Ask most email marketers what they want, and you’ll probably hear the same answers: better engagement, higher click-through rates, more conversions. Fair enough. Those are the outcomes everyone is chasing. But the way most people go about achieving them tends to look pretty similar from program to program. Subject line test here, new creative there, maybe a different send time, etc.
There is nothing wrong with any of that. Testing and optimizing those elements is the backbone of any successful email program. But there are some habits that, once built, tend to pay dividends across all of those areas, and yet they don’t get nearly the same attention. Here are three worth adding to your routine.
Get Curious About Your Sender Name
Most email marketers put a lot of thought into the subject line. The sender name, not so much. It’s treated like something you set once during platform setup and don’t think about again. But your audience pays attention to it, and it directly influences whether a recipient opens your email in the first place.
Think about your own inbox behavior for a second. When you’re scrolling through a long list of new messages, what’s the first thing you actually look at? For most people, it’s who the email is from. An unfamiliar sender name, especially in a promotions folder, is often enough to get an email deleted without ever being opened. On the other hand, a sender name that a recipient recognizes and associates with something valuable gets a very different reaction.
The thing is, there’s no universal rule for what the best sender name looks like. Sometimes a brand name works best. Sometimes a person’s name feels more familiar and approachable. The only way to find out what works for your audience is to test it, which many email marketers don’t consider. It’s a fairly simple test to run, and the results can be surprising.
Stop Treating Your Landing Page as Someone Else’s Problem
There’s a tendency for some email marketers to measure success by the click. The email drove a strong click-through rate, so the email performed well. Done. What happens after the click is often treated as outside the scope of the email campaign, even though that’s usually where the ultimate conversion happens.
If your landing page is slow to load, hard to read on a phone, doesn’t have a clear call to action, or is disconnected from the messaging in the email itself, you’re leaving a lot of results on the table. The email got them interested. The landing page is what closes the deal. If your optimization efforts stop at the email itself, you’re missing half the equation.
Make it a habit to regularly review your landing pages. Does the email messaging match what they see when they get there? Is the call to action clear and easy to find? Does it render properly on mobile? These are questions that often go unasked once a campaign is up and running, and especially if different teams manage the email campaign vs. the landing page. Testing and optimizing your landing page is every bit as important as it is for your email creatives.
Build More Rest Into Your Frequency Strategy
This one might sound counterintuitive. Email is a high-frequency channel by nature, and the incremental cost of sending one more campaign is about as close to zero as it gets. So why not mail as often as possible?
Because your audience has a frequency threshold, and when you cross it, you start working against yourself. Recipients who feel overloaded by your emails don’t always unsubscribe right away. Sometimes they just stop engaging with them. They’re still on your list, but contributing nothing positive to your performance and quietly damaging your sender reputation in the process.
Building a more disciplined frequency strategy means paying attention to engagement trends over time, not just campaign by campaign. Are certain segments of your audience starting to disengage? Are open rates softening in a way that might be tied to how often you’re hitting their inbox? These are worth tracking. And periodically giving some segments a break from your main campaign cadence, rather than mailing everyone at full volume all the time, can actually improve performance when you mail them again.
None of these three habits is particularly flashy. They don’t have the same appeal as a clever new subject line strategy or a redesigned email template. But the programs that tend to perform over time are usually the ones where the basics are being managed thoughtfully and consistently, not just the parts that show up in the highlight reel.
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