If you have your leads’ information in an email list, that’s a great start — but actually converting your email leads to sales takes a bit of practice and finesse.

How do you engage and nurture your email list? We’ll explore a range of strategies designed to captivate your potential customers and turn their interest into sales. We’ll talk about tactics for personalization, when and how to segment your audience, and how to create email content that makes your list look forward to interacting with your business or brand.

Ready? Let’s make your email marketing more effective.

Email Personalization Tactics

Unless you’re completely new to marketing, you’ve probably been hearing about personalization for a while now. Email personalization still reigns supreme as one of the most effective tactics for helping your content stand out. But how personal should you get, and how much effort should you devote to it? What are the different ways to personalize marketing emails? Here are some specific tactics — browse through them and determine which makes the most sense for you.

Use personalized presets to capture attention. Are you more likely to read an email that starts with your name or with “dear customer?” It’s simple but effective. All modern email marketing software programs offer this type of personalization, and it’s often as easy as clicking a button. First name, last name, location, place of employment, job title, and any other data you’ve captured about your customer can be used to personalize your email body content.

Focus on subject lines. One exceptionally good place to use personalization is in the email subject line since it’s the first thing people often read. For example, if you’re a real estate investor trying to close a deal on a newly available property, simply send an automatic email to interested contacts with the listing and information.

Offer personalized email delivery options. Here’s one that isn’t talked about as often but when used correctly, can improve open rates and help with customer retention. Provide your mailing list with the option to receive emails as frequently as they prefer — whether that’s daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Offer different styles of email communication, like promotional emails, news, or education, and allow your list to opt into only those they want to receive. Not only does this provide excellent customer service, but it also makes your content automatically more relevant to each subscriber, which can significantly reduce unsubscribe rates.

Email Segmentation Tactics

Email segmentation is another effective tactic email marketers use to improve audience engagement. To segment your email list, you can use sub-lists or tags to categorize subscribers by different criteria. Some of the popular segmentation criteria include:

• Purchase history. If you’re a retail company, you might have separate segments for customers who have purchased women’s clothes versus men’s clothes in the past.
• Location. If geographic location is relevant to your business, you can personalize your marketing emails by location and send different versions to those across different regions.
• Job title. For those networking with multiple decision-makers, it may be helpful to segment your list into the various job titles these decision-makers hold. 
• Stage of the buying cycle. Are these new leads or repeat customers? Do they need more of an introduction to your brand, or are they looking for hyper-targeted promotions and special offers?
• Behavior on your website. Whether a subscriber visits a specific page, lingers on a blog post, or abandons a cart, you can segment audiences based on different site behaviors.

Save Time with Templates and Automation

Savvy email marketers don’t recreate the wheel every time they fire off a new email. Once you’ve built out an email marketing strategy and segmented your audience appropriately, create branded templates that you can use and reuse to create consistency and save time.

In the same vein, automation can also be a massive time-saver. For any email sequences that are transactional or repetitive, try setting up a tailored email sequence that triggers automatically. For example:

• When a new subscriber signs up, send them through an automatic sequence to verify their email, followed by a tailored “welcome” email based on their demographic or other data
• When a subscriber makes a purchase, set up an automatic “thank you” email with a confirmation number or a special offer
• When a subscriber abandons their cart, send an automatic sequence to remind them of the items they left behind

When creating your email content, follow copywriting and design best practices. Employ anecdotes and storytelling to make your emails more engaging, and focus on providing value to the reader — not just selling them your product or solution.

Don’t Forget About Deliverability

With so much buzz about email content and personalization, it’s easy to forget about one of the most important aspects of email marketing: email deliverability. There are tons of reasons why an email might not get delivered — an incorrect email address, an unverified email, spam filters, or inaccurate metrics as a result of Apple’s privacy protection. How do you know your emails are getting delivered to the right people at the right time?

Here are some tips for improving email deliverability:

• Make it easier for people to unsubscribe from your lists. It may seem counterintuitive, but when people want to unsubscribe and can’t find the “unsubscribe” button, they may flag your email as spam — which hurts your reputation with email providers and may cause more of your emails to go to spam.
• Have a solid opt-in process. Require users to verify their email addresses so you can naturally filter out invalid emails and scammers.
• Hone your subject lines (and your content). Avoid spammy subject lines, like those that overemphasize deals, the word “free,” or hyped language like “get it now.”
• Clean up your lists regularly. Clear out unsubscribes and bounced addresses. 

With these tactics and value-driven content, you can harness the potential of email marketing to foster engagement and convert leads into loyal customers. Good luck!