Alex Medick

February 21, 2022

Email Marketing Tactics For 2022

The other week I gave a presentation to an awesome crowd of 600+ digital marketers at an INSIDE.COM event. The conversation on the whole was about implementing effective digital marketing tactics in a post iOS 14 world. For my segment, I chose to speak about effective email marketing tactics – which I feel is incredibly important since iOS 15 arrived on the scene.

Below is the written version of that presentation, along with the video version for your information digestion option pleasure. 

Enjoy and happy marketing!


EMAIL MARKETING TACTICS FOR 2022


What We’ll Go Over Today

  1. Why Email Marketing Is Important
  2. What changed with iOS 15
  3. Maximizing Email Marketing Effectiveness in 2022
  4. Bonus Ideas To Experiment With
  5. Tools You Might Dig
  6. Closing Thoughts

WTF Should You Care About Email Marketing?


Why should you care about email marketing? Why? WHY?!?

Alright, I get it. Email marketing is like the least sexy marketing tactic in the marketers toolkit, but dammit, it’s one of the most important ones too. 

Here are three reasons why you should give a damn about email marketing: 

  1. Email marketing allows you to create a personalized experience and relationship with your audience
  2. You own the people that are kind enough to want to hear from you. Social followings are cool, but direct access to your audience at any time with a higher deliverability rate is event cooler
  3. The ROI (return on investment) of email marketing is MASSIVE

In a 2021 join study from Shop.org and Forrester Research found that 85% of US retailers recognize that email marketing is one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics. 

MASSIVE STAT -> On average, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is 122%.

What Changed With iOS 15?


Most people know about Facebook privacy in iOS 14. What they don’t know a lot about it the privacy enhancements in iOS 15. 

iOS 15 introduced even more user protections from third-party trackers. This includes mail privacy protection that stops email sends from collecting data via invisible pixels. 

What does this mean? 

Marketers can no longer solely rely on open rates as a reliable metric of success. 

Why Did Apple Do This?

There are 3 schools of thought: 

  1. They really care about user privacy and are using it as a standard that separates them from other products – high quality, great design, user privacy focused. 
  2. They are creating privacy measures for their customers to make more money on their proprietary advertising products and for upselling nominal MRR services.
  3. They just flat out like messing with marketers. 

Do These Privacy Changes Drive You Bananas?

I get this question ALL OF THE TIME. No, it doesn’t. 

Why?

As an advocate of digital privacy, I totally back these moves. Also, as a digital marketer, that’s what keeps things fun – the internet and technologies are ever evolving. You have to constantly be learning new trends, thinking outside the box, and staying on the pulse of things happening and to come. 

One thing that helps me stay on the pulse is reading Inside.com (disclaimer: I work with them). 


Tactics You Can Implement: Maximizing Email Marketing Effectiveness in 2022


  1. Focus on email engagement and response – aka, Land In The Inbox, Yo!
  2. Alternative Email Marketing Success Metrics (CTOR, CTR, & Conversions)
  3. Use Killer Subject Lines
  4. Don’t Sell – Add Value
  5. Utilize Audience Segmentation

1. Focus On Email Engagement & Response

To work on training inbox algorithms to treat your email as something your customer wants to see, start focusing on email engagement and response. 

One way to do this is by using a 2 step automation sequence. 

  • Step 1) Once you get an email, send an automated response that encourages the user to click or take action in your message. 
  • Step 2) Send an automated follow up email shortly after (12-24 hours) that ends in a question that encourages the use to respond to your email. 

EXAMPLE:

  • Email 1 (instant): Here is the link to download your “How to Kick Ass With Email Marketing in 2022 lesson. Click here to download.”
  • Email 2 (12 hour delay): Hey Bob, Alex from Inside here. How did you like my email marketing lesson? Was there anything I could’ve included to make it better? Are there any additional questions I can answer for you? You can reply to this email – I’d love to hear from you. 

2. Alternative Email Marketing Success Metrics

  • CTOR = Click To Open Rate
    CTOR compares the number of unique clicks vs. the number of unique opens. It really helps indicate how effective the email is. 

    It differs from CTR because it focuses on individual opens rather than most-engagement. 

  • CTR = Click Through Rate
    Monitoring clicks will help you discover the subscribers actively engaging with your content.

  • Conversions = Users That Completed A Desired Task (like, sales!)
    How many sales / downloads / whatever come from this email campaign?

3. Use Killer Subject Lines

You can’t really effectively A/B test subject lines anymore, so stick with these 2 rules of thumb: 

Rule #1: Be SUPER direct and valuable (Ex: Email Marketing Not Working? Try These 5 Tips Instead ✈️)

Rule #2: Create curiosity and intrigue (My biggest failure…and how you can avoid it too)

4. Don’t Sell, Add Value

What most people think of when you say email marketing is – oh no, spam city, here I come. 

But no. That’s not what email marketing is. And if you’re doing that, STOP NOW!

Focus on frequency and value. 

Send sparingly (1x per week would be awesome), and make sure emails have value in them, like links to your blog, to podcasts, etc. Don’t just be on a mad salesman spree 24/7

5. Utilize Audience Segmentation

The best email marketing tools allow you to segment your audience. 

Not only should you segment by interest (like T-Shirt Buyers, Crypto fans), but you should segment by engagement trends. 

If you mass email your list without segmenting out “non-readers”, the higher chance there is that your email will land in the spam box. 

And the spam box is no bueno. 

Bonus Ideas To Experiment With


  • Experiment 1) Use a first name and company as the sender of the email. 

    Ex: Alex from Inside.com <alex@inside.com>
  • Experiment 2) Use a subdomain email to keep “sender purity” with your primary domain.

    Ex: NoReply@Messaging.AlexMedick.com

Tools You Might Dig (I Do At Least)


I really dig ConvertKit. This is a great funnel, sequencing, and automation tool for small businesses that utilize email marketing. Give it a try!

For email verification, there's also...

TrueMail (truemail.io)
Bouncer (usebouncer.com)
Never Bounce (neverbounce.com)
Zero Bounce (zerobounce.com)
DeBounce (debounce.io)

Closing Thoughts


  1. Make sure you add value to your audience with each touch-point. 
  2. Sales suck, value is cool.
  3. Work on personalization and relationship development with the recipient.
  4. Utilize audience segmentation (tags and lists are your new BFF)
  5. Subscribe to my newsletter

Hope you enjoyed my little rundown of email marketing. ✌️♥️

-AJM

Website | Email | Twitter | Signal

About Alex Medick

Dad, Entrepreneur // Building INSIDE