Save time and money with these email marketing hacks

You’ve put a lot of time, money, and effort into your marketing campaign. 

You’ve studied and implemented segmentation, automation, and even some personalization. You and your marketing team have all of the email marketing techniques and strategies down to a T. 

However, is there something you’re missing, something that could make your job a whole lot easier?

In this post we'll share some of our top marketing hacks that will help you streamline your email marketing efforts. Start applying some (or all 10!) of these email marketing hacks to save yourself and your team a ton of time and money.  

Time and money are two of our most important resources. These 10 marketing hacks will help ensure that you don’t waste either. 

The first five tips are fantastic for saving you precious time.

1. Commit to your marketing plan

If you want to save a lot of time, you need to commit to a plan. Haphazard emailing won’t do you or your subscribers any good. 

Making the commitment to stick to a plan will help you get into a creative flow. It is a state in which ideas come to mind faster and easier because your mission is right in front of you constantly. 

Not only will committing to sending regular emails save you time, but it will also save you money in the long run. Your subscribers won’t get the valuable information you have to share, and that can end up having an impact on your conversion rates.

2. Concatenate first and last name in Excel

Many people have a list of their email subscribers in an Excel file. Each column holds pertinent information, including their first and last name, as well as their email address. 

You can upload this list to your Emma email list settings in a simple step. However, sometimes, you may not want two separate columns for the subscribers’ first and last names. There’s a time-saving way to do this. 

Instead of adding a new column and typing out the first and last name of each and every subscriber into that column, you can concatenate the first and last name in Excel. 

Excel has a special concatenate formula that you can use to significantly cut down on the amount of time you spend on this process. You can then upload your new and improved list to Emma quickly and easily. 

3. Check for sensitive subject lines

Crafting your subject line is one of the most important parts of the entire creative process for your email campaign. It has an important job to do—it needs to grab your subscribers’ attention immediately!

Unfortunately, in an effort to be funny, provocative, or otherwise attention-grabbing, some marketers have ended up embarrassing themselves or alienating some of their subscribers. 

One of the great marketing hacks for email subject lines is the subject analyzer Sensitive Subject Lines. With this tool, you can avoid sending an email with a potentially embarrassing or offensive subject line.

4. Accessible brand colors for hex codes and color palettes

Designing your email is a fun prospect. Unfortunately, it’s also part of the process that can take a lot of your time. It’s so easy to get caught up in choosing just the right colors that you end up wasting a lot of time. What can you do about this?

You can find accessible brand colors for hex codes and color palettes by using the tool UseAllFive.com. With this tool, you can see what colors will work well together in your emails. Instead of sending something out and waiting for feedback from your readers, you can get immediate feedback and see what will work and what won’t. 

Source: UseAllFive.com

5. Tools that make coding and mockups easier

A lot of time can be spent (or perhaps, wasted) trying to find the specific code for HTML characters. 

Source: W3Schools

Not every character can be found on your keyboard, so what are you going to do? You’re going to bookmark a site called Toptal.com. This site has the codes for nearly 50 HTML characters. 

Source: Toptal.com

Find the code you need quickly and easily. 

Another timesaving resource is Fill Murray. You’ve probably seen the text placeholder: lorem ipsum. There will be times when you need an image placeholder as well, typically for mockups of your email design. 

You can have some fun with this by using the images provided by Fill Murray—placeholders of various sizes that are all pictures of actor and comedian Bill Murray. The images are high-quality, so you won’t be embarrassed about having a poor quality mockup. 

Email marketing hacks that will save you a lot of money

The next half of the tips are great ones to use for saving money. 

6. Resend unopened emails

One of the most annoying things to see when you analyze the progress of your campaign is unopened emails. You worked hard on the content and design, so when someone doesn’t even open it, it can be disheartening. 

However, this situation can actually turn into an opportunity that will save you—and even make you—some money.

What you can do is segment your email list and then start a reengagement campaign with those who haven’t opened your emails in a while. 

In this email, you can outline who you are and why you’re writing. Then, you can invite them to stick with you by providing some sort of incentive. 

This type of campaign will help you to: 

• Find out who is really interested in what you have to offer
• Help you save time cleaning your email list
• Avoid ending up in the spam folder

7. Avoid costly mistakes by using Grammarly

Grammarly is a really helpful tool for creating the content of your emails. It catches grammar and spelling mistakes. The paid version has added features, like sentence recommendations. The software will tell you if you’ve written a sentence in passive voice and can offer a better suggestion. 

This software can help you save money in two ways. 

First, it teaches you, through practice, to become a better writer. Over time, you (or whoever is writing your email copy) will become faster and more proficient, making fewer mistakes along the way. Better writing and fewer mistakes can end up saving you money by saving you time.

Second, Grammarly can help if you have in-house or third-party copy editors to evaluate your email copy. Human editors are invaluable. They help you catch things that software can’t, like sensitive subject lines or embarrassing typos. 

When your editor can focus less on grammar, spelling, and punctuation, they can spend more time evaluating the overall quality and flow of your writing. And if they get to spend less time editing because you used Grammarly, their fee won’t be as much. 

8. Compliment tracking with Google Analytics

Source: Neil Patel

Your email marketing software likely has some form of analytics. You can enhance these features by utilizing them in conjunction with Google Analytics. 

The information you obtain from Google Analytics will help you set campaign goals, which can end up boosting your conversion rate, thereby improving company earnings.

If you’re currently strapped for cash, you can still benefit from the free version of Google Analytics. Once your company can afford it, you can invest in the paid version if you see fit. 

9. Batch write your content and schedule to send

When you come up with a really great marketing campaign idea, any subsequent ideas tend to flow freely. You think about how you want to approach your audience, what you want to share with them, and what kind of value you’re going to offer them. 

If you sit down to write an email, then send it, then wait a week or so until you write and send your next email, the inspiration can vanish. 

Take advantage of free-flowing ideas by doing batch work. Productive people batch their work in many areas of life. Take cooking for example. If you take a day of the week to spend prepping all of your meals, you’ll end up saving time and money on your grocery bill. 

Similarly, batch work will help you save time, which will thereby save you some money. The great thing about Emma is that you can input your content and then schedule it to go out to your subscribers whenever you want. We understand the value of batch work and want to help you take advantage of it with our scheduling tools. 

10. Use social media to boost your email marketing efforts and revenue 

While email marketing is one of the best ways to market your business, you can’t ignore social media. After all, there are some people out there who, in fact, prefer social media over email. 

When you integrate your efforts between these two platforms, you double your chances of making money from your marketing campaign. 

When creating a social media profile, be sure to add an invitation for people to sign up for your email list. Social media can be a free or cheap tool that can help you grow your list and should be utilized!

Wrap up

Do you want to save time and money on your email marketing campaigns? You can with the marketing hacks listed above. 

To review: 

• Check your email subject lines with the sensitive subject lines tool
• Learn how to concatenate first and names in Excel
• Use Fill Murray
• Take advantage of social media
• Batch your work. 

Implement these marketing hacks and you’ll be able to streamline your marketing efforts. 

Are you struggling with your marketing strategy? Whether you’re starting a new project or have just run out of steam for an old one, our email marketing strategy tools can help. Check them out today for some insights and inspiration.