigns.
• Plan the structure of your email campaign. Make sure you have a “Countdown begins”, “Countdown is on”, and “Last call” email scheduled. Depending on the length of your campaign, you might want to create multiple “Countdown is on” emails, each focused on a different aspect of the sale/event you’re counting down to.
• Create your emails with care. Use only the highest quality images, write concise copy that emphasizes the value you’re offering your subscribers, and proofread everything, including graphics.
• Use a countdown timer. A countdown timer is a visual aid that increases the sense of urgency created by the campaign itself. There are many tools that let you create these timers for free.

So what are you waiting for? Start planning your first countdown email campaign today!

• The three things a newsletter landing page must do to be successful
• How to build a newsletter landing page, from planning to publication

When you’re finished reading, you’ll have all of the tools you need to start building a landing page for your newsletter.

Three keys to a successful newsletter landing page

A good newsletter landing page does three things:

1. Limit distractions

Your landing page should make it easy to subscribe to your newsletter and more difficult to do anything else. To accomplish this, many landing pages either minimize the site’s navigation menu or do away with it altogether, like the IT Showcase landing page shown below.

2. Explain your offer

A newsletter landing page should tell visitors what to expect when they sign up for your newsletter. This can be done through a combination of clear, direct copywriting and images of your newsletter or opt-in bonus.

3. Encourage action

Your newsletter landing page should make your signup form and/or subscribe button highly visible. The form itself should also be easy to use, with a minimal amount of required information. Visitors are more likely to take action when the steps to do so are readily apparent.

How to make a newsletter landing page with WordPress

Planning your newsletter landing page

To create an effective newsletter landing page, you’ll first need to get clear on what that landing page is supposed to do.

1. Get specific about your goals

The goal of a newsletter landing page is obviously to gain subscribers. If you want to be able to measure and improve upon your success, however, you’ll need to get more specific with that goal.

There are three types of goals you’ll need to set for your newsletter landing page:

• Visitor number. This is the number of visitors you hope to bring to your landing page.
• Subscription rate. This is the percentage of visitors you hope to turn into subscribers.
• Number of subscribers. This is the exact number of subscribers who sign up using the form on your landing page. For example, if you’re creating a limited-time landing page for a specific campaign, you might aim for 300 subscribers to sign up during the campaign.

The main thing to remember when setting these goals is that your goal number of subscribers should be relative to the number of people expected to see the page. For example, if you only expect 1,000 people to view your newsletter landing page in a given month, aiming for 800 subscribers per month sets you up to fail. In this case, a better number to aim for is 100 subscribers per month. At 10% of the visitor rate, this is still an ambitious goal, but it is possible for many brands.

2. Get clear about what you’re offering

The next thing you need to establish is what value you’ll be providing to subscribers who sign up through this landing page. There are a couple of things to consider here:

• Your regular newsletter content. What types of emails can people expect to receive from you? Sneak peeks at future products? Educational content? Opportunities to influence your future products or services?
• Your opt-in bonus. Is there a special gift users get when they sign up? If so, how does this gift benefit your visitors?

Knowing this up front will help you with the next two steps.

Creating your copy

The next step in how to create a newsletter landing page with WordPress is to write the text, or copy, for it.

3. Use copywriting techniques to create your landing page text

Copywriting is a type of writing that convinces users to take a specific action, typically a signup or a sale. There are several copywriting techniques you can use to create effective text for your landing page:

• Address visitors directly. Use the word “you” to directly engage with visitors. This also helps you create a conversational tone in your text.
• Emphasize the benefits people get for signing up. Will they get access to exclusive discounts? Educational or inspirational content? Opportunities to influence your brand? Tell them about it!
• Use urgent language. Words like “hurry” and “now”, as well as phrases like “don’t miss out”, encourage your visitors to take action right away.
• Don’t be afraid to break a few grammar rules. You’re creating a conversation between your brand and your visitors, not an academic paper. Your writing should reflect that, even if it means breaking a few rules.
• Create a highly specific call to action. Use a call to action that tells your visitors exactly what you want them to do, like “Sign up now”.

Most of all, don’t just use the first text that comes to mind. Play around with the wording of your original text, write a few alternate options, ask for input from your team if you have one. More often than not, you’ll find something better along the way.

4. Write a short, self-contained message to go “above the fold”

Make sure your first pitch, including the call to action, is short enough that you can display it in large text and still have it completely visible to users when the page loads. This encourages users to make quick decisions and reduces clutter on the screen.

In fact, many landing pages only include one or two sentences of text in the first area, like the landing page for i done this:

5. Consider writing a longer pitch to go “below the fold”

One common landing page strategy for winning over hesitant visitors is to use each successive screen to expand on what you’re offering visitors. The first area of the page contains a 2-3 sentence pitch and a call to action, followed by an area with 2-3 paragraphs explaining different aspects of your offer. Product/service landing pages often also have areas explaining different aspects of how their product works, but a newsletter can usually be fully explained in two panels.

Designing your page

Now that you’ve created your landing page copy, it’s time to learn how to create a newsletter landing page with WordPress.

6. Choose your color scheme

In most cases, a landing page should use your existing brand colors. However, you still need to figure out where these colors will be used. What color will be used in your header? What color do you want your landing page copy to be? What color can you use to make your call to action stand out from other content on the page?

You also want to remember that black and white can be used to great effect. Consider, for example, this landing page for Aesop Wines:

This page uses black and white to create contrast, with only a splash of color. You can go the other way, though, using colorful illustrations and only using black and white for your call to action.

7. Design your signup form

The final thing you’ll want to do before you start building your landing page is to create a unique signup form for it. This will make it easier to track how many people are actually signing up for your landing page. It’s also an opportunity to create something that really fits with your landing page.

As a MailPoet user, you can do this by going to MailPoet – Forms – Add New. This takes you to the signup form template library. There are templates available for every type of signup form. You can also choose to start with a blank form. Either way, since you’re working on a newsletter landing page, you’ll want to choose an embedded form that can be placed front and center on your page.

Next, you’ll be sent to the MailPoet form editor. This is where you can edit several aspects of your form:

• What list this form is for. You will need to specify this even if you only have one list.
• Where subscribers are sent. You can choose to either give new subscribers a simple thank-you message or to send them to a custom thank-you page.
• Background image. You can add a custom background image to your form.
• Background color. You can choose any color you want for the background of your form, including several color gradiant options.
• Font and message colors. You can also choose colors for the font, success message, and error messages.
• Required information. You can add information fields for first and last names. To find these blocks, press the blue “+” in the top left corner of the screen, then scroll down the block menu to the “Fields” area. You’ll note that MailPoet also lets you create custom information fields.
• Additional content. The MailPoet form editor lets you add most existing WordPress blocks to your signup form. This means you can add a header, regular text, or images to make your form more appealing.

When you’re happy with your form, click ‘Save’. The form will now be accessible through the MailPoet Subscription Form block in the WordPress block editor.

8. Choose a sidebar layout

It’s time to start making your page! Before adding any content, however, you’ll want to scroll to the bottom of the sidebar and choose a sidebar layout. Specifically, you’ll want to choose a layout with no sidebar in order to minimize distractions.

9. Optional: hide the menu and title

If you really want to minimize distractions, you can also hide the navigation menu. This will require minimal use of code, but the process is pretty simple:

• Open the page you want to work on in the WordPress editor.
• Grab the page ID from the address bar; this appears as “post=number”.
• In your CSS editor or the Simple Custom CSS plugin, enter the page ID and the CSS attribute, then use the code display:none. When you’re done, it should look something like this:

.page-id-101 nav#no-header-top-menu { display: none; }

Hiding the title is a similar process. Grab your page id and combine it with the following code:

.page-id-101 .entry-title {
display: none;
}

10. Add your content

With the basics of your page set up, the next step in how to create a newsletter landing page with WordPress is to add your text and any associated images. You can do this the same way you would add content to any other WordPress page: click on the page in the spot where you want to add a block, press the blue “+” button, and choose a block from the menu that appears.

As you add your content, keep some best practices in mind:

• Your signup form should be displayed above the fold
• Each screen of your landing page should include a unique call to action
• Use directional cues, like arrows or photos with people looking in a specific direction, to guide people’s eyes to your signup form and/or other calls to action
• Use contrasting colors to make your call to action highly visible
• Make sure all of your images are optimized to ensure fast loading speed
• Limit the amount of images and information on any given screen, giving users time and space to digest all of the information available
• Consider adding a slide-in form that appears when people scroll down the page

Most of all, take the time to design something you’re proud of. Your newsletter landing page will often be the first part of your site seen by new visitors. Make it something they’ll remember.

11. Optional: do A/B testing on your newsletter landing page

If you want to take your landing page to the next level, consider A/B testing. This type of testing involves running two or more slight variations of a landing page at the same time to determine which option receives the highest conversion rate. There are several A/B testing plugins you can use to run these tests directly on your WordPress site.

Final advice

Feeling intimidated by all of this advice on how to create a newsletter landing page with WordPress? Here are a few simple steps you can take to get started:

• Determine the goal of your landing page
• List every benefit subscribers get from your newsletter, including any opt-in bonuses
• Draft a one-paragraph pitch for your newsletter

And remember to save this article so you can come back to it when you’re ready for the next steps!

You might want to send email notifications to your blog’s subscribers when you publish a new post. Or, if you have multiple authors and you want to simplify your admin processes, you might want to send yourself post notification emails when someone publishes a post on your site.

Either way, we’ve got you covered because we’re going to cover everything you need to know about the best plugins and tools to send WordPress post notifications.

In this article, we’re going to cover plugins that help you send two different types of notifications:

1. Automatic email notifications to your blog’s subscribers when you publish a new post.
2. Admin notification emails to yourself (or your site’s editors, or really any registered users on your site).

You can click the links above to jump straight to the section for the type of plugin that you’re interested in. Or, just keep reading to learn about all of your options.

Ready to get started? Let’s dig in!

Two plugins to send WordPress post notifications to blog subscribers

If you want to send email post notifications to your subscribers, you’ll need a tool that can do two things:

1. Create an opt-in form that visitors can use to subscribe to your post notifications, along with a way to manage those subscribers.
2. Automatically send notifications when you publish a new post.

We’re going to showcase two tools that can help you do that:

1. MailPoet
2. Jetpack, via its Subscriptions feature

Both tools are easy-to-use and non-technical, but they have a pretty different approach – MailPoet offers the most flexibility and customizability, while Jetpack offers a really simple option for basic notifications.

Let’s go through them…

1. MailPoet

MailPoet is a full-service WordPress email plugin. It can help you:

• Send automatic post notification emails on a custom schedule. E.g. instant notifications for each post, a daily digest of all the posts that day, a weekly digest, and so on.
• Completely customize the email template for your post notifications using a drag-and-drop editor (or any other email templates that you use).
• Design custom email subscribe forms using the WordPress block editor.
• Manage subscribers via your dashboard, including separating them into different segments if needed.
• Send one-off emails in addition to your automatic post notifications.

That’s the main advantage of MailPoet – it’s a full email solution that also includes a built-in feature for automatic post notifications.

It’s the best option if you want the most flexibility for controlling the schedule of your notifications, customizing their design, and managing your subscribers (like sending different types of notifications to different segments of subscribers).

How MailPoet works

To help you collect subscribers, MailPoet lets you design email opt-in forms using pre-built templates and the WordPress block editor.

You’ll be able to manage all of your subscribers from your dashboard, including dividing them into different segments.

To set up post notifications, MailPoet includes a built-in feature to send automatic emails for your posts. You can send an email right away for every single post. Or, you can also set up daily, weekly, or monthly digests that include some or all of the posts that you’ve published in those timeframes:

Then, to control the actual content of your emails, you can use MailPoet’s drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates, including inserting merge tags for dynamic information (such as the name of the subscriber). 

The builder also includes dedicated widgets to dynamically insert content from your posts. You can choose how much content to include. For example, you could only display the post title or you could include the excerpt or full text.

Finally, MailPoet also includes its own built-in email sending service, which means that you can be confident your emails will make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.

For a detailed look at how to use MailPoet for post notifications, check out our full guide on how to send automatic WordPress post notification emails with MailPoet.

2. Jetpack Subscriptions

Compared to MailPoet, Jetpack’s Subscriptions feature is much less customizable. However, in some situations that might be exactly what you want!

Here are the limitations of Jetpack’s post notifications feature. You…

1. Can’t customize the design of the notification emails. You can choose whether to send an excerpt or the full text of a post, but that’s pretty much it.
2. Don’t get advanced tools to manage your subscriber lists. For example, you can’t create list segments.
3. Can’t send your own custom one-off emails. It only works for automatic post notifications.

But if you’re ok with those limitations, there are some definite positives to Jetpack post notifications:

1. It’s 100% free. Whether you have 100 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers, you won’t pay anything to send them post notifications.
2. It’s super simple. You pretty much just activate the feature, choose where to add your subscribe forms, and you never need to think about it again.
3. It works for comments, too. You can give subscribers the option to also get notified for new comments on posts that they’re following.

How Jetpack Subscriptions works

To set up Jetpack post notifications, you’ll need to install the Jetpack plugin and enable the Subscriptions feature. From there, there’s not much to configure.

Really the only thing that you must do is choose how to collect subscribers. You can create dedicated forms and/or you can add checkboxes to your comment forms that let readers subscribe to notifications when they leave a comment on your blog.

If you want to limit which types of content trigger notifications, you can use code filters to include/exclude certain categories of posts. There’s also a code filter that enables an option to enable/disable notification emails on a post-by-post basis.

To learn how it works, check out our full guide on using Jetpack Subscriptions for email post notifications.

Which tool should you use?

Again, both tools are easy to use, so your decision should really just come down to this:

• If you want the flexibility to customize the design for your post notifications, customize their schedule, and send other types of emails to your subscribers, use MailPoet.
• If you just want a really lightweight solution exclusively for post notifications and you don’t need to control the design of the email, you can use Jetpack Subscriptions.

For most people, we think that MailPoet is probably a better option because it offers more flexibility while still keeping things beginner-friendly.

However, if you’re fine with the limitations of Jetpack Subscriptions, it’s also a great solution for what it does.

Two plugins to send email post notifications to admins, editors, or other registered users

Above, we showed you some useful plugins to send WordPress post notifications to your readers. But as we mentioned in the introduction, there’s another type of post notification that can also be useful – sending notifications to yourself or your editorial team when there’s a new post.

If you have a multi-author blog or if you just generally publish a lot of content, setting up post notifications can help you stay on top of what’s going on with your site’s content.

These plugins can also help you send post notifications to your users. However, there’s a very key difference between these plugins and MailPoet/Jetpack – both of these plugins only let you send notification emails to people who are registered on your site.

As with the previous section, we’ll share two solutions that you can use here…

1. Better Notifications for WP

Better Notifications for WP is the most popular plugin at WordPress.org for setting up custom WordPress alert emails.

It lets you set up email alerts for a variety of different actions, but we’re going to focus on the post notifications.

When you set up your notification, you can choose from different actions related to your posts. For example, you can send a notification email when a post is…

• Published
• Updated
• Submitted as pending review
• Scheduled
• Moved to trash
• Made private

To control who receives the notification emails, you can either select entire user roles or choose specific usernames.

Then, to control the content of your emails, you can either use the WYSIWYG Classic editor or format the email as plain text.  You’ll also be able to use lots of merge tags to insert dynamic information related to the post, such as the title, URL, author, and so on.

With the premium version, you’ll get more advanced conditional controls. For example, you could only send alerts for posts with certain…

• Categories
• Tags
• Authors
• Post formats
• Terms

By default, the plugin sends its alerts using the regular WordPress mail function. However, to improve reliability, you could pair it with MailPoet by enabling MailPoet’s built-in feature to send transactional emails.

Or, it also works with SMTP plugins and services, including SendGrid and Mailgun.

The free version of the plugin works for basic post notifications. For more advanced features, bundles start at $129.

2. Notification

Notification is another popular option that lets you set up your own custom post notification emails (along with notifications for other types of activity on your site).

When you set up the notification, you can choose from a variety of different actions for your posts. You can send a notification when a post is…

• Published
• Updated
• Saved as a draft
• Set for review
• Scheduled
• Trashed

When you choose who should receive the notification email, you can choose from different user roles, choose specific usernames, or enter any email address.

You can also fully customize the text of the email using the WYSIWYG Classic editor, including using merge tags to insert dynamic information, such as the name of the post and its URL:

With the premium version, you’ll also be able to add conditional logic, such as only sending a notification for posts with a specific category, tag, author, and so on.

You can send basic post notifications with the free version of the plugin at WordPress.org. To unlock the conditional rules and other advanced features, the premium version starts at $99.

Which Tool Should You Use?

For basic WordPress post notifications, both tools are pretty equal so you should be fine with either.

If you need more advanced features, such as only sending notifications for posts in certain categories, the Notification plugin is a bit cheaper for that specific feature (though there are other feature differences between the premium plugins that might push you in one direction or another).

Get started with WordPress post notifications today

Whether you want to send WordPress post notifications to your readers or to your site management team, you can find some great plugins that make it easy to set up.

If you want to send automatic post notifications to your readers, we showcased two great options that work in different ways:

• MailPoet – this is the best option if you want the ability to customize when to send your emails, the content/design of your emails, which segments of users should receive notifications, and so on. You’ll also be able to send other emails beyond post notifications. Check out the full MailPoet guide.
• Jetpack Subscriptions – this can be a good option if you just want a very simple way to send notifications and only notifications. It does have some notable limitations that we discussed above, but if you’re fine with those limitations, it’s a very easy way to implement post notifications (and it’s 100% free). Check out the full Jetpack Subscriptions guide.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a way to send post notifications to yourself, your editors, or other types of registered users on your site, then you might be better off with the other two plugins that we featured – Better Notifications for WP or Notification. 

You can also pair the two types of plugins. For example, you could use MailPoet to send notifications to your readers and Better Notifications for WP to send notifications to your editorial staff.

The cool thing about this combination is that you can still use MailPoet’s built-in sending service to deliver the notification emails that Better Notifications for WP sends – just make sure to enable MailPoet’s transactional email feature.

Do you still have any questions about sending post notifications on WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

Email list churn, or decay, is a real problem, with many lists losing 25-50% of subscribers in a year.

Beyond people unsubscribing (“transparent churn”), which is easy to track, you might also have people who churn because they stop engaging with your emails (“opaque churn”), which can be much more difficult to track because these people are still technically “subscribed”.

By sending re-engagement emails, you have a chance to win back those unengaged subscribers and get them to start opening and clicking your emails again.

Or, at the very least, you’ll be able to accurately clean your lists of unengaged subscribers who stopped opening emails but haven’t unsubscribed.

Basically, it’s a win either way, so it’s definitely worth putting in the time to learn how re-engagement emails work.

In this post, we’re going to make that easy for you because we’re going to go over all the important details:

• What re-engagement emails are
• Why re-engagement emails are important
• Best practices for sending re-engagement emails, along with real-life examples
• How to easily start sending re-engagement emails with MailPoet

What is a re-engagement email?

A re-engagement email is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

It’s an email (or often a sequence of emails) that’s designed to re-engage subscribers who have stopped engaging with your regular emails, as measured by engagement metrics such as click rate, open rate (if available), and so on.

In a perfect world, every single subscriber would open every single email and click on every single call to action.

But in the real world, it’s easy for subscribers to start tuning you out.

There are a lot of reasons why people might stop engaging. Some of those reasons are things that you could maybe improve on while others are just totally out of your hands. Here are some examples:

• You send too many emails and people are tuning them out.
• Your emails aren’t relevant to what the subscriber is interested in.
• Your subscribers’ inboxes are packed full of emails from other brands.
• Your subscribers really are interested in what you offer, but they’ve been really busy lately and kind of just forgot about you.
• …you get the idea.

Re-engagement emails are emails that are designed to win back these unengaged subscribers and get them interested in what you have to offer again. For that reason, you’ll also see these types of emails called win-back emails.

Or, for some reason, you’ll find lots of people calling these emails The Divine Jackfruit. It really is a thing, though we’re not sure why. We’re going to stick with “re-engagement email” in this post.

Why are re-engagement emails important?

Having a large percentage of unengaged subscribers on your email lists can be bad for a couple of reasons:

• You can reduce your sender reputation if you’re constantly sending emails to people who don’t engage with them (or have marked you as spam).
• Your costs are higher because that subscriber is taking up space on your list. Most email marketing services bill you based on the number of subscribers that you have, so unengaged subscribers are just wasting money and forcing you to pay for a more expensive plan.

Most importantly, if you’re selling products or services, it’s generally easier to re-engage an existing customer than it is to find a new customer, so you could be leaving money on the table by not trying to connect with these people.

Re-engagement emails and Apple’s iOS 15 update

To complicate matters further, it’s also becoming more difficult to actually figure out whether subscribers are even engaged in the first place. This is thanks to some privacy-focused changes that Apple made to email tracking in iOS 15.

We have a whole post on how the iOS 15 update affects email marketing, but here are the basic ideas:

• It’s difficult to accurately track open rates for people using Apple Mail, so it can be hard to tell whether or not people are opening your emails. You can still see if people click in the email, but you can’t track if Apple users open the email without clicking. This makes it hard to rely on open rates alone as a metric for engaged subscribers.
• Apple has made it easy for people to hide their real email addresses by letting them create unique, disableable emails that forward to their actual address. Subscribers could have disabled the dummy email without bothering to unsubscribe, which means it’s impossible to tell whether they’re still receiving emails from you.

So, in addition to winning back subscribers, re-engagement email campaigns can also help you verify that people really are engaged in a post-iOS 15 world.

Re-engagement emails are a win-win

To sum up, re-engagement emails are definitely a win-win situation.

If your re-engagement email succeeds in winning back a subscriber, that’s a success because your list now has more engaged subscribers. This is the ideal scenario and, hopefully, your emails work to win back every single unengaged subscriber.

But even if your re-engagement emails don’t win back every single subscriber, it’s still a win because you can now feel confident in deleting those subscribers from your list.

Sure, it’s not as much of a win as re-engaging a subscriber, but at least you’ll now have a cleaner list, reduced sending costs, more accurate analytics, and a better sender reputation.

Nine best practices for sending re-engagement emails (plus real examples!)

Now that you know what re-engagement emails are, let’s go over some re-engagement email best practices that you should consider when you’re setting up these campaigns.

Along with this, we’ll share some real-life re-engagement email examples from brands implementing these best tactics. That way, you’ll have some inspiration to go along with the best practices.

Then, in the next section, we’ll show you how you can actually set up your re-engagement emails in MailPoet using MailPoet’s new re-engagement campaign type.

1. Define when subscribers are “unengaged” and create segments

The first step in sending re-engagement campaigns is to make sure you’ve accurately set up your segments so that you really are only sending emails to unengaged customers.

That brings up an important question:

How do you define what an unengaged subscriber is? Is it someone who hasn’t engaged with an email in a week? A month? Two months? A year?

Well, there’s no single “right” answer here, but most experts recommend using around one or two months as the bare minimum of when to consider a subscriber “unengaged”. You’ll also see people recommend longer periods such as six months or even up to a year.

If you’re using MailPoet, the new re-engagement campaign type makes it easy to automatically target subscribers who haven’t engaged in a certain period of time. All you do is choose the cutoff and MailPoet will handle everything else for you (more on this below).

If you’re using a different email marketing service, you’ll need to see if that tool offers something similar or you might need to manually create segments or tags to target unengaged subscribers.

2. Send a sequence rather than a standalone email

As a general guideline, re-engagement emails are generally best sent in a sequence rather than a single email, though this isn’t a hard rule.

Most experts recommend sending about 3-4 emails as part of your sequence but feel free to adjust this to your site’s specific needs.

You typically want the emails to build on one another. So you might start with just a nudge and end with a clear email that tells people they’ll be removed from the list if they don’t engage (in a nice way, of course).

3. Offer an incentive (if applicable)

One great way to win back unengaged subscribers is to sweeten the deal with some type of incentive.

If you have an eCommerce store or sell any type of products or services, the obvious incentive is a sale or discount. You could give them a special coupon with the goal of enticing them back to make another purchase.

GoDaddy isn’t doing anything fancy in this email – just a straight-up “bribe” to keep people engaged:

For informational sites, you could offer some special content upgrade if they re-engage or maybe a free course.

Note – we’ve sourced this example, and many of our other re-engagement email examples, from the excellent Really Good Emails website.

4. Reinforce your value

If someone took the effort to sign up to your list in the first place, they probably have at least some interest in what you have to offer.

That means a re-engagement email can be a good spot to reinforce those values that convinced them to subscribe in the first place.

If they think you’re not living up to your values, this might not work. But a lot of people might’ve just naturally forgotten about you in their busy inboxes so reminding them why they signed up can be a great strategy to generate interest again.

This email from Airbnb does a great job of convincing potential hosts to re-engage by highlighting their potential earnings. Most people host on Airbnb for the money, so Airbnb is reinforcing that benefit by including the average earnings in the email:

5. Highlight new benefits/values (if applicable)

If you’ve added new value or benefits recently, another great win-back strategy is to showcase these new features so that subscribers can see that they’re now getting more than they were when they originally signed up.

For example, maybe you recently launched a new feature that you think people will love. Or, maybe you launched a new course that you think people might be interested in.

You could send a re-engagement email that highlights the value of your new offerings with the hopes that it will win back your subscribers.

Here, Clear does a good job of highlighting that they’ve improved their service since the subscriber last engaged, so it might be worth another look:

6. Add some FOMO

FOMO stands for fear of missing out. It’s a pretty powerful motivator because, let’s be honest, no one wants to miss out on cool stuff that’s happening to other people!

If someone unsubscribes from your list, they’ll quite literally be missing out on what you have to offer. So – don’t be afraid to put a little fear into them – in a friendly way, of course!

The way that Other Goose phrases this re-engagement email is a great way to do things – “Click Here to Restore Access”:

Without being negative, Other Goose makes it seem like subscribers will be missing out on something they’ve been enjoying (access) if they don’t re-engage.

7. Let people optimize their experience

In some situations, it might not be that subscribers aren’t interested in hearing anything from you; it might just be that they don’t want to hear everything from you.

That is, they might only be interested in certain types of content that you send, which is why they generally aren’t engaging with the other content.

One useful strategy here is to create segments or lists that let people subscribe to specific interests. Then, you can use your re-engagement campaign to give people the chance to update their interests.

For example, take this email from Matt D’Avella. This email isn’t technically a re-engagement email, but it demonstrates this principle very well. 

Matt launched a YouTube course that he was marketing to his regular lists. Personally, I’m interested in his regular emails, but I’m never planning to create a YouTube channel, so I didn’t find these specific emails to be very engaging. That’s why it’s nice that Matt adds an easy option at the top to stop receiving emails about his YouTube courses:

By giving me this option to customize what emails I receive, Matt keeps me engaged with his other content and opening his other emails. 

If you give your subscribers the same choices, you can keep them engaged with the content that they like.

8. Play around with emotion

If it fits your branding, incorporating emotion into your re-engagement emails can be a fun way to connect with customers.

Typically, most brands will go with the “sad” angle when adding emotions.

For example, Duolingo, the language learning app, is already pretty playful with its cartoon owl. In their re-engagement emails, Duolingo plays things up further by having the owl crying and standing in a puddle of tears:

Google Local Guides does something similar with a cute sad dog:

Does this approach work if you’re Salesforce (or another B2B company)? Probably not. But in B2C markets or industries where you have a close connection with your followers, this type of emotion can be a great strategy.

9. Make it easy for subscribers to opt out

In some cases, people might just really not be interested in receiving emails from you anymore. That’s ok – you can’t please everyone!

In these situations, no amount of quality copywriting and email best practices will convince them to engage.

So, rather than annoying these people, make it easy for them to remove their email from your list.

As an example of this, you can check out one of MailPoet’s re-engagement email templates, which includes a clear option for people to unsubscribe right away:

Speaking of MailPoet…

How to set up re-engagement emails in MailPoet

Now that you know all of the best practices for re-engagement emails, let’s talk about how you can set up these types of campaigns using MailPoet.

In MailPoet version 3.74.2 (released in late 2021), we added a brand new re-engagement email type designed to make it easy to run your own re-engagement campaigns. 

Instead of trying to manually set up your own custom engagement tracking, all you need to do is choose the time to consider a subscriber unengaged, customize your email using MailPoet’s builder, and you’re ready to go.

Here’s how it works…

1. Create a new engagement email and choose timing

To begin, go to MailPoet → Emails and click the Set up button under the new Re-engagement Emails option:

On the next screen, you can choose when you want to send the email.

The default setting is to send the email five months after a subscriber has had no activity, which is a good starting point for most sites. 

However, you can also adjust this number higher or lower as needed. You can also set the timing in weeks instead of months.

2. Customize your email template

On the next screen, you can choose from MailPoet’s premade re-engagement email templates. 

When we’re writing this guide, there are two different templates:

• Confirm your interest or unsubscribe – people have two options. They can click the button to stay subscribed to your list or click the link to unsubscribe right away.
• Confirm interest before deactivation – the template only highlights one option to stay subscribed. There’s still an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, but it isn’t highlighted in the body.

Once you choose a template for your starting point, you’ll be able to fully customize its content using MailPoet’s visual builder:

When you’re happy with the design, click Next to advance to the final settings page.

3. Activate your re-engagement campaign

On the last screen, you’ll be able to perform a few final housekeeping steps.

For example, you can choose one or more lists to target with this re-engagement campaign. You could use the same re-engagement email for all of your lists or you could create unique re-engagement campaigns for different lists – it’s totally up to you.

Once you’re happy with the settings here, click the Activate button to make your re-engagement campaign live:

Now, MailPoet will automatically send your re-engagement emails to people who meet your inactivity condition. You won’t need to lift another finger and you’ll be able to enjoy cleaner, more accurate lists.

If you want to create multiple re-engagement emails in a sequence, you can repeat the same steps above to create another email with different timing.

How to manage your re-engagement emails

If you ever want to disable or edit your re-engagement emails, you can go to MailPoet → Emails → Re-engagement emails.

You can use the Status toggle to quickly enable or disable a campaign and you can hover over an email and click Edit to adjust its content and settings:

Get started with re-engagement emails today!

If you want to maximize your email marketing efforts, re-engagement emails are an important tactic to implement.

There’s really no downside to sending them.

If you manage to win back an unengaged subscriber, that’s just as much of a win as getting a new subscriber in the first place.

And even if you don’t succeed in winning back all your subscribers, you’ll at least be able to clean your lists of people who really have no interest in what you offer. That means lowered costs, improved sending reputation, and more accurate engagement analytics.

After Apple’s iOS 15 update, re-engagement emails are even more important because of how Apple has made it harder for email marketers to track accurate open data and easier for people to hide their real email addresses.

Best of all, sending re-engagement emails isn’t complex or time-consuming. With MailPoet’s new re-engagement email type, you can easily set up your own re-engagement emails in minutes by following the tutorial above.

If you’re already using MailPoet, set up your first re-engagement email campaign to try it out.

And if you’re not using MailPoet yet, head to the MailPoet homepage to learn more about how MailPoet can help you achieve your email marketing goals without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

Do you still have any questions about re-engagement emails or how to use MailPoet’s new re-engagement email type? Let us know in the comments!

Email blasting, where you send one big “blast” to all of your subscribers, is no longer your best option. You’ll get a better return on your marketing efforts by segmenting your email list into multiple groups based on certain subscriber attributes, and sending targeted, personalized messages to your contacts.

Statistics show that email segmentation is well worth the effort. According to Hubspot, marketers using email segmentation saw as much as a 760% increase in revenue. And, segmentation is catching on. As of 2020, one survey found that 78% of email marketers are using personalization and segmentation in their emails. Subscribers are much more likely to convert when companies take the time to communicate with them in a more targeted way.

So how do you segment a big email list (“big” means lists with at least 2000 subscribers)? It’s not as complex as you might think. In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know to get started with email segmentation. Plus, you’ll learn how to create your first segmented email list with MailPoet.

What is email segmentation?

Email segmentation is about breaking your one big email list into meaningful and useful segments based on different criteria. It’s also about more effectively engaging different groups of subscribers by sending them emails that speak to their interests and habits, rather than trying to appeal to everyone with a single message. 

Typically, segmentation is used as a personalization tactic for delivering more relevant email marketing to subscribers based on data specific to them, including:

• Actions within an email and on your website
• Purchase history
• Geographic location
• Age
• Gender

For example, say you run an online store selling home improvement products and services and have a sale offering a 20% discount to anyone who spends over $100. You could create a segment of your list that includes everyone who has spent $75 or more, and send emails to that list promoting the sale. 

By sending that email only to people who have proven that they are willing to spend more, you target the subscribers that are most likely to take advantage of your offer. By then tailoring the subject line and messaging to fit that particular group, you’ll further increase your conversion rates.

Email segmentation can help your business or organization stay relevant, even with a subscriber base that has constantly changing interests and needs. That’s the best part about segmentation — depending on the email platform you use, it’s usually automated so the segmenting is taken care of for you.

Why email segmentation works

No matter how good your emails are, if your content is generic, your subscribers are eventually going to tune out. With targeted subject lines and content that appeals to segmented lists, you can deliver emails that each slice of your audience is genuinely interested in. That’s a recipe for improved click-through rates, conversions, and higher email deliverability.

1. Increase click-through rates

You’ve probably spent hours crafting your emails and perfecting your topics, copy, images, and call to action (CTA). But what good is an amazing email if no one opens it?

Using list segmentation, you can craft subject lines tailored to specific groups to better entice them to open your emails. For subscribers who get a ton of emails in their inbox every day, a unique and relevant subject line is key when trying to get their attention.

Now, because of the Apple iOS 15 update in the fall of 2021, open rate data is much less trustworthy than it used to be. So, you have to measure campaign success using other metrics, such as click-through rates, number of sales, or total profits. This makes email segmentation more important than ever because people only click on emails that are relevant to them.

But you still need subscribers to open your emails if they’re going to engage with your message, and a well-crafted subject line that speaks to that email segment is more likely to get opened.

Segmentation allows you to create email content that caters to groups of subscribers — such as people who live in a certain part of the city, or retired couples, or women, or combinations of all of these. It enables you to send content that is relevant to the needs and interests of that group.

2. Decrease unsubscribes

Why do people unsubscribe from emails? Most of the time, it’s because a brand starts flooding their inbox with emails that either don’t apply to them or that they’re just not interested in. 

A MarketingSherpa survey found that 26% of people unsubscribe because they get too many emails in general, 21% unsubscribe because the email isn’t relevant, and 17% unsubscribe because the email content is boring or repetitive.

With email segmentation, you can tackle all these problems and decrease unsubscribes, because each person on your list will probably be getting fewer overall emails from your company, and more of those emails will cater to their interests. 

3. Increase conversions

Focus on your best customers by sending targeted emails to engaged subscribers. An engaged subscriber is someone who has recently made a purchase from a previous email campaign, regularly browses your website, or frequently clicks through from your emails. When you send personalized content to an engaged subscriber, together with compelling copy and a strong call to action, you’re more likely to catch them in a moment when they’re ready to buy.

For example, you could email customers who’ve previously shopped a certain category of products in your WooCommerce store and let them know you’re running a sale. Since the customer has already shown a strong interest in your store, they’ll be more likely to come back to make another purchase. 

4. Avoid spam filters

Many legitimate senders end up hitting spam filters because they send generic, irrelevant content that subscribers ignore and delete. When you send emails to inactive subscribers too often, email service providers like Gmail pick up on that and start automatically sending your emails directly to spam boxes.

With email segmentation, you can send personalized content that your subscribers are more likely to open — and want to open — every time they see your emails in their inbox. 

Why email personalization matters

Personalization has become a huge focus in digital marketing, so much so that when something isn’t personalized, it’s jarring.

Have you ever received an email from a company offering a discount for a product after already buying it, or gotten marketing messages about services that you have absolutely no interest in? 

These are coming from companies that have poorly segmented email lists, or lists that haven’t been segmented at all. If that’s what you’re doing, your subscribers can feel it. And if you persist in using that approach, you’re almost begging people to unsubscribe from your list because you’re sending them content they don’t care about.

Here are a few basic attributes that are often used to segment email lists:

• User role (i.e. the subscriber’s role on your WordPress site)
• Purchase history (type of product, specific product, number of orders, or total amount spent)
• Interests
• Geographic location
• Age
• Gender
• Date of subscription
• Email actions (like click-throughs or not clicking)

There are many more ways you can segment your email list. These are just some examples to help you get started. 

Obviously, the more information you collect about your subscribers, the more opportunities you have to segment your list and personalize your emails so they resonate with the right audiences.

Once upon a time, personalization meant simply including a person’s first name using a merge tag provided by your email platform. Now, email personalization has evolved into a much more powerful marketing tool, reliant on sending the right email to the right person at the right time.

An example of bad email segmentation

Sometimes it’s important to know how not to do something. A prime example of this is an email from TripAdvisor:

This subscriber hadn’t used TripAdvisor in years. They immediately unsubscribed because the email was irrelevant to them.

Examples of good email segmentation

Here’s a fun example of segmentation in the form of a cart abandonment email:

This email was triggered based on subscriber behavior — in this case, leaving a pillow in the shopping cart while browsing the Casper website — and encourages the recipient to come back and complete their purchase. The testimonial further reinforces the value of the product with some social proof.

This email from Harry & David quickly identifies itself as being sent only to loyal customers, so it was likely segmented by purchase history. The subject line was, “Exclusively for you – an offer from the president of Harry & David,” which compels the subscriber to open because it puts them in a special category.

Following the compelling subject line, the email begins by reinforcing that this offer really is only for loyal customers. And then it sells the pears, the holidays, and a one-day-only special offer that includes shipping. 

Getting started with email segmentation

Segmentation can offer enormous benefits for your email marketing, as we’ve explored. But getting started can be daunting — multiple segments mean more work creating content, right?

While it does mean you’ll have to put in more effort when sending out emails, the return on investment (ROI) is definitely worth it. And with some planning and automation, you can even set some of your emails to run on autopilot.

These four steps will help get you started segmenting your email list:

1. Check what kind of segmentation your email platform allows

All email platforms are different and will offer different options for how you can segment your email lists.

With MailPoet, you can segment your subscribers based on:

• WordPress user roles
• Email actions (clicked links)
• Active subscriptions (using WooCommerce Subscriptions)
• Subscriber date
• Custom fields
• WooCommerce: Purchased this Product
• WooCommerce: First Purchase
• WooCommerce: Purchased in this Category
• WooCommerce: Abandoned Cart Emails
• WooCommerce: total spent
• WooCommerce: customer country

With these segments, you can really get creative with your emails. Send emails to subscribers who clicked on any link in your last newsletter. Target shoppers who recently bought a dress (and cross-sell them that perfect pair of boots to match). Send a personalized email to contacts who didn’t click on your last email and offer them an incentive to visit your site.

2. Collect subscriber data

Now that you know what kind of data your email platform can handle, you need to start gathering it because you can’t create segments without it.

Think about what kind of information is going to be most useful for your marketing strategy. Would it be helpful to sort subscribers by gender or age? Maybe you’d like to know what country they live in so you can let customers know about seasonal sales. There’s no point telling customers in Australia about a winter sale in January when it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere!

Consider what information you’re already collecting about your subscribers. Obviously, you’ve got their email address, but are you asking for first and last names?

Then you’ll need to think about how to collect any additional data you need. This might involve editing your sign-up form to ask subscribers for more personal details, or even sending out a survey and adding that information to your email list.

For segments based on behavior like clicks and purchases, you simply need to activate triggers in your marketing journeys that automatically place subscribers into segments based on their actions. 

3. Create your segments

Once you’ve got your data, you can start segmenting your email list. How you do this will depend on your email service provider. With MailPoet, you can create a segment by going to Lists → Segments. 

Give your segment a name (e.g. inactive users) and a description (e.g. subscribers who didn’t click on last week’s newsletter), then choose your segment (e.g. Choose “Email” from the first drop-down and then “Not clicked” from the second dropdown). 

Then you need to select the last newsletter.

Now, you can target subscribers who didn’t click on the last newsletter and maybe send it to them again with a new subject line, or even send them a new email in case they missed the message and you want them to see it before it’s no longer relevant.

What’s great about conditional email list segmentation is that it’s usually automated. So when a subscriber meets your conditions for a segment, they will be automatically added to it. This means there’s no extra work on your part to maintain the segment after it’s created.

4. Create your email content

Once you’ve built your segments, you can start creating personalized content for them.

If you have a WooCommerce store, you could create cross-sell emails that target people who already made a purchase. If you blog about multiple topics — both travel and food — send an email with your top recipes just to people who indicated they’re foodies.

Don’t worry about creating a complex drip campaign or an entire set of emails. Start with just one message to a single segment and go from there.

Don’t forget to extend your personalization to the subject line. The whole point of segmentation is to drive higher engagement. The emails need to get opened. And research has shown that personalized subject lines get opened more often.

5. Offer a choice of lists in your signup form

If your WordPress site covers many topics, or if you have a lot of content, you’re a prime candidate for allowing your subscribers to choose which of your email lists they would like to subscribe to.

For example, if you’re selling home improvement materials, you could have two lists — one for DIY tips and one for news regarding your latest products:

Another example is news websites. Some people may want to receive your post notifications daily; others weekly, So provide frequency options on your subscription form.

Wrapping up

Once your email segments are up and running, make sure to track and measure how your subscribers are interacting with your content. You’ll want to know what they’re clicking on and what kinds of content they’re engaging with. This knowledge will help you improve future email campaigns.

The important thing to remember about email segmentation is that your subscribers are unique — they come from different backgrounds, have different interests, and will engage with your business or organization in different ways. With segmentation, you can create personalized messages for your segments that will ultimately boost your click-through rates and score you more conversions.