You receive several email newsletters a week from your own subscriptions. In fact, you’ve even become someone’s customer from staying engaged with this particular genre of marketing. You know it’s a valuable marketing tool, but you don’t know how it would work for your business. Here are five things you can do in email marketing to see awesome engagements and maybe even some sales!

1. See email marketing as nurturing, not selling.

As soon as things get salesy in people’s inboxes, BOOM. UNSUBSCRIBE. The goal of email marketing is not to get sales—although it could lead to them! The main goal of email marketing is to continue people’s awareness of your products and services. That way, when they are in a position to buy, you’re the first person they think of. In summary, aim to nurture these leads, not necessarily make a sale.

2. Give them valuable content.

So now you know to nurture your email list. How do you do that? You give them content that they find valuable. Get into your core audience’s head. What is valuable to them? What are they interested in? Is it before and after photos of the remodels you do as a contractor? It is the latest trends in jewelry? Is it a free hot wings recipe for Super Bowl Sunday? Give the people what they want! Just make sure it aligns with your brand.

3. Test, test, and test again.

The best way to find out what works for your particular audience is to test it! Let’s say you run a restaurant and you want to bring awareness to a new menu item. You have a couple subject lines in mind. “This menu item is 20% off this week and may change your life” or “This life-changing menu item is 20% off this week.” Run what we call an A/B test. Send an email with one subject line to a small sample of your email list, and the other email to the same number of people. See which email gets the most engagements in the next 48-72 hours, and now you know what to send to the rest of your subscribers!

4. Include images…but don’t overdo it.

We don’t have much to say about this except that research shows that 1-3 images in an email newsletter is okay, but if 4+ images are included, people are more likely to unsubscribe. Choose your images wisely.

5. Get creative with emojis!

Emails with emojis tend to get a lot of attention in people’s inboxes. Fun fact: subject lines with ☂️ and ✈️ get more opens than emails with other emojis! Don’t ask us to explain it…we don’t know why either. The point is, people love emojis. The more creative you can get with them, the more likely you are to stand out in people’s inboxes.

There you go! Those are our expert tips for email marketing. If you’d like to see these tips in action, join our email list! We send free marketing tips every week to help local businesses market themselves with ease! To join, scroll down and enter your email address below. As an added bonus, there’s no need to wait for next week’s newsletter to get free tips! You’ll get our free Six-Step Guide to Increasing Your Exposure on Google immediately after you sign up!