45 Email Marketing Tactics to Boost Response

At our peak, Dropkick Copy sends over two million emails a month. We’ve produced $301,827 in three months at a 3,350% ROI for one client and booked 900 sales calls over seven months for another.

Here are 45 bite-sized tips to boost the response of your email broadcasts and autoresponders. We’ve cut out all the exposition. If you’d like us to elaborate on a specific tip, leave a comment below.

1. Send more emails. A lot more emails. More emails than you believe are acceptable.
2. Resend to non-buyers. Not just non-clickers/non-openers.
3. Never assume your subscriber read, opened, or even saw your email in their inbox.
4. When composing or designing an email, think mobile-first. Short sentences. Short paragraphs.
5. Ask subscribers to add your email address to their contacts, move you to the primary inbox, and mark you as important. Show them how to do it with gifs & screenshots.
6. Ask them to buy something as soon as they subscribe. Do this on the thank-you page and in your follow-up email.
7. Only use discounts to reward your best subscribers and customers.
8. Send a survey email before a big promotion. Ask your subscribers what they want.
9. Ask your subscribers to reply to emails.
10. Send *true* plain text emails from time to time. It’s a plain text email if you can’t hyperlink. E.g. Some big ESP’s plain-text option aren’t true plain text because you can hyperlink.
11. Don’t try to be clever in your subject lines. Leave puns to the brand copywriters.
12. The best subject line has: benefit + specificity + curiosity.
13. Keep your subject line under 30 characters. Impossible with every subject line, but try. That’s what fits on a mobile screen.
14. Don’t copy the subject line or email style of gurus or big brands.
15. Use the preview text to amplify your subject line. And always use the preview text.
16. If your email software doesn’t have a field to add preview text, use the first line of your email as the preview text.
17. Don’t just say click here or buy now. Re-state the benefit in your call to action. This is a CALL-TO-VALUE.
18. The first line of your email must grab the reader by his or her throat.
19. In the first few lines, let the reader know why they need to read your email. Tell them what’s in it for them.
20. Delete your introduction. Start your email in the middle of the action. Movies and TV shows do this all the time.
21. Images should serve a purpose. Don’t just include them to make the email look nice.
22. Resize and compress your images before adding them to your email.
23. The offer is everything. You don’t need design or copy to sell 50% off storewide.
24. Embed countdown timers when you want to add urgency. You can find free timers online.
25. During a promotion, email at least twice a day. Once in the morning. Then resend that email to non-buyers in the evening.
26. On the last day of a promotion send an 18-hour and 4-hour cart-closing email to everyone.
27. Immediately ask buyers to buy again – upsell, cross-sell, or give them a discount on their next purchase. Do this in your post-purchase funnel and emails.
28. Send your email from a person rather than a brand. Nabeel Azeez > Nabeel at Dropkick Copy > Dropkick Copy.
29. Include a photo of the email sender in the sign-off. Link that image to your product/service/lead generation.
30. Don’t add links too early in your email. You’re wasting an opportunity to persuade them to buy.
31. List segmentation is a waste of time until you hit 10k subscribers. Use that time and energy to write and send more emails. And you’ll make more money per email.
32. A/B testing is a waste of time until you hit 5-7k+ subscribers. Statistical significance.
33. The most likely person to buy from you is someone who has already bought from you. Treat your customers better than you treat everyone else.
34. Pay more attention to the subscribers and customers who engage with and buy from you. Don’t waste your time on unengaged subscribers and non-customers.
35. Segment customers by: Recency – when did they buy last? Frequency – how often have they bought? Monetary – how much have they bought?
36. Take your best-performing email campaigns and add them to your autoresponder sequence.
37. Make your autoresponder sequences longer. 90 days > 60 days > 30 days. Nurture sequence, Post-purchase, Abandoned cart, Etc.
38. Use video landing pages as a bridge between your email and product page. Perfect for testimonials. And you control the user experience.
39. The weaker your product page (conversion rate) the longer your email needs to be and vice versa.
40. When you have a high-converting product page, sell the click over selling the product.
41. Make sure the landing page you’re sending subscribers to loads in less than 3 seconds.
42. When resending an email, change the: subject line/preview text, email copy or style (text vs. design,) from name (optional.) Make it look like a brand new email.
43. When emailing from a new domain, follow a warm up schedule. 100 emails day 1, 200 day 2, 400 day 3, etc.
44. Regularly prune your list of unengaged and inactive subscribers. Send a re-engagement email first, then delete with extreme prejudice.
45. When you add a Google Doc or YouTube video (or any Google Workspace product) to an email using a naked URL, it appears as an attachment in Gmail desktop.