Email marketing continues to be the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to getting the best ROI on your marketing activities. Email is consistently the high performing, conversion-making, brand-strengthening part of any smart marketer’s toolbox.
Are you thinking, “I’m using email marketing but am not seeing consistent return”? Then you just aren’t doing email marketing right or you simply aren’t going deep enough.
Email marketing still has a staggering 38:1 ROI ratio.
Here are six tips for resetting the way you think about your email marketing strategy.
1. No Email Marketing, No Funnel
People are surprised when I tell them their funnel doesn’t exist without email.
Email marketing is a topic I get asked about every day. I just got another DM last night from a faithful follower of The Modern Marketer who asked if I believe email marketing is a key component to business.
It’s not a key component, it’s the chest that the keys open.
Lol, but seriously.
Your sales pipeline does not exist without email. Your engagement from initial brand contact, to purchase, to brand advocate doesn’t exist without email.
The important thing to remember is that email is evolving.
So, yes, you have to choose more carefully how you use email now vs how you would have used it 5+ years ago. But, that doesn’t change the fact that email marketing software solutions are popping up every year.
Game changers even.
Remember our talk about digital assets? For the thousands of new Modern Marketer followers since I last mentioned that,
“your company needs to build its digital assets and stop relying on third parties to be the ‘equity’ of your brand.”
At a moment’s notice it could all be gone.
So, if I took away all of your social media followers, your networks, and broke your website and software solutions you use, what would be left? If your answer is nothing, then you need to fix that.
Because the answer should be “I have hundreds/thousands of custom content pieces, have a nurtured and segmented email list, and we could go right back to the market today.”
See the difference? Good.
Now you understand that email marketing is really one of the only things in your digital assets that ACTUALLY belongs to you 100%. So, focus on building your efforts in email marketing and controlling that ecosystem.
2. Send Messages People Are Dying to Open
Email campaigns that focus on the category of “hobbies” have the highest open rate, statistically speaking.
This is interesting because it proves that everywhere online, no matter what medium or platform, people respond to the things that they are most interested in.
Right?
So, even when it comes to email marketing, the category with the highest open rate is “hobbies.”
Makes sense.
Ergo, it’s important for us brands and SMBs to understand what it takes to be as relevant (or at least as close to as relevant) to a user as one of their hobbies. For example, you see a drum set in the background of this picture right?

I love music. I used to literally be a professional musician, now it’s sort of a hobby.
Any time I see something in my inbox related to drums, 9 times out of 10 I am going to open it because it’s extremely relevant to things that I am deeply interested in. I’ve seen all there is to see in the drumming industry. I know the best brands—I have heard, talked to and played with the best drummers in the world.
My roots in music go deep, but it never loses its relevancy in my life.
I want you to think of how you can position your SMB (in regards to email marketing) to be not only a necessity for your users, but something that they are deeply interested in. Whether it’s because of your content or special offerings.
Become as relevant as a hobby.
3. Flip Your Funnel Right-side Up
One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make is taking marketing strategies that are meant for a certain part of the funnel and trying to use them for another part of the funnel.
Let me explain what I mean.
Email marketing and/or marketing automation is something that happens after the first two stages of the buyer journey—which, if you’ve read our content before, you remember that the buyer journey is:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
Most users go through about 67% of the buyer journey before talking to a brand representative, from which they then become a lead and a sale.
Why then are brands trying to make users who have just come in contact with them give their information upfront so they can pound them with more messages? It’s because those brands are trying to use a bottom of the funnel tactic at the top of their funnel.
So, if you find yourself asking questions like, “how do I make people sign up for my newsletter…how do I make people follow me….how do I get people from social media to go over to my website…???” it’s because you are misusing strategies in the wrong parts of your funnel.
Extra Insight: Understand the buyer journey of “awareness, consideration, decision,” understand your sales funnel of “acquisition, conversion, engagement,” and make sure that your marketing efforts align with each stage.
I taught a course on this at the end of last year, and this was the graphic that I created for the course to help people understand what I was talking about:

So, as you can see, there is a true method to this madness. And your ability to understand your buyer’s journey is key to making sure your funnel isn’t upside down.
4. Plain Text Emails Are The Best, Use Them
77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.
But I always find myself, along with most of you probably, in a conundrum of whether I should send designed emails or plain text emails.
Ahhhhh.
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that the team and I mostly create plain text emails for clients of all sizes.
Hardly every do we design emails.
It just isn’t super effective for your consistent communication touch points with customers, unless your brand solely relies on it’s visuals.

But, at the same time, we’ve worked with a ton of brands where basic communication is done in plain text, but their weekly deals, promos and newsletters are all designed up and mobile responsive.
Again, most of the time the plain text emails still have better statistics regarding open rates and click rates, but the designed emails play well when they are centered around one specific purpose.
Like a deal, event or product.
The conclusion that I’ve come to after split testing this for the last 2 years or so, is that plain text needs to be 80% of your email communication and designed emails only 20%. Now, some of you may immediately disagree because you see great results with your designed emails and you stun your customers every email.
So, take this advice with a grain of salt, but know that we’ve made our clients 10x more money with plain text emails than we have with designed emails. If you are going to design an email, make sure it has a centric value proposition and that you deliver the right message to the right segment at the right time.
Context marketing: the right message to the right people at the right time.
Don’t just blast out a design because it’s beautiful.
5. Spy on Who Opens Your Emails
Communication is the cornerstone of your business development.
Business owners literally get hundreds of email messages every single day and your ability to understand and control your communication ecosystem will determine your success.
Trust me when I say that this is very tactical and actionable.
Two tools that you can implement today in your communication are Yesware and/or Sidekick by Hubspot. Both are email tracking tools and give you insight into who you are talking to.
I used Yesware for years, but have currently been using Sidekick for the past year or so.
I can see:
- when people open emails
- how many times they open it
- what they click on
- what device they were on
- and where they were at in the world
I know that seems a bit much, but you would be surprised how efficient it is to be working and see that so-and-so opened your email via a push notification.
So, why talk about this in an article about email marketing?
Because this is the side of email marketing centered around business development. Without business development, you have no business. This is the tactical side of email marketing that isn’t automated, that isn’t triggered.
You still have to communicate 1-on-1, network and act like a human sometimes.
The other cool thing about these tools is that they show you key pieces of information on the person you are talking to, like their social accounts, latest posts and contact information. This is both helpful if you are communicating with customers and or decision makers for business development.
So, take a second and go install them into your email. It’s free to start with up to a certain amount of tracked emails.
6. Pop Up ‘Value’
Most people who visit your website aren’t ready to buy.
That’s a fact.
I think the benchmark is currently up in the 90th percentile. Because of that, you hear me talk about things like retargeting and lead generation a lot.
One thing that has forever worked well for myself and our clients is using what they call “exit-intent” pop ups. They are pop ups that pop when a user’s mouse leaves the browser window.
Now…HUGE DISCLAIMER.
We have all seen this done the wrong way. We all have those sites we’ve seen like 24/7 Sports in which we shun the brand because of their horrible pop up ad experience. We get it.
There is a right way and a wrong way to execute pop ups.
Imagine if you were getting ready to leave Dick’s Sporting Goods soccer section of their website and when your mouse left the browser window, a quick pop up with Rinaldo’s face and a play button says “Watch this video of Rinaldo and comment for a chance to win tickets to a game of your choosing. Plus get an immediate 20% off on all soccer equipment.”
That was a very random example, but my point is that relevance is the only thing that makes pop ups not spammy and annoying. You can, in fact, add more value through pop ups.

As one more example, one of our clients just ran a very successful online conference. The biggest in the world for their niche, literally. We threw up an exit intent pop up that offered a free book, and free course if they purchased a ticked by X date. That alone converted users who were on the fence at an insane rate.
Because all of a sudden we added value that they didn’t expect. So, don’t ever blame pop ups for being annoying. Don’t every blame ads for being annoying. The only thing that becomes annoying is when you use those tools to be annoying with your spammy messages and lack of value.
There is always a right way.
Conclusion
This was a pretty beefy article, so I encourage you to book mark it and revisit any time you go to execute an email marketing campaign.
Inevitably, you are going to keep seeing articles and messages on social media about how email marketing is dying or dead.
But it’s not.
It remains one of the only ways that you can generate an INSANE ROI from something that you 100% own. Unlike a social media account with 10k followers, an email list with 10k subscribers will forever belong to you.
Your job is to simply always be segmenting, nurturing and adding value to your list so when you ask for the buy, you get it.