My email strategy for 2024: focus on the 20% of tactics that have the power to drive 80% of your results. I share those tactics here.
This content was first published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 01.14.2024.
Most marketing activities follow the Pareto principle: 80% of your upside will come from 20% of your decisions and tactics. Email is similar. I see a lot of hand-wringing over segmentation strategies, flows and testing. If your brand is doing under $30M a year in sales, that is wasted effort.
I’m going to share a select list of first principles and critical tactics that will actually make you money from email in 2024.
Email Marketing First Principles
Your email file = a microcosm of your customer file.
What does this mean? If your email performance is in the pooper, it’s probably a sign of larger issues with your business as a whole. The exception would be technical issues like deliverability.
If you want to fix your email problems, you probably have to fix your business first. “Optimization” can slow counteract the bleeding…for a little while. But it won’t heal the wound.
From a strategic standpoint, the microcosm concept means that there are certain principles that govern how your subscriber base behaves. Work with these principles and grow:
- Recency is important. Many prospects tune out after 24-48 hours, even if they don’t subscribe. Customers who subscribe tune out after 7-14 days if the content isn’t relevant.
- Your loyalists = your most engaged/reactive audience. They’re probably 20% of your subs and 80% of your attributed revenue. Therefore, their preferences dominate file-wide test results, which can become a red herring.
- Acquisition is essential. Very few of your new subscribers become long time engaged subscribers. If you want the file to grow, you need to keep subscriber acquisition constant or growing.
There Are Only 2 Email Strategies
You can manage your email file in one of two ways: you can treat email like an advertising impression, or you can treat it like a communications channel. Think: running Meta ads vs managing a Facebook community.
If you’re running email like Meta ads, you want to get the most “impressions” in front of the most people. You design your emails to look like ads (product focused, lots of offers, urgency triggers) and then you send out a lot of emails.
The “apex” of this strategy = brands who send 3-5 emails per day to the entire list (or close to the entire list). Every email you send increases the odds that someone will open their inbox the moment you send it, open the email, click and convert. The content of the email is almost irrelevant.
If you’re running email like a Facebook community, you’re trying to keep the list engaged. You do this with a good circulation strategy, but the most important lever is content. You need to develop content that the audience finds helpful and/or entertaining. This often means plain text emails.
Brands that commit to this strategy become good at copywriting. The written content of the email is incredibly important; design is less so. Popular info product brands execute this strategy well, as do many supplement companies or more traditional “direct response” brands.
Both of these strategies eventually run into the same wall w/r/t revenue growth: the size of the list. Eventually you optimize your strategy up to the very edge of the asymptote. The only way to grow meaningfully is to jump onto another curve aka grow the list.
You can make money from either strategy, but you have to “whole ass it” (as Ron Swanson would say). If you’re going all-in on “personalization” without an investment in customer research and copywriting, you’re not whole-assing it. If you’re sending three emails a day but letting your brand team dictate the calendar, you’re not whole-assing it.
Email Marketing “Table Stakes” Checklist For 2024
Before you start testing new, wacky ideas, make sure you have all of these basics covered going into 2024:
Google Email Deliverability Changes: I’m not going to get into the weeds here, but these changes are going into effect in February 2024. This post has a good breakdown of the specifics, and what you’ll need to do about them.
Good Tech & Processes: If it takes two months and five figures to set up something simple on your ESP like a post-purchase flow…get yourself a new ESP. Do it now. Find a way to exit your contract. You need an ESP that integrates seamlessly with your eCom platform.
Similarly, if you’re building most of your emails in Photoshop and slicing them…stop. This is wildly inefficient. It makes you focus on things that don’t matter. And it will sabotage your ability to move quickly or personalize content. More on this here.
Table Stakes Flows: Make sure you have these flows set up: welcome, post-purchase, “at risk”, abandoned cart. That’s all you really need. FYI, an at risk flow speaks to customers who are approaching their predicted next order date but have not purchased yet. Klaviyo has a predictive attribute for this date, or you can use an average.
Circulation Strategy: Make sure you’re emailing your list at least three to five times per week. If you’re only selling a single product, you’ll have to lean more on education and brand-related content.
Don’t over-segment your list. You should limit your core sending pool to “engaged” subscribers i.e. folks who have clicked an email in the last 3-6 months. If anyone in this pool is getting fewer than three emails per week, you’re probably over-segmenting.
In larger, more complex businesses, you’ll often see segmentation strategies where emails about category A are only sent to buyers or browsers of category A. That is a missed opportunity; email is a low cost channel for introducing your customers to new products or different parts of the assortment.
Engagement Testing & Flows: When your subscribers stop opening and clicking your emails it’s hard to get them re-engaged. At this point, they’re likely to forget about you, even if they don’t unsubscribe.
You should have tactics in place to “save” some of these subscribers before they churn completely. You might test different subject lines, sending cadences and offers. Target interaction points that occur before a user opens an email.
Then take the successful tactics and automate them. Ex. if a subscriber hasn’t opened an email in X days, put them into a segment or flow where the winning tactics are executed.
5 High Priority Email Growth Tactics For 2024
I used to be very much against “aggressive” emailing. But most brands don’t follow the “email as a Facebook community” strategy. So aggressive emailing is the best way to maximize the value of the list. These tactics reflect that POV:
Add A Survey To Your Email Popup: Forget an email -> phone number capture in your popup; collecting SMS here is a waste of time. Instead, ask one question that will help you understand which pain points or motivations yield the highest quality customers.
How to use this: customize the first emails in the Welcome series based on the response to the survey question. This converts more subs. Then, track which survey answer(s) result in more, higher value conversions. Use this info to inform your acquisition marketing.
The Jones Road Beauty site has a good example of how this type of popup can work. FormToro enables multi-question popups, segmentation and analytics if you’re ready to go all in on this approach.
Aggressive Welcome Series: A lot of folks who complete your email capture pop-up are high intent buyers looking for a discount. They’ll either convert within 24 hours of signing up, or disengage. If they haven’t converted within a week, most will tune out completely.
You need to maximize your opportunity here: send 2-3 emails within the first 24 hours of opt-in. Push the popup offer and create a sense of urgency. Then progress to your ~softer~ storytelling content.
Getting the most out of your welcome series is important because its one of the few ways that email/retention marketers can contribute to customer and subscriber acquisition. And that’s your biggest lever for email revenue.
Send More Plain Text Email: It’s a combo breaker, which gets your subscribers’ attention. It tends to have better deliverability. And you can prompt readers to reply to the email, which further improves your deliverability.
I like to use plain text email in flows, especially in scenarios where a note from your employees or founder could enhance the message. I also like using plain text to introduce “early access” for sales or other events. It amplifies the response.
Talk To Your Prospects/New Customers: Your loyal customers are going to be the “loudest” segment of your email file–they’re more likely to open/click any given email you send. For that reason, their preferences will dominate any testing you run.
But if you want to grow the file, you have to turn prospects into buyers, and you have to keep your new customers engaged. To do that, you’ll need to develop content that specifically appeals to this segment.
Simple framework: prospects/newbies need to know what you can do for them. They don’t care about your Facebook group, they don’t care about the exclusive collab you just launched. They probably want to know more about your hero product and why it matters.
Test best sellers, educational content, or content that has worked as paid social landing pages. Above all, make it about them.
Test Direct Mail: Most brands do not run their email list like a Facebook group. For that reason, most of your subscribers will be looking for one thing: sales and promotions.
If you’re a brand that constantly runs promos, you’ll have an engaged list. If you’re a brand that only runs limited promos, you run the risk of heavy subscriber churn. With Google’s new deliverability rules coming into play, it’s riskier to mail unengaged subscribers, especially if you only do it during 2-4 “peak” moments each year.
If there is an event that you know converts existing customers at high rates, test a direct mail postcard for unengaged subscribers and L6-12M customers not opted into email.
Is this more expensive than email? Yeah. Is it getting harder and harder to keep an email list engaged without a content-driven strategy? Also yeah.
This is one of the true “low hanging fruit” retention opportunities available to most brands. You can either invest major resources in keeping your audience engaged via organic channels, or you can pay a small toll to speak with them at critical moments.
The best thing about direct mail? It’s easy to run a holdout test to determine how much incremental revenue you’re driving.
That’s All Folks! Everything you need to get the most out of email in 2024. You can do more, but if you are a brand doing <$30M/year in revenue, I’d focus on customer acquisition instead.