email marketing case study 2022

20 Email Marketing Case Studies: Examples & Results to Learn From

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How would you like to read the best email marketing case studies ever published?

More importantly, how would you like to copy the best practices for email marketing campaigns that are based on real-world examples and not just theory?

Below, you’ll find a list of the top email marketing case studies along with the results and key findings from each example. By studying these email marketing case study examples and applying the lessons learned in your own email campaigns, you can hopefully achieve similar results as an email marketer.

Table of Contents

Top Email Marketing Case Studies

Getting 1,300 monthly donations – watsi email marketing case study.

In this case study, you’ll learn how Watsi crafted an email marketing campaign encouraging new and existing users to sign up for its Universal Fund. Using seven test-driven tools helped this organization knock huge campaigns out of the park. Learn how Watsi used email to make people feel more special, take customization to the next level, earn 1,300 monthly donations, and more.

Collecting 100,000 Emails In One Week – Tim Ferris Show Email Marketing Case Study

This email marketing case study has it all: tips, templates, and code to create a successful email campaign. Discover how Harry’s, a men’s grooming brand, launched its brand and how it collected nearly 100,000 email addresses in one week. You’ll learn everything they did so you can try to replicate the results.

The Science Behind Obama’s Campaign Emails – Bloomberg Email Marketing Case Study

Obama’s election success proved the true power of digital marketing, including powerful email campaigns. Most of the $690 million dollars Obama raised online came from fundraising emails. In this article, you’ll learn about the rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts and the strategies that made the campaign so successful.

The Amazon Email Experience – Vero Email Marketing Case Study

In this case study on email marketing by Vero, you’ll get a complete analysis of Amazon’s email experience for the user. It takes you from the initial subscriber welcome message, to email receipts, shipping updates, thank you content, invites, Black Friday deals, the review email, and more. There are loads of data and useful tips you can gain and use for your own email campaigns in this post.

Boost Open Rates By 3X & CTR By 2X – Digital Marketer Email Marketing Case Study

How would you like to instantly boost your open rates by 3X and your click-through rates (CTR) by 2X with the next email you send to your list? Digital Marketer shows you 11 strategies you can use right now based on its own research and data to achieve similar results.

Increasing Reach, Impact & Subscriber Satisfaction – Content Marketing Institute Email Marketing Case Study

This article by Content Marketing Institute contains a breakdown of several case study examples for email marketing. Inside, you’ll learn about using list segmentation as well as advice on measuring and optimizing your email delivery performance. Popular brands discussed include SalesForce, Xerox, Noodles Company, and more.

Birchbox Boost Conversions By 25% – Braze Email Marketing Case Study

This is one of the top email marketing case studies that prove why you shouldn’t send out a one-size-fits-all message to your mailing list. It’s a short case study on email marketing, but you’ll learn quickly how Braze helped Birchbox use custom attributes culled from data gathered on customer behavior to switch from generic email content to a more personalized strategy that delivered better results: a 25% boost in conversion rates and 16% increase in open rates.

109% Revenue Lift for Dell with GIFs – MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Case Study

This is one of the best email marketing case studies available that shows the true power of using GIFs in your daily, weekly, or monthly newsletter campaigns. Discover how Dell lifted revenue by 109% with GIF-centered email effort.

$40,000 In Sales Without Annoying Subscribers – Yaro Starak Email Marketing Case Study

Here’s a complete breakdown of how Yaro Starak generated $40,00 in sales without annoying his subscribers during new product launches. It contains lots of tips, tricks, and expert advice on how (and when) to send consecutive emails, usiing videos in the campaign, creating a sense of urgency to buy now, and more.

$800,000 for Charity Water By Increasing Email Frequency – Money Journal Email Marketing Case Study

There are numerous email marketing strategies you can use to increase revenue for your business. However, not all email campaigns have to be heavily focused on giving customer discounts or free stuff to generate more money. This is especially true for non-profit organizations. Check out this case study to learn how Charity Water increased revenue by $800,000 by taking an unconventional approach to their follow-up emails that takes their audience on a journey.

Nanoleaf Recovers 30% of Abandonded Carts – Rejoiner Email Marketing Case Study

Are you an ecommerce brand, online retailer, course seller, or other type of website that uses a cart for the checkout process? If so, then this case study by Rejoiner will give you actionable tips to try based on data from Nanoleaf, which recovered 30% of sales with abandoned cart follow-up emails.

70+ Calls for a B2B Company with Cold Emailing – Growforce Email Marketing Case Study

Cold email marketing can be one of the best converting channels when done right. And this article will help you improve your cold emailing results. Read it to find out some of the top cold email best practices, get an example email sequence, and learn a powerful extra step you can use for marketing automation that works.

From Starting Blocks to Total Clarity – Email Marketing Heroes Case Study

Email Marketing Heroes is a podcast that offers free email marketing tips and a membership program to help business owners improve their email campaigns. In this blog post (and podcast), you’ll learn how one member got instant positive results by emailing her list more regularly, setting up automated email campaigns, and including links in a specific part of each message.

Hammock Increased Open Rate 48% with Shorter Emails – MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Case Study

Hammock is a B2B company that turned its traditional, content-heavy email newsletter into what they refer to as an “un-newsletter.” Discover how “The Idea Email” increased email open rates by 48% by focusing on one central topic and containing 350 words or less.

A/B Testing for Success – VWO Email Marketing Case Study

Most digital marketers don’t think about A/B testing their email marketing campaigns. However, year after year, email marketing delivers the highest return on investment (ROI) across all acquisition channels. In this article, you’ll learn how to incorporate A/B testing best practices, methodologies, and mental models to increase open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and more.

Building a Welcome Series from Scratch – HelpScout Email Marketing Case Study

This is not your typical case study on email marketing; however, it’s an important article to read if you need help setting up a good welcome series for your business. HelpScout takes you from the first email to the last you send to new subscribers while also describing the goal of each email message in the campaign.

600 Email Subscribers With 2 Blog Posts – Jacob McMillen Email Marketing Case Study

Want to know how to combine the power of SEO, blogging, and email marketing to get new subscribers on your list? Jacob McMillen teaches you all that and more in this case study. Learn how he used ConvertKit on a new blog along with SumoMe Pro popups, and a special SEO content writing technique to get 600 email subscribers from just two blog posts. Includes step-by-step instructions for you to copy this exact strategy for your website and email campaigns.

8 Steps to Building a Tripwire Email Funnel – Data Driven Marketing Email Case Study

If you’re serious about email marketing, then you need to have a good tripwire in place to make more sales from your new subscribers. Inside this guide, you’ll find a complete strategy for building an effective tripwire funnel that converts more subscribers into customers as well as using a follow up email sequence to capture the non-buyers.

10 Tripwire Examples – Autogrow Email Marketing Case Study

After reading the last previous guide on setting up an email tripwire funnel, you may want to look at this page to get proven examples of case studies that worked for this type of email marketing.

56% Rise In Open Rates with Emojis In Subject Lines – Campaign Monitor Email Marketing Case Study

A famous email campaign case study released by Experian revealed that 56% of unique open rates increased for brands that used emojis in their subject lines. In this article, Campaign Monitor offers valuable tips for using emojis like a pro email marketer.

What Is an Email Marketing Case Study?

An email marketing case study explains the process a business went through with a client to help them achieve specific results with an email campaign. Email marketing case studies provide a detailed examination of particular strategies within a real-world context to prove how effective it was for the client.

Are Case Studies Good for Email Marketing?

Case studies are good for email marketing because you can learn how to create email campaigns more effectively. Instead of just studying the theory of email marketing, you can learn from real email strategy campaigns to find out what methods deliver a higher return on investment.

Read More Marketing Case Studies

Here’s a list of more case studies you can use to improve your marketing campaigns:

• SEO case studies
• PPC case studies
• Content marketing case studies
• Digital marketing case studies
• Social media marketing case studies
• Affiliate marketing case studies

Email Marketing Case Study Examples Summary

I hope you enjoyed this list of the best email marketing case studies that are based on real-world results and not just theory.

As you discovered, the email marketing case study examples above demonstrated many different ways to implement an effective email campaign. By studying the key findings from these examples, and applying the methods learned to your own business and email newsletters, you can hopefully achieve the same positive outcome with your email marketing efforts.

New email success case studies are being published every month and I’ll continue to update this list as they become available. So keep checking back to read the current sources of information on email marketing.

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• Email Marketing

‍ If your business is looking to improve its email marketing strategy, there is a lot to be gained from diving into the analytics of every completed campaign. It’s also helpful to study other companies’ campaigns that had positive outcomes, as they can offer inspiration for your future projects!

The following eCommerce email marketing case studies showcase three instances where a good email content based on a marketing strategyl marketing strategy yielded positive returns. These campaigns all incorporated the Sendlane platform to achieve these results, the details of which we’ll touch on here.

Read all of our fantastic customer case studies such as Starbucks' email marketing and how they use it to gain customer loyalty.

1. MAD TASTY’s Successful Mid-Pandemic Journey into eCommerce

The hemp-extract beverage company MAD TASTY is the perfect example of a brand that was quick to pivot when COVID hit, subsequently transitioning their operations in order to remain competitive in a relatively niche industry. Here’s how they did it, and how email marketing paved the way.

Background and shift to email marketing

OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder is the pen and voice behind some of the biggest pop hits in the world, including Apologize with Timbaland, Counting Stars, and Good Life. Six years ago he was at a crossroads in terms of his mental health, with skyrocketing anxiety levels brought on by exhaustion. It was then that he tried CBD for the first time. 

After seeing positive results fairly quickly, he started work on a retail store presenting clean CBD products to the US market. When expert marketer Leila Khoury was brought in to grow customer awareness and revenue, she noticed that they weren’t tapping into email marketing nearly enough. She foresaw possibilities to scale the business by building a new, well-nurtured audience base online by investing in an eCommerce email marketing software.

Making the switch

As recently as the end of 2019, MAD TASTY was still predominantly a physical business without much of an eCommerce presence. While their team was sending email campaigns to customers, it was with a provider that didn’t offer much support.

A recommendation from another business in the same industry soon brought Sendlane into the mix. Enthralled by the deep-data integration we offered, the brand was impressed by how we were able to help them get to know their core customers on a much deeper level; we facilitated them in quickly creating audience segments for more personalized targeting. Being able to automate much of the process — effectively freeing up resources for other COVID-related challenges — was an added bonus. 

Sendlane’s impact

Aside from showing the commercial power of email marketing to the MAD TASTY team for the first time, Sendlane was the formal channel through which the company could help transition their business online and encourage their customers to buy their CBD products through their web and increase their sales.

The switch meant that their marketing department spent less time generating mailer designs, automating much of the process right from day one. Their customers were now able to buy products online and learn more about new releases directly from MAD TASTY, leading to better sales and growing the brand’s popularity over the last two years. 

2. Rx Smart Gear Implements a Multi-channel Revenue Strategy

Another case study to take note of showcases the strength of leveraging a multi-channel revenue strategy with unified email and SMS marketing. Rx Smart Gear — a world-leading fitness brand — was hopeful in turning SMS marketing into their next highest revenue source. The results were nothing short of astounding. 

Shifting focus to SMS marketing

The team at RXSG already knew about the importance of email marketing. The channel is responsible for 15% of their total revenue and plays a key role in delivering personalized customer experiences.

But most ESPs they used lacked comprehensive employee training, reliable customer support, and integrations with their favorite apps. RXSG was looking for an all-in-one solution that not only enabled them to implement campaigns easily, but also helped their employees understand automations.

A roll of the dice

Marketing expert Ericka Arguedas knew they needed a tool that would easily integrate with their current tech stack so their team could leverage data for a unified client experience.

After searching for a while, RXSG came across Sendlane — the best email marketing solution for their needs. The platform’s intuitive and powerful email and SMS features made it easy to implement a multi-channel strategy. Plus, the transition was a breeze thanks to their dedicated Customer Success & Implementation managers! Together, they were able to integrate their BigCommerce store and apps like Justuno to start funneling data under one roof.

How Sendlane helped

Before making the switch, the RXSG team was unsure how automations worked. But the Sendlane support team quickly went to work teaching Ericka and team how to build email and SMS automations from scratch.

With Sendlane, RXSG was able to boost their revenue and click rates by enriching customer profiles with relevant emails and valuable data using the Justuno integration to segment and send high-converting email & SMS.

To top it off, the RXSG team was also able to reach new customers to subscribe easily through multiple channels by implementing automated email & SMS campaigns.

//[inject:ad-personalized-email]

3. Skybound Entertainment Increase Open Rates by 80%

Skybound Entertainment is a business born out of a single comic book that was adapted into a long-standing hit TV series. The Walking Dead might have taken a long time to develop a loyal fanbase, but today it is at a point where it is generating high revenue volumes for the company. This has allowed them to invest in new projects as well as improve their existing marketing efforts, with a prominent focus on generating eCommerce sales.

A slow start for email engagement

Having never really prioritized email marketing as part of their customer value and growth strategy, Skybound Entertainment wasn’t too fussy about the provider they worked with. However, once their audience started to grow exponentially, it became obvious that they were going to need marketing automation software that could help them better manage their email master list. They were hoping to find a provider that could save them both time and energy so they could focus on developing the business in other areas. 

Big master list, no segments

Despite having grown their email lists to two million subscribers, they were still receiving low engagement on their email marketing campaigns. The problem was clear: their existing provider did not have a feature in place to break their master list into different audience segments that could be targeted individually with different messages. 

Mass emails to a bulk audience consisting of people with very different interests are typically coupled with low open and engagement rates. Once Sendlane was brought in, we were able to help update the existing master list. The result was better targeting, with open rates skyrocketing to as much as 80% (that’s four out of every five recipients) for some campaigns. 

‍4. Grey Ghost Gear’s Email Revenue Attribution Jumps From 1.8% to 34%+ After Switching To Sendlane

It started with an unexpected change to their pricing plan. Then, the changes to their Terms of Service and the ESP’s updates surrounding GDPR required them to jump through multiple hoops before they could send out a single campaign.

Understandably, it was starting to be too much to deal with. That was when Ryan began to look at the revenue they were generating after these changes, which became the turning point in starting a search for a new email marketing platform. 

Sendlane's solution

Ryan began putting together a list of must-haves Grey Ghost Gear would need from another email marketing platform. Aside from making it easier to actually send emails, there were a few more boxes that needed ticking. 

At the top of the list was better deliverability to help increase CTR and, ultimately, revenue. Next, the need for top-notch customer service with a more one-on-one feel. Lastly, the new platform had to incorporate intelligent email marketing automations — something that was entirely non-existent on their current ESP at the time. 

Soon enough, Ryan came across Sendlane and signed up for a free trial. From the first call with Sendlane’s customer service team, Ryan was impressed by the level of insight and help the team members gave. It was a refreshing change of pace from what he and his team at Grey Ghost Gear were accustomed to. 

5. Strawberry Hill Baking Company Drives $42,000+ Revenue During Holiday Campaigns with Sendlane

Because of his tech background, Marc is a big believer in the importance of innovation in products. He knew from experience products that stopped innovating couldn’t keep up with customers' needs. 

Initially, they started using Constant Contact as an email provider. Then they moved through a few other tools, including Klaviyo, trying to find an ESP that didn't come with a steep learning curve without losing eCommerce capabilities like automation and SMS. 

As he started his search, Marc eventually stumbled across Sendlane. After giving it a try, he fell in love with the important marketing features like browser behavior tracking and ease of use. 

When Sendlane recently added SMS to the platform, Marc went to work using Sendlane’s email and SMS opt-in features to collect content and grow their list. Their SMS list increased to 2500+ in just a couple of months right in time for Black Friday and Holiday season shopping.

6. Wellgrove Health Harnesses Sendlane's Intuitive Platform to Create Powerful Marketing Automations

Dustin, President of Boundary Bend Wellness, has always known two things: That olives are a powerful antioxidant he swears by, and email marketing is the name of the game in eCommerce business. 

After coming on board with the company, Dustin started diving deep into the areas of business that were generating revenue. 

As they started pushing out various email marketing campaigns on their current platform, he found that the interface was hard to navigate, the open-rates weren’t anything to write home about, and the email automation features were non-existent.  

Wellgrove continued to work on growing their brand. All the while, Dustin kept an eye out for a new email marketing platform worth trying out. At the suggestion of a developer he worked with, he signed up for a free trial with Sendlane and soon enough was on a call with an Account Manager. 

Our platform’s influence

Our platform’s role was predominantly to do housekeeping on the existing email list (which at that point had been cut down to 200,000 people after a re-engagement campaign). From the new segments, the Skybound Entertainment team was able to better study their audience, adapt their thinking, and come up with new ideas to keep their target audience interested and engaged. 

On top of helping them streamline the way they spoke to their audience, the Skybound team also gained a trusted supplier in the process. We do our best to understand the individual needs of each and every one of our clients, aligning these with the visions they have for growing and expanding their operations over time. 

These case studies have showcased the effectiveness of email marketing for eCommerce-focused businesses. If yours is looking to grow its revenue from online sales, it might be a good time to think about making the switch to Sendlane. We love working with all different industries and business sizes, from startups to major brands. We are here to introduce efficient marketing automation into your operations, saving you time and allowing you to redirect company resources wherever else they might be needed. 

Partner with Sendlane and it won’t be long before it’s smooth sailing for your email marketing strategy and campaigns, leaving room for your team to focus on generating inspiring content ideas for the audience segments you’re targeting. Get in touch with us today to find out more about how we can help you get there!

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Caitlin Hutchinson

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The State of Email Marketing in 2022

How to use the latest email trends to your advantage.

American computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email message (to himself) in 1971. By the early 1990s, we already had a spam problem . In the following three decades email would rise and fall in popularity, as consumers faced increasingly aggressive online advertising campaigns and juggled more and more communication methods. With the advent of social media , some marketing prognosticators even warned of an impending end to the original electronic message. But as we’ve seen: email is not dead . Ninety-nine percent of us check it every day . And that’s why the email marketing market is expected to more than double by 2027 . (Fortunately, most of us consider email to be “ the most personal channel to receive communications from brands.”)

(More Than) Three Mind-Changing Email Marketing Stats

Not only is email not dead, it generated a 4,200% ROI in 2021. That’s ridiculous. But if it’s not enough to convince you, here are three other reasons four out of five marketers say they’d rather give up social media than email marketing :

• Email marketing is 400% more effective than Twitter or Facebook at reaching your target audience(s) ( McKinsey & Co. )
• Nearly eight in 10 consumers believe email is the best channel for company contact, preferring it almost twice as much as any other ( DMA Consumer Tracker )
• More than three quarters of all marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months ( Hubspot )

In fact, nearly 320-billion emails were sent in 2021, and that number is expected to exceed 333 billion in 2022. As much as that means email’s here to stay, it also means there’s a lot of email marketing competition. To help you outperform your industry, I developed the official Customer Engagement Insider list of email marketing tips for 2022 and beyond.

The Top 10 Email Trends of 2022

Want to know how to do email marketing? In the last decade and a half I’ve developed, iterated and optimized the email marketing strategy of numerous companies, nonprofits and agencies, large and small. I’ve also implemented and overseen dozens of email marketing campaigns — and each one has enhanced my understanding of what works and what doesn’t. In 2022, though, we’re still facing a lingering pandemic and “ The Great Resignation ,” so for this year’s list of the most important email trends I also relied on what other experts are saying. 

Take this advice, discuss it with your team, and test out the strategies and tactics against what you’ve been doing. (Then, sign up and share your results in the comments below the article.) 

1. Data Privacy, Data Decay, and the Customer Data Platform

Privacy laws are changing , all the time, and we can no longer rely on third parties for collecting our customer data. Also, because of COVID, more people are moving around and re-thinking their priorities than ever before, leaving our data out of date . From what I’ve read, experts are recommending organizations use double opt-ins to protect data quality. Others are urging email marketers to redefine success, and focus more on data collection and aggregation techniques than ‘vanity’ metrics like open rates. 

I suggest you consider investing in a customer data platform , a marketing and CX technology designed to unify your data across all your online and offline sources. 

2. Segmentation and Personalization 

Between March and August 2020, 20% of all consumers switched brands completely and seven in 10 tried new digital shopping channels; the retail sector experienced a decade’s worth of growth in digital penetration in mere months. Nevertheless, for most retailers the surge in data didn’t help them better market to their customers and prospects. Why? Because their DMP or CRM or MMH’s outdated data modeling prevented them from effectively capturing critical shifts in consumer behavior. In turn, this prevented them from better understanding their customers. And today’s customers expect to be understood and appreciated by the brands they shop. They expect to interact with these brands, and personally connect with them. They’re sick and tired of traditional digital advertising and email marketing approaches.

Marketers who send segmented email marketing campaigns experience an up to 760% increase in revenue , but if you don’t know who to target — and when, where and how to target them — you’ll waste a lot of money sending marketing emails that alienate your audience(s). Even if you’ve created personas and communicated correctly to the right consumers, you can expect a lot of unsubscribes, abandoned carts and customer churn if you don’t translate each conversion event into personalized messaging through dynamic segmentation. This is how Netflix and Spotify outpaced their competitors. And with the data collection, unification, profiling and segmentation capabilities of a CDP , you can easily implement, iterate, optimize and glean invaluable insights from your email marketing campaigns.

3. Artificial Intelligence

One way to deliver a personalized, empathic experience to your email marketing recipients is to leverage artificial intelligence, or AI. Of course, it must be done with care; if you misuse or overuse AI, you can create the opposite effect, alienating your customers. To get the benefits, without the risk, start by using AI in your email marketing strategy for predictive analytics, split-testing subject lines , cleaning up your mailing lists and optimizing send times .

4. Omnichannel Marketing

Google has found that 98% of Americans switch between platforms and devices on the same day. This is why marketers who simply use three or more channels in any one campaign deliver a 287% higher purchase rate . Of course, if you optimize how you use these channels, you can experience even better results.

While multichannel marketing allows you to cast your net as wide as possible to reach more consumers and build brand awareness, marketers who commit to omnichannel marketing provide a consistent customer experience across channels — and retain nearly nine of 10 customers (versus 33% for those who don’t)! So what does omnichannel marketing mean?

Ninety percent of all consumers expect consistency in their interactions no matter where they are. Omnichannel marketing represents a rethinking of the customer lifecycle , with a focus on providing a seamless and personalized user experience across all channels relevant to the buyer journey. In other words, email may be alive and well, but it doesn’t stand alone. 

With omnichannel marketing, you don’t send email blasts or even targeted automated messages without first incorporating your email marketing strategy into an overarching 360-degree marketing strategy that integrates all essential channels. And the best way to achieve this is by first gathering, standardizing, validating, deduplicating and consolidating your data from all sources.

5. Empathy Marketing

Today’s consumers want more than consistency, and more than personalization. To be truly customer centric, you must fully embrace the person behind the consumer behavior; to understand your customers, their pain points, and what motivates them to act, you need to see through their eyes. In other words, you have to build trust by demonstrating personal empathy across your website and/or physical location, social media accounts, emails, text messages, digital ads and customer service communications.

Take Hotels.com, for instance. Instead of urging people to travel during the pandemic or scrambling to create new revenue streams, the company encouraged people to stay home . Company leadership knew this approach could cost Hotels.com near-term revenue, but that it would also demonstrate to their customers that the people at Hotels.com actually care about the health and safety of the people who use their services. Although Hotels.com took a risk, nothing eviscerates brand trust like showing all you care about is money.

Another, less risky way to show empathy in marketing is to provide in your emails and other communications what your audience is actually looking for. For many, it’s the opportunity to interact with your brand.

6. Interactivity

Customer engagement is “ a proven way to boost your sales ,” and delivering interactive experiences across the customer journey is one of the most effective ways to improve engagement. Yet, only 23% of brands have started experimenting with it, and only 32% are planning on trying it soon. This means you can separate yourself from almost everyone else who’s emailing your customers — simply by adding animated GIFs, image rollover effects, gamification elements, polls, surveys, interactive sounds and user-generated content. Gamification alone can help you increase customer interactions by up to 40%.

7. AMP for Email

You know AMP: Google built it in 2015 as an open source technology designed to boost page loading speeds on mobile devices. But did you know Google also released AMP for email ? It could increase your engagement and conversions by 500% , by delivering the interactivity that more than half of all email recipients want . With AMP for email, users can take a survey, respond to an invitation, reply to a comment, or zoom in on products. Clickable interfaces allow users to explore your content without ever leaving the email for a landing page. But AMP’s real strength is that it can pull live data into an email, ensuring that each and every recipient will see the most up-to-date information no matter when or how they open your AMP email.

8. User-Generated Content and Social Proof

Buyers today are more selective about the brands they interact with and purchase from — and with consumers 240% more likely to view user-generated content as authentic (compared to content created by brands), now’s the time to invest in a strategy that leverages user-generated content in email marketing and other channels across the buyer journey. 

To get started, scour your social media channels and the world wide web for videos, images, reviews and testimonials featuring your products. Don’t forget TikTok. Don’t forget YouTube. Then, incorporate the best of the best into your AMP emails, social media posts, social commerce channels (like the Instagram Shop) and website (as an interactive element, through an app like TrustPulse ). 

Do not, under any circumstances, fabricate your user-generated content; sophisticated consumers will catch you, destroying the valuable trust you’ve built for your brand.

9. Accessibility and Inclusivity

Another way to damage your reputation (with one-billion people worldwide) is to ignore the need for accessibility in your email marketing. By implementing accessibility best practices across all your digital communications, you can ensure your message reaches all your customers (including those with vision impairment) — and everyone is included. You can also stand out among your competitors, since only about half of all companies maintain these practices consistently. 

Here are a few ways to start improving your accessibility today:

• Add header tags (like H1, H2, and H3) to guide readers through the email
• Add alt-text to any image so a screen reader can read the description
• Use only GIFs with an animation flashing rate that is not between 2 Hz to 55 Hz, as this can aggravate photosensitive epilepsy
• Use proper color contrast to make it easier for colorblind people

10. Mobile Optimization

More than 50% of email campaigns are viewed on mobile devices and mobile-optimized emails are 65% more likely to generate clickthroughs to your website; yet, at least 20% of all email campaigns are still sent today without mobile optimization . So, make sure your email marketing provider either automatically optimizes for mobile or allows you to do so. Otherwise, switch providers. The mobile takeover has begun.

Image Credits   (in order of appearance)

• Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/uGcDWKN91Fs
• Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/U33fHryBYBU
• Photo by Drew Dizzy Graham on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/s4dfrh7hdDU
• Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with  Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/SU9MbBY0Obs

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9 Great Email Marketing Case Studies (and Counting)

• News and Updates Updated August 2020 Posted: August 2015

On this page

Transparency is hot right now, but not in email marketing.

You can see how many Twitter followers a brand has. Lots of businesses blog about their audience growth. And some newsletters share their subscriber count as social proof .

But no one talks about open and click rates, ROI or impact on the bottom line. It’s taboo in the email world.

That makes it really hard to find email marketing case studies. If you want inspiration for your own campaigns, there aren’t many options. You can:

• Read blogs like this one 🙂
• Dive into ReallyGoodEmails.com
• Sign up for newsletters and products to receive their emails

Other than that, all you can do is test your assumptions relentlessly.

We’d like to make it a little easier to read stories about great email campaigns so we collected some of our favorites. Here is the criteria for the case studies we included:

• They are real case studies, not a best practices pieces.
• They include quotes or data from the campaign creators.

That sounds simple until you start exploring the web for stories that meet those two rules. We’d like to add to this list so if you know of a great email story, let us know in the comments.

Together, these posts are long enough to be a book. So we turned them into one.

Download an .epub file

What Startups Can Learn from Watsi’s Wildly Successful Email Campaign

Read it | Share it | Save it

This story is too nuanced to accurately summarize but here’s a primer.

Watsi is the first non-profit to be part of Y Combinator. They crowdsource healthcare funding for people all over the world. To drive recurring revenue, they broke out their monthly donation feature into its own product and launched it separately.

They used email to source early feedback, used social proof to create buzz and built a personalized newsletter to keep users informed about their donations.

Here’s a snippet from this post:

Part of showing people what they’re getting is investing in communications where you aren’t asking for anything. Instead, you’re thanking people for their business or their participation. You’re acknowledging your end of the deal where you’re committed to delighting and surprising them. This is something that for-profit startups tend to neglect – the importance of not just sending a receipt for a purchase, but honing that interaction to make customers feel something more.

Email marketing is isn’t a channel – it’s one layer of a customer-centric company. This case study reveals how complex (and truly valuable) it is to use email to grow a business.

Building a Newsletter Welcome Series from Scratch

Help Scout’s signature flair is purpose .

As they considered how to welcome to new subscribers – and there are more than 51,000 – they knew that aligning business goals with a great experience was key. They pulled it off by ensuring each email sought to achieve a single, measurable goal.

Each of the five emails in the sequence is explained in detail, including the intended purpose and suggestions based on their own learnings.

How The Skimm’s passionate readership helped its newsletter grow to 1.5 million subscribers

Building a profitable business with email is very different than using email to build a profitable business.

Watsi, for example, uses email to support their product. In The Skimm’s case, the email is the product. When newsletters become a business, it’s worth paying careful attention to their strategy. (We detailed an example of this in our Death to the Stock Photo case study .)

The Skimm’s email newsletter reaches 1.5 million daily. That growth has been fueled by an intense understanding of their target reader and an community that is eager to help. There are more than 6,000 “ Skimm’bassadors ” actively spreading the word about this business.

There’s a lot to learn here but if you take just one lesson, let it be this:

The Skimm focuses on women ages 22-34 in big cities throughout the country. They are busy, they’re on the go. It’s a professional audience. And we looked at what they do first thing in the morning. Your alarm goes off, you grab your phone, and you read emails from friends and family first. It really made sense to us to introduce a product that fit in with that routine. And email is very much in the routines of the demo that we’re going after.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Meet your target audience where they’re already active.

How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week

I hope you’re noticing a trend in these case studies: Pulling off a wildly successful email campaign isn’t easy.

Even when the goals are simple, the logistics tend to get messy. The smartest companies dig in anyway.

In Harry’s case, they used a landing page to gather 100,000 emails in the week leading up their launch. As a shaving company, they are competing against institutions like Gillette. The only way to outsell them is to out-maneuver them.

Harry’s drove traffic to a landing page, asked for a signup, then used a referral mechanism to incentivize people to share the product. Those who referred friends earned free products. They gave away a ton of free razors that week but it cost way less than broadcasting the upcoming launch on traditional advertising channels.

This post gets into the nitty gritty of driving the traffic, managing the flood of interest and actually delivering the free products.

The Art and Science of Turning Free Trials Into Happy Customers

If you’re a small startup, you’ll be able to relate to this story.

Alex Smith runs marketing at ContactMonkey . As a growing company with a small team, it became too difficult to onboard new customers one at a time. So Alex created a series of events in the application that trigger emails or pause existing campaigns.

The result was not only happier customers, but faster growth. Once the triggers were in place, ContactMonkey was able to guarantee that each customer received the right messaging at the right time.

This post shares the exact emails and triggers ContactMonkey uses to onboarding their users, along with some ideas for blurring the lines between CRM and email marketing.

The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails

I think this line will pique your interest about Obama’s last campaign: “Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails.”

The Obama campaign famously used a casual, conversational in tone in the email subject lines. The most famous subject line was simply “Hey.” Another – “I will be outspent” – raised $2.6 million on its own.

Source: Slideshare

This didn’t happen by accident. The folks behind the campaigns tested incessantly, sometimes playing with a dozen or more variations on a single email. Here’s one of the most interesting findings revealed by digital analytics directo Amelia Showalter:

…these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest,” says Showalter.

They bottled lightening over and over through rigorous testing and exceptional copywriting. The viral effect was manufactured, not serendipitous.

What We Learned From A Week Of Prototyping A Newsletter In Public

When Buzzfeed began developing a daily email newsletter, the editors turned to Facebook for feedback. They shared their prototypes ( here’s an example ) with their own friends. They made each iteration of the newsletter public to ensure they could patch any holes before launch.

Interestingly, editor Millie Tran said the most useful part of this exercise was the intense focus on the product/market fit:

The most valuable thing about this exercise was that it allowed us to avoid getting too emotionally attached to any one idea early on and to keep tweaking and adjusting the product to be better.

As we’ve written before, email is an extension of your product and should be treated with the appropriate care.

Buzzfeed also wrote a follow-up to this post about using email to test early versions of their mobile app.

Learning vs. Selling

This is a personal story based on my experience here at Vero. Last year, we created 14-step campaign to welcome new subscribers to the blog. The open rates were decent and we heard some positive feedback from customers about the campaign.

Then we nuked it.

Because it a) wasn’t helping us convert readers into customers and b) it wasn’t helping us learn about our readers. We replaced the entire campaign with a single email.

Tons of people replied and we’ve been able to shape our content and emails to match our readers’ challenges and needs. The lesson is here to create opportunities to learn before you try to sell your product.

The Most Successful E-mail I Ever Wrote

A single email can change a business.

Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, realized this after he created this masterpiece of a shipping confirmation email :

Source: Smashing Magazine

The email went viral. At the time, no one put any effort into their transactional emails . The personal touch resonated with a lot of people.

That one silly e-mail, sent out with every order, has been so loved that if you search Google for “private CD Baby jet” you’ll get over 20,000 results. Each one is somebody who got the e-mail and loved it enough to post on their website and tell all their friends. That one goofy e-mail created thousands of new customers.

Simon Schmid calls this finesse the “personality layer.” Here are a number of other examples.

A few more case studies from the Vero archives:

• TripAdvisor’s Unfair Email Marketing Advantage
• How Amazon Dominates E-Commerce with Email
• How Death to the Stock Photo Built a Profitable Business with Email
• Why Product Hunt’s Emails Are So Addictive
• Evernote’s Simple But Useful Onboarding Emails

And here’s a few suggestions from readers:

• How The New York Times gets a 70 percent open rate on its newsletters

Want to send more personalized mobile and email messages to your users?

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Email marketing remains a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their target audience and achieve remarkable results.

In this article, we will delve into real-life case studies of businesses that have leveraged email marketing to attain impressive outcomes.

By examining these success stories, we can uncover the strategies and tactics that contributed to their achievements, offering valuable insights for aspiring marketers.

Case Study 1: Clothing Retailer’s Personalization Powerhouse

A well-known clothing retailer implemented a highly personalized email marketing campaign that led to a substantial increase in customer engagement and sales. The key to their success lay in collecting and leveraging customer data effectively.

By segmenting their subscriber list based on demographics, browsing history, and previous purchases, they tailored their email content to match each recipient’s preferences. They utilized dynamic content to showcase personalized product recommendations, discounts, and exclusive offers.

This level of personalization fostered a strong sense of relevance and urgency, resulting in a significant boost in open rates, click-through rates, and overall conversions.

Insights: Collecting and utilizing customer data to deliver personalized content is crucial for maximizing email marketing success . Effective segmentation, dynamic content, and targeted offers are key elements to enhance engagement and drive conversions.

Protip: Segmentation becomes easier when you have the right target audience’s email list. GetEmail.io is a one-stop service to help you find every professional’s email address. Its Chrome extension can help you find bulk email addresses even on platforms like Gmail, LinkedIn as well as Salesforce!

Case Study 2: E-commerce Startup’s Cart Recovery Triumph

An e-commerce startup struggling with abandoned carts implemented a cart recovery email campaign that yielded remarkable results. By integrating automation and behavioral triggers, they sent timely and personalized emails to customers who had left items in their carts without completing the purchase.

These emails included persuasive copy, compelling visuals, and a clear call to action to encourage recipients to return and complete their purchases.

Furthermore, the company offered exclusive incentives, such as discounts or free shipping, to entice customers back to their website. As a result, the startup experienced a substantial increase in cart recovery rates, ultimately boosting revenue and improving customer loyalty.

Insights: Utilizing automation and behavioral triggers to implement cart recovery email campaigns can effectively reclaim lost revenue. Persuasive copy, compelling visuals, and enticing incentives play a vital role in driving customers to complete their purchases.

Case Study 3: Software Provider’s Onboarding Success

A software provider implemented a well-crafted email onboarding series to educate and engage new users. They designed a sequence of emails that guided users through the onboarding process, providing step-by-step instructions, useful tips, and video tutorials to help users maximize the software’s capabilities.

However, they incorporated interactive elements, such as surveys or quizzes, to gather valuable feedback and further tailor their messaging. This comprehensive onboarding campaign significantly reduced user churn and increased product adoption, leading to higher customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.

Insights: An effective onboarding email series can enhance user adoption, reduce churn, and foster customer loyalty. Providing valuable resources, and interactive elements, and seeking user feedback are key components of a successful onboarding campaign.

Conclusion:

These real-life case studies demonstrate the power of email marketing when implemented strategically.

By understanding and applying these insights, businesses can harness the potential of email marketing to achieve impressive results, foster customer relationships, and drive business growth in the digital age.

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Email Marketing Wins: Real Case Studies and Success Stories!

by PanGrow | Nov 22, 2023

In the world of digital marketing, email marketing stands out as a super effective tool, whether you’re selling to other businesses (B2B) or directly to consumers (B2C). When you consider various email marketing case studies, you will find that diligent and intelligent efforts in this area never go to waste.

Sure, there are other ways to get people interested in your business, but email has some awesome benefits that really stand out, especially when you compare it to social media and search engines. They say that for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you can expect a whopping $39.40 in return. That’s a pretty amazing return on investment!

But here’s the thing: just sending emails here and there isn’t enough. You’ve got to make sure that people are actually opening and reading your emails. If they’re not opening them, your goals won’t be met. So, it’s super important to focus on getting the best possible email open rate.

In the competitive digital world, mastering email marketing is like having a superpower. It’s not just about sending messages; it’s about making sure people open them, pay attention, and connect with your business. As you navigate the digital landscape, making your emails stand out and ensuring people open them is key to long-term success and building strong connections with your audience.

Let’s explore a few email marketing case studies that had some tough challenges. They used email marketing in a smart way to not only deal with these challenges but also find great success.

HubSpot – Personalization Powerhouse

Company Background:

Founded in 2006, HubSpot stands as a prominent platform for inbound marketing and sales solutions. Catering to a diverse user base, HubSpot faced the challenge of delivering personalized content to a broad audience.

Challenge :

The challenge for HubSpot was to connect with users on an individual level in a landscape flooded with generic emails. How could they make their communications more relevant and engaging for each unique subscriber?

Overcoming with Email Marketing:

HubSpot tackled this challenge head-on by leveraging the power of personalization in email marketing. Using sophisticated data analytics, they delved into user behaviour, preferences, and interactions. Armed with this information, HubSpot crafted highly tailored email campaigns, recommending personalized content, providing targeted product suggestions, and offering exclusive discounts based on users’ past engagements.

For instance, if a user frequently engaged with blog posts on a specific topic, HubSpot would send curated emails featuring related content. This strategy significantly boosted user engagement, as recipients felt that the content was specifically tailored to their needs and preferences.

HubSpot implemented dynamic content in emails, allowing them to display different content to different segments of their audience. This level of personalization not only enhanced the user experience but also contributed to increased conversion rates and customer loyalty.

Amazon’s Retail E-commerce Marketing

Background:

Amazon, founded in 1994, initially started as an online bookstore and has evolved into one of the world’s most influential e-commerce and cloud-computing giants. As an e-commerce behemoth, Amazon faced the substantial challenge of helping users navigate and discover relevant products within the immense array of options available on its platform.

The Challenge:

The challenge for Amazon was twofold. First, users could easily feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of products available, leading to decision fatigue and potentially reducing the likelihood of a purchase. Second, with such an extensive inventory, there was a risk that users might not find products that genuinely aligned with their preferences and needs.

Overcoming the Challenge:

Amazon ingeniously tackled this challenge by leveraging the power of recommendations through email marketing. Recognizing the value of data-driven insights, Amazon implemented sophisticated algorithms to analyze each customer’s browsing history, past purchases, and overall engagement on the platform.

Using this wealth of data, Amazon crafted targeted and personalized email campaigns. These emails were designed to suggest products tailored specifically to each customer’s interests, preferences, and purchase history. For example, if a customer frequently browsed or purchased electronics, they might receive emails featuring the latest gadgets, accessories, or related items.

By delivering content that resonated with individual customers, Amazon significantly increased the likelihood of them discovering and purchasing products aligned with their interests.

Mailmodo’s Pain Point Resolution

Mailmodo, a marketing platform, provides email marketing case studies of how their clients have successfully resolved pain points and discovered new growth avenues through email marketing. Their email marketing case studies highlight the power of personalization, automation, and segmentation in driving engagement and conversions.

By tailoring email content to specific audience segments, businesses have been able to deliver highly relevant messages that resonate with their subscribers. This approach has led to increased open rates, click-through rates, and ultimately, higher conversions.

Mailmodo’s case studies exemplify the impact of leveraging email marketing tools to address customer pain points and drive business growth.

How did Zillow do it?

Zillow, a prominent real estate and rental marketplace, is dedicated to providing consumers with valuable data. With an extensive database of property listings and user information, Zillow faced the challenge of effectively presenting this data in an engaging and actionable way.

Zillow needed to overcome the challenge of delivering relevant information to its users, ensuring that it was both useful and compelling enough to drive them to take action. With such a vast amount of data available, finding a personalized approach to engage users was crucial.

Zillow leveraged its user data to send personalized, data-driven emails to its audience. These emails included tailored home recommendations and market trends based on each user’s search history and preferences. By utilizing the power of personalization and data-driven insights, Zillow aimed to deliver content that resonated with its users and encouraged them to take action.

The implementation of personalized, data-driven emails yielded remarkable results for Zillow. Users responded positively, with a significant increase in engagement observed. More users clicked through the emails to view properties and utilized various services offered by Zillow. This heightened engagement demonstrated the effectiveness of using data to drive email marketing campaigns. By delivering timely and relevant content, Zillow successfully captured the attention of its audience and motivated them to take further action on its platform.

Dollar Shave Club: Humor and Personality for Retention

Dollar Shave Club, founded in 2011, disrupted the shaving industry with its subscription-based model that delivers razors and grooming products to customers’ doors.

In a competitive market, differentiating the brand and retaining customers were significant challenges. Dollar Shave Club needed a strategy that went beyond the transactional nature of their business.

Dollar Shave Club infused humor and personality into its email campaigns. From witty subject lines to entertaining content, the brand made every email a delightful experience for subscribers. This approach not only distinguished the brand from competitors but also fostered a sense of community among its subscribers, contributing to higher customer retention rates.

Don’t be afraid to inject personality and humour into your email campaigns. It can make your brand more relatable and memorable, fostering a stronger connection with your audience.

Starbucks: A Brew of Personalization and Customer Loyalty

Starbucks, a global coffee giant, had the challenge of keeping its customers engaged and loyal in an extremely competitive market.

With a vast customer base, Starbucks needed to ensure that its marketing efforts were personal and engaging to each customer. They had to ensure their promotions were reaching the right people at the right time.

Starbucks leveraged email marketing to send personalized offers based on customers’ purchase history and preferences. They used data from their loyalty program to segment their customers and deliver highly targeted emails. For instance, a customer who frequently purchases a particular drink would receive promotions related to that drink.

Starbucks’ personalized email marketing efforts resulted in increased customer loyalty and higher sales. Customers appreciated the personalized touch, which made them feel valued and understood. This case study showcases the power of personalization in email marketing.

Grammarly: Nurturing Leads with Educational Content

Grammarly, launched in 2009, is a writing assistant tool that helps users improve their writing skills and enhance the clarity of their communication.

With a user base spanning a wide range of writing abilities, Grammarly faced the challenge of catering to diverse needs. Lead conversions into loyal customers requires a strategic approach.

Grammarly used email marketing for lead nurturing. Their emails included valuable tips on improving writing skills, insights into premium features, and success stories from users who benefited from the tool. By providing educational content, Grammarly not only kept users engaged but also positioned itself as an indispensable tool for anyone looking to enhance their writing.

These email marketing case studies collectively emphasize that email marketing is not merely a communication tool; it’s a dynamic force that can drive engagement, build trust, and foster meaningful connections with an audience. The common thread among these achievements is the strategic utilization of data, personalization, transparency, and education to create impactful and resonant email campaigns.

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Let’s begin by taking a look at what’s worked for us. Firstly, the recipe to create an award-winning case study begins with having executed a successful email marketing campaign , highlighting key events in the journey that paved the way to a successful result.

Having case studies as part of your marketing arsenal can be extremely effective as a marketing tool to drive more sales to your business. When looking at the facts objectively, readers may be more inclined to take a second look, or even a third to see just how your email marketing successes came to be.

Let’s delve in a little further, shall we? Case studies are essentially a snapshot into who you are, what your business stands for and what you do best. However, case studies market your message in reverse, if you will, by illustrating how these key points can be the solution to their pain points. Furthermore, case studies can summarize what your business does without clients having to scour your website in detail.

Case studies, like ones about your email marketing , are another way to solidify your marketing message to achieve your ROI objectives - hopefully exponentially. So why not hop on over to our posts to see how we can enhance your email marketing strategy and boost your email marketing efforts even more.

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B2B email marketing: Proven strategies and examples

I'd been working in email marketing for quite a while before I took on my first B2B campaign. Of course, I knew that B2B campaigns needed to be handled differently than my usual consumer outreach, and I thought I'd made the necessary tweaks.

I learned from my B2B blunder , and in an effort to save other marketers from similar mistakes, I've put together a guide to building a tailored B2B email marketing strategy.

What is B2B email marketing

Why B2B emails require B2B strategies

7 key strategies for designing a b2b email campaign, best practices for b2b emails, 7 b2b marketing email examples that stick the landing, what is b2b email marketing.

B2B email marketing is a tactic for promoting products or services to business-to-business customers. At its core, the goal is to nurture relationships with potential customers, build brand awareness, and generate sales. Successful strategies involve distributing newsletters, promotional offers, product updates, or free tools—all hyper-tailored to the needs and interests of the recipient.

When done right, B2B email marketing provides valuable information that encourages the recipient to make a purchase or take another desired action to move through the marketing funnel .

General email marketing tactics don't work for B2B campaigns for the same reason two nearly identical doors still require different keys: you're trying to get different people in the door. Here are a few specific ways in which general email marketing tactics fail when employed on B2B campaigns. 

Email targeting

Most email marketing campaigns target individuals, but B2B campaigns target companies—or rather, multiple individuals at a company. Whereas an individual getting a B2C email is responsible for every stage of their own buying journey, a company's purchasing process involves people in all sorts of roles.

When you identify a B2B target, you're really identifying a group of targets—and your B2B online marketing strategy needs to account for the differences among multiple contacts within a company.

What this means in practice: To reach people effectively, you need to be sending different emails to different individuals within the same target company.

Cycle length

Buying something on your own doesn't take very long. To paraphrase one of my favorite Ariana Grande songs: you see it, you like it, you want it, you got it. Easy. (In my case, there's usually also a "you check your bank balance" somewhere in there, but that's a bit of a mouthful for a pop lyric.)

For a company, on the other hand, the purchasing process can be a lot like herding cats. Getting multiple departments to coordinate on a decision, especially one that requires a budget approval, takes a Herculean effort—and Herculean patience.

What this means in practice: Since email marketing campaigns last the length of the customer journey, expect your marketing cycles for B2B companies to take a lot more time.

Email tone and content

Consumers know that they're consumers, so when you're writing B2C emails, you can be more obvious about the fact that you're trying to make a sale. Content like promotions, discounts, and sale announcements fit in a B2C campaign but would feel strange in an email to a business.

B2B emails tend to perform better when they focus on providing information and resources. Educational content like trend reports, industry benchmarks, how-to guides, and webinar recordings help prove your brand's value to a B2B subscriber. 

What this means in practice: You'll need to source entirely new content types and formats to use for your B2B campaigns—repurposing B2C content is out of the question.

You get it: B2C or generalized email strategies are a no-go for your B2B campaign. But telling you what tactics not to use without giving you any to replace them wouldn't be very helpful of me, would it? Here's how to nail your B2B email marketing campaign.

1. Profile your target customers

When targeting a particular B2B company, you're really targeting that company's buying center—the group of people who determine whether or not the company purchases your product. 

The buying center includes six main roles:

Initiators are the first people at a company who become introduced to and interested in your product. 

Users are the people who will use your product day-to-day once the company decides to make the purchase.

Buyers are the people who handle the logistics and administrative aspects of a potential purchase, including budgeting, contract terms, renewals, etc.

Deciders are the people who ultimately decide whether or not to approve the buyers to move forward with a purchase. 

Gatekeepers are the people (usually administrators) who control the flow of information to and from other members of the buying center. 

Influencers is a catch-all group that encompasses anyone within an organization that influences the decisions and opinions of other members of the buying center. (In other words: everyone else at the company.)

If you've done any marketing in the past, you may be familiar with the ideal customer profile (ICP), or the audience vignette created by outlining your prospective customers' demographics, behaviors, characteristics, challenges, and needs. Your B2B targets are groups, so you'll need to expand your ICP to incorporate different columns for each different role in the target company's buying center. 

2. Think like a buyer

With a customer profile matrix in hand, you can step into the mindset of each member of your target customer's buying center in order to better understand what kinds of emails fit each role.

For example, an Initiator or a User will likely be interested in a how-to guide that relates to an aspect of the User's job. If you sent that same email to a buyer, who primarily deals with the purchasing and renewal of a product rather than its actual function, it would probably get sent straight to the trash.

The more customized your emails are to your targets' actual needs, the more effective they'll be—and the fewer unsubscribes or spam reports you'll get.

3. Use email segmentation

When I'm running campaigns at scale, the thought of tailoring my emails to each individual at a company would send me running for the hills.

Email segmentation tools (which are built into most email marketing platforms) allow you to group your subscribers according to their characteristics. Instead of grouping contacts by company or industry, create lists for each of the different buyer personas. With as few as six segmented lists, you can hit everyone on your target list with content that's customized to their interests and needs. 

4. Plan your campaign in stages

The B2B email marketing cycle should more or less mirror the B2B customer journey . By planning your campaign around the stages of the customer journey, you can ensure that your emails are relevant not only to who your target is, but also to where they are at a particular point in time. 

There are five main stages of the buyer journey, and different types of content are best suited to each stage.

Awareness : The target is learning about your brand and product but isn't seriously thinking about making a purchase yet. How-to guides, eBooks, thought leadership, and other educational content can help the target grow familiar with your brand.

Consideration : The target is specifically interested in your product, but won't reach the decision-making stage until they've gathered more information. Case studies, customer testimonials, and product demos can provide more information about your product's value and push the target toward making a purchase.

Decision-making : The target is interested in buying or trying your product, and is now considering things like budget and return on investment in order to determine whether they're ready to buy. Free trials, discount offers, and cost estimates can influence your target in the direction of a purchase.

Retention : Once your prospect is a customer, your goal is for them to buy more of your product, renew their subscription, or otherwise continue your customer relationship. Product tutorials and high-level educational content can help your target get the most out of your product's features and encourage them to remain a customer. 

Advocacy : Targets who are loyal customers can help boost your marketing efforts by becoming brand advocates —they'll tell others about your product and bring in new targets. Surveys and referral program offers can engage customers in more active brand advocacy.

5. Use templates

Email templates are another valuable tool to keep in your work-smarter-not-harder toolbox. Building a solid library of high-quality templates takes time, but you'll thank yourself later when you're able to crank through hundreds of emails in a day and still clock out by five.

The key to using templates is that the email recipient shouldn't be able to tell it's a template. Build a library of templates for each different type of email that you typically send, using the same brand elements across the board but ensuring each template is still visually distinct. Each of my campaigns has a different template for:

Welcome emails

Thank-you emails

Gated content delivery emails

Survey emails

Curated content roundup emails

Newsletter and what's new emails

Educational and thought leadership emails

Case study and report emails

Event and webinar emails

Unsubscribe emails

Maintaining a template library will not only simplify your process, but it also ensures that you can take time off with the peace of mind that whoever fills in for you will have pre-made email skeletons ready to go.

6. Save time by automating

Email marketing automation allows you to complete detailed tasks that would be impossibly time-consuming to do manually. 

For example, you might set up an automation that tags email contacts with any new information you receive about them, like demographic details and job characteristics. With a robust tagging system, you can target hyper-specific audiences like "female executives in the biotech industry" or "past attendees in the Los Angeles area" with just a few sort filters.

Your email marketing platform's sequencing function will also allow you to set up drip campaigns to be sent out over a period of weeks. That's a pretty common example, but there are plenty of others as well:

Add and update contacts based on form submissions on your website

Segment your subscribers into different lists based on their behaviors (e.g., event attendance)

Send colleagues relevant updates about new subscribers, email lists , and sales leads

Much like my template library, my email marketing automations let me sleep well knowing that things are running smoothly without my human brain.

And if you want to automate across apps, use Zapier to create entire integrated workflows. Learn more about how to automate your email marketing across your tech stack, or get started with one of these pre-built workflows.

Send emails via Gmail when Google Sheets rows are updated

Send Microsoft Outlook emails for new Typeform entries

Add or update ActiveCampaign contacts with new Facebook Lead Ads leads

It's increasingly important to establish an AI marketing plan , and that goes for B2B marketing efforts, too. Here are some ways you can use artificial intelligence to smarten up your B2B campaigns:

Text generation: AI writing generators can churn out email copy in a flash. You can specify everything from voice to product positioning to persuasiveness to humor, honing your messaging exactly how you want it. Just be sure a human is the final eyes.

Translation: Many AI writing tools can also translate messages to different languages and even use natural language processing to account for regional dialects and slang.

Optimized subject lines: If you struggle to come up with a gripping subject line, you can use AI text generators or AI chatbots to test out alternate phrasing that fits within a strict character count.

Automated campaigns: When in doubt, just hand the whole operation over to the robots. AI sales assistant tools like Postaga can automate entire outreach campaigns for you. And most marketing automation software is incorporating AI into its optimization.

Lead scraping: Not sure who to reach out to at a company? AI apps like Clay can instantly scrape the web for verified contact information.

You could create the most perfect B2B email marketing strategy the world has ever seen, but it still won't do much if what's inside the email isn't up to snuff. Quality packaging and structural integrity are key to a successful burrito, but everyone knows that the good stuff is what's inside.

Write great subject lines

Granted, this tip does apply to all types of email marketing. All email marketers should be checking to make sure their subject lines are short enough to be seen in the inbox ( Mailchimp says the magic number is 60 characters or fewer). 

But B2C emails have a much higher likelihood of succeeding in spite of a bad subject line. I personally can't stand the way the alcohol delivery app I use writes its subject lines, but I open all of their emails anyway because I like being able to buy my wine without putting on shoes. But when I'm at work? A cold email with an annoying subject line is going to get sent to spam right away.

The point is: the busier your targets are, the more important your subject lines will be. Place your email's value-add (the resource, tool, or offer it contains) at the front of the line. Make your call to action clear —tell the recipient what you want them to read, watch, submit, or sign up for right away. 

Personalize as much as humanly (or automatically) possible

I mentioned before how important it is to automate certain functions of your campaign, like email segmentation and audience targeting. Within the email itself, you can use import fields to make sure the email is addressed to your recipient by name, to include their company in the subject line, and to add in other information that helps your email look less generalized.

Like subject lines, custom fields are more important for B2B emails than consumer blasts. Most of the emails from that alcohol delivery app contain just one large graphic with a coupon or deal—it's not addressed to me by name, because it doesn't need to be.

Be conversational

When writing B2B content, it's easy to drift too far into professional mode and wind up coming across stiff and robotic. Remember that you're still writing to people , even if your targets are brands. 

Think from a human's perspective: what kinds of business emails do you pay attention to? Which subject lines do you open, and which do you send straight to the trash? Leading your campaign empathetically will help you connect with your targets.

Consider a supplemental software

If you're still sending your cold email templates in Gmail and logging the results in Sheets, it might be time to upgrade your software situation. 

Email marketing services like Mailchimp and Sender make email campaigns easier to manage. These platforms let you do things like test heading variants, compile and segment lead lists, create templates, and schedule sends. 

If you're looking for a more consolidated experience for your sales and marketing teams, a good CRM can help you track leads, monitor campaign performance, collaborate across teams, compile reports, and even automate processes. You can even incorporate broader sales and marketing efforts, combining everything from customer support to B2B advertising campaigns into one convenient hub. 

Whether you're a one-person emailing powerhouse or a sprawling enterprise with a dozen teams, housing all your contact and email data inside a single dashboard can be a real game changer if you're used to piecemealing multiple solutions together.

Keep things scannable

If you take time to think about what email strategies work best on you, you'll likely find that the most effective emails are pretty brief. Business people are busy, and few people have the time to get through an email that's packed with text.

Keeping your emails brief doesn't mean you can't still give them substance. You can pack a lot of information into an email with smart formatting and a little bit of strategic design. Besides, the goal is to get them to click through to your content, so it's ok to place the good stuff after the jump.

I get a lot of emails at work from B2B brands, many of which I subscribed to on purpose. For at least the first few emails, though, I'm evaluating them to decide whether I want to unsubscribe or if this brand's content is worth reading. Just because a brand is great doesn't mean their emails will be—there are plenty of companies killing it on the stock exchange but floundering in my inbox.

Remember that you're not just looking to get your recipients to click through, download, or register in the short term. You're also looking to prove that your content is valuable, well-curated, and pristinely presented so that your recipients want to see what's inside the next email you send.

Here are a few B2B emails that I've received personally that not only got me to open them but also impressed me with what I found inside.

1. New user email: Smartsheet

Buyer persona : User

Journey stage : Retention

It's essential to communicate to your recipients that you're not wasting their time. New users are beyond the purchasing stage of the buyer journey, so you're at risk of losing their engagement if they decide they no longer find your emails useful. The first emails after a company buys your product need to prove to them that your emails have a clear value-add and are worth opening.

Smartsheet's new user email uses large photos and minimal text to convey to the recipient that they're sending over useful resources and nothing else—as a project management and time tracking tool, their brand knows more than most how little time business people have for cold emails. 

Using design to clearly title, subtitle, and attach images to your emails will ensure that people's eyes are drawn exactly what you want them to see, as soon as they open your email. 

2. "What's new" email: Datawrapper

Buyer persona : User, Influencer

Journey stage : Awareness, Retention

Company updates are the email equivalent of someone walking up to your desk and starting to talk about themselves. If you have the time, and you're in the mood for a chat, that can be a perfectly lovely way to start a conversation. But if not, you're not only going to dismiss that person in the moment, but you're also going to start avoiding them whenever you have work to get done.

The key to update emails is to clearly tie your bits of news to things that directly impact the user (or potential user). For example, Datawrapper's company update leads with a new dark mode feature rollout for their platform. This is both a company update and a product update, which helps readers see the value of the email up front and encourages them to keep reading.

3. Download delivery email: Gallup

Buyer persona : Initiator, User

Journey stage : Awareness, Consideration

When I request a download from a website, it's usually a report or dataset that I need for a project I'm working on. I'm almost always in the middle of my workflow when I submit a download request, so when the email arrives, I have zero interest in doing anything except downloading what I need and moving on.

The only thing that could catch my attention while I'm in that flow is something else that could help me with the task at hand. The Gallup email below is one extremely rare example of a content download email that actually got me to open another piece of content that I didn't specifically ask for. 

I downloaded this State of the American Manager report while working on a piece about business operations and people management, so when I saw a link to a resource on "transforming your outdated performance management practices," I clicked—the topic seemed like it held pertinent information that could be valuable for my project.

When you're sending any B2B email, put yourself in the mindset of the person you're sending it to. For downloads and other emails that are designed to arrive at a particular point in time, give them what they want and not much else.

4. Live event and webinar email: SlashNext

Buyer persona : User, Buyer, Influencer

Journey stage : Awareness, Consideration, Decision-Making

If I ever got a physical invitation that included long paragraphs about the history of the event, the host's backstory, and a few other topics only vaguely related to the event itself, the invitation would be in the garbage before I even got to reading the date. You don't clutter your mailed invitations with a bunch of unnecessary information, so don't do it to your emailed invitations, either.

Of course, when you're cold emailing invitations, you do need to at least explain what the event is and why someone might be interested in attending it. Take a page from SlashNext's book—their invitation makes the most of a small amount of space by including a bulleted list of actionable information that attendees will hear during the webinar, but it doesn't extend beyond two paragraphs total, so it still feels light and efficient.

5. Trend report email: Exploding Topics

Buyer persona : Influencer, Initiator

Trend reports are, by definition, cutting-edge. Though gimmicks are usually a big red flag in B2B emails, a trend report email gives you some room to experiment with (tasteful!) out-of-the-box design. Take Exploding Topics' weekly trend report, for example, which showcases the top trends from the week based on search data. 

With easy-to-digest graphs showing how each trend has grown year-over-year and detailed insights on where the trend is heading, the buyer takes in high-level information quickly while also getting a taste of the value of Exploding Topics' product.

6. Curated content email: HoneyBook

Curated content emails are some of the most fun to put together and to receive. Sending out recaps of your recent content can drive a ton of traffic from people who wouldn't have come across your posts organically, but you don't even need to include your own content for one of these emails to be effective. 

If you have a talent for it, curating a collection from around the internet gives you an opportunity to become something of a tastemaker in your readers' inboxes, leading to skyrocketing open rates as people increasingly look to you for the cool information they won't find on their own.

No matter what kind of curated content you're sending out, it won't matter if your email looks overpacked or messy once the reader opens it. It can be tempting to want to jam-pack a ton of links into these emails, but that will only leave you with an email that looks like it belongs on Hoarders . Stick with just a handful of links paired with large photos, larger font, and very few (if any) link descriptions. 

HoneyBook's content roundup emails are super sparse, but in a way that I think most readers appreciate—I was able to give this email a quick scan and know right away whether I wanted to click through or close out. 

7. Newsletter email: Mind Tools for Business

Buyer personas : Gatekeeper, User, Influencer

Journey stage : Consideration

Although they can be similar to curated content emails, newsletters give marketers a little more wiggle room to write. People know what newsletters are, so when they open them, they're doing so when they have a free moment to actually read what's inside it.

That said: quick, clean takeaways are still the surest pathway to newsletter success. Notice how Mind Tools for Business uses attention-grabbing headlines like "10 things managers should never say - and what to say instead" that quickly convey exactly what the reader will get out of the article. 

Whether you're including links from news sites or modeling your own "headlines" after real news outlets, headlines can lend your newsletter a "must-know" tone of voice that will engage readers right away.

Why a top-notch B2B email marketing strategy pays off

It takes some time and effort to learn how to really succeed at targeted B2B email marketing, but that investment is worth it—according to Campaign Monitor , the return on investment for B2B email marketing (when done correctly) is 4,200%, or $42 for every $1 spent. For small business owners especially, email marketing is often the number one way to get the biggest bang for your buck. And since email marketing is easy to automate, you can improve your profitability even further by getting more done while your tech handles what would have taken hours to do manually. 

B2B email marketing is undeniably tricky, but taking time to do it right pays off. The learning curve may be steep, but it's worth climbing—and no-code automation from Zapier can help you get to the top of it with simple, automatic workflows that connect all your favorite applications.

Related reading:

Connect multiple email marketing tools

The best free email marketing services

What is AI marketing and how can you leverage it?

ChatGPT prompts that write great sales emails

This article was originally published in April 2022 and has also had contributions from Luke Strauss. The most recent update was in April 2024.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

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Email marketing best practices and tips for 2022

Table of Contents

On average, email earns $36 for every $1 spent . The next–highest ROI growth channel returns half that.

In 2022, you simply need a strong email marketing strategy to grow your business.

Email stands out as a growth marketing channel because it’s permission-based. Unlike ads, subscribers choose to hear from you. If you play your cards right, you earn access to inboxes—and you earn trust.

Commerce follows trust.

Given the importance of email marketing, we spent a month interviewing top email marketers at fast-growing startups. These are practitioners—folks who are actually scaling email marketing engines. Email isn’t just an afterthought for them. It’s their craft.

Turns out, most of the legacy advice you’ll find on the internet is outdated at best, and very often misleading.

So this blog post breaks down a list of 10 email marketing best practices and tips that have been rigorously tested this year . You can immediately apply them to your email marketing strategy.

1. Grow your email list in 3 simple steps

2. how to write subject lines that actually get clicks, 3. great marketing emails are mobile-first, 4. use automation: segmentation and email flows, 5. change your call to action (cta) to a call to value, 6. improve deliverability to get your emails in more inboxes, 7. ignore open rates—here are the metrics that matter, 8. the best marketing automation tools based on your business model, 9. optimal time to send emails, 10. practice good email list hygiene, why does email marketing even matter.

Before we dive in, it pays to know the two main reasons why email marketing is worth investing in.

1. Email is an owned channel

It’s great to grow a Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn following. But with social media, only a fraction of your audience will ever see your organic content. You’re at the mercy of an algorithm that decides whether to surface your content.

With email, you're directly in subscribers’ inboxes. No gatekeepers.

2. Email is high ROI

Email is the most profitable marketing channel.

Why? Because it’s cheap to send emails, and your best-converting customers are people who are already on your list. Email is where the most dollars remain uncaptured.

Email marketing best practices and tips

We’ll skip the basics. Instead, here’s a list of email marketing tips that the pros are implementing to build real, fast-growing businesses.

Use them to create an email marketing engine that turns prospects and leads into paying customers, and that retains existing customers for high lifetime value.

You don’t need a huge list. Instead, you want a growing list of people who are likely to trust you and buy from you.

The quality of your email marketing strategy comes down to the quality of your subscribers .

Here’s a tried-and-true email list growth framework for getting the right type of people to join your list.

Step 1: Choose a lead gen offer (lead magnet)

Create a lead magnet: a valuable resource you offer leads in exchange for their email addresses.

When a person visits your site and sees your lead magnet, they’re going to decide whether the magnet—the incentive—is attractive enough to justify providing access to their inbox.

• For ecommerce : A discount, free shipping, or product giveaway contest
• For SaaS : Free trials and demos or free tools
• For B2B : Gated high-quality content (white papers, ebooks, guides) or webinars

Step 2: Select a lead source (traffic source)

A lead source sends traffic to your lead magnet.

We suggest leaning into your main growth marketing channel, which is typically where most of your traffic is already coming from. We can help you develop your growth channel when you enroll in the Growth Program .

If you don’t yet have traffic coming to your site, experiment with these tactics:

• Paid promotion : Ads are the fastest way to drive email signups. You can pay to send traffic to your lead gen landing page. The ad channels that work best for lead gen include Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok.
• Organic social media : Send your organic social media traffic to your lead magnet. Post about it, and link it in your bio.
• Online communities : Add value to communities where your target audience hangs out. Slack groups, Reddit, Discord, etc. Answer questions, engage in discussions, make introductions—be as helpful as you can. Then occasionally share your lead magnet landing page with community members to move some of them over to your list.

You want to tap a source where you can get your lead gen asset in front of high-value leads.

Step 3: Set up email signup forms

Create email capture forms to pitch your lead gen asset. We suggest using a combination of the two types of forms below:

• Standard forms : Add an inline form to your landing page that clearly highlights the value of your lead magnet. Ask for an email in exchange.
• Popups : Marketers love to hate them, but they convert people who wouldn’t fill out a standard form. Consider adding one to your site.

While you’re working through each step of the framework, consider experimenting with different email list growth tactics .

Remember, quality of email subscribers matters more than quantity. Email addresses that sit idle on your list are worth little and can actually hurt your email deliverability, something we’ll cover later.

Want to make sure your emails actually get read? Check out our Own the Inbox video course from former Grammarly email marketer, Drew Price.

If people don't open your email, then your design, copy, and clever tactics won’t matter.

Your subject line (along with past email quality) determines whether people open your email.

Every email subject line you write should pique curiosity and be self-evident, personalized, and concise.

• Pique curiosity : Subject lines are like cliffhangers. Provide an inkling of the content within without revealing too much. Intrigue readers to open to satisfy their curiosity.
• Self-evident : You don’t want people guessing why you’re bugging them.
• Personalized : Your campaigns should be segmented (covered shortly in this post). Use a subject that's hyper-relevant to each sub-audience.
• Concise : Use 30 characters or less, or your subject will be cut off on mobile—and mobile users won’t open.

If you have the time when you’re setting up a new email, consider A/B testing your subject lines. You can do this for broadcasts like newsletters or campaigns like nurture flows.

Create multiple subject lines for a given email, and A/B test them on roughly 10% of your list or segment.

Then set up your email service provider (ESP) to send the variant that receives the highest open rate to the rest of your list or segment.

We've found that small iterations on your initial subject line work best because they require less time to write. And slight tweaks to your email subject line can lead to significant swings in open rates.

People are often curious about whether they should include emojis in subject lines. 

We’ve seen emails do well with and without them. Context matters, of course. Consumer businesses—ecommerce and consumer SaaS—with playful, casual brands can often get high open rates by using a single emoji in a subject line. Multiple emojis can come across as over-the-top and unprofessional.

When in doubt, run a quick test and go with the winning variant.

Also, avoid clickbait like the plague. This is one of the biggest mistakes marketers make when it comes to subject lines. People might open your emails, but they’ll soon associate your brand with spam—hurting your email open rates in the long run.

Most people read email on their phones.

Sounds obvious, but marketers neglect this far too often because there’s a disconnect—they use desktop platforms to create and send emails. It's easy to overlook mobile when you're working from a desktop computer.

If you're not creating mobile-first emails, your email marketing campaigns aren't fully optimized. 

The good news is that it's easy for email clients like Gmail and internet service providers (ISPs) to automatically adapt mobile-first designs to desktop (whereas the opposite isn’t true). So if you optimize for mobile, your design will look sharp regardless of the device.

Here's how you create great mobile-first emails:

• Back to subject lines. Remember, 30 characters or less to prevent them from getting cut off on mobile.
• Use a narrower, single-column design with plenty of negative space. This performs better on vertical screens.
• Use only big, legible fonts.
• Create large, easy-to-click calls-to-action (CTAs).
• Use small image files only. Many mobile devices are running weak processors. Compress your image files to prevent people from bouncing because of slow load times.
• Send a test email, and read it on your own phone before scheduling it.
• Add alt text to images in case they don’t render correctly on mobile.
• Don’t forget to add preheader text (preview text)—the text that appears next to or below your subject in email services like Gmail. 

Spotify’s year-end music recap executes mobile-first email to a T.

Subject: Your 2021 Wrapped is finally here —just over 30 characters long, and it's visible on most mobile devices.

Take a look at the bullet points above one more time. See how it weaves in all the elements of a great mobile-first email?

Marketers generate 760% more email revenue from segmented email marketing campaigns vs. non-segmented.

Segmentation is the practice of splitting your email list into different groups to provide contacts with more relevant and personalized content.

For example, say you’re growing a holistic health company. One person signs up for your email list while reading an article your team wrote about gut health. They then get an email that educates them on gut health, with relevant products. 

But another person lands on a meditation article and subscribes. They’d be in a separate segment and would receive emails and products relating to meditation.

Segmentation helps you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

That’s why it has such a high ROI.

With more targeted campaigns, your emails will see better performance: higher open rates and click-throughs. Plus, fewer people will mark your email as spam and unsubscribe.

So how do you actually use segmentation in your strategy ?

Set up email flows . These are email marketing campaigns that automatically trigger based on the way you segment your list, using factors like demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and subscribers’ relationships with your business.

Here’s an example of a flow:

• A customer signs up for your email list.
• They click on a blog post shared in your welcome email.
• They then visit five other pages on your blog over the next week.
• The fifth page visit triggers a follow-up email to them pitching a free trial.

You can vary the number of emails in each flow based on how your subscribers are engaging. Some flows perform best with three emails, while others need more than ten to drive action.

Use a call to action (CTA) to highlight the action you want subscribers to take, and to make that action stand out from the rest of your email’s copy:

Your CTA button should be the easy next step for your email readers. And it should be enticing.

There are two common mistakes we see with CTA copy:

• It describes an action, but it doesn’t provide value. “Visit site” doesn’t offer anything to readers.
• It’s vague and salesy. "Improve yourself!" would set off any bs radar. (Another reason to avoid this mistake: Because of its spammy language, ISPs could block your email from getting delivered to inboxes.)

Instead of a traditional CTA, feature a call to value . Use your CTA button copy to describe the value readers receive from clicking the button:

• “See it in action” instead of “learn more”
• “Begin designing” instead of “visit site”
• “Browse winter jackets” instead of “shop now”
• “Tell your friends” instead of “share to social media”

Recipients often skim emails and don’t pay close attention. So when copywriting, create eye-catching CTA copy with specific next steps.

You can use text links for your CTAs, but just make sure they’re on their own line. They’ll stand out more and will be more likely to be clicked by people who are quickly skimming the email.

Email deliverability is the percentage of emails that make it to subscribers’ inboxes.

High deliverability means your emails will land in front of more subscribers, as opposed to getting trapped in spam folders or blocked by firewalls. 

The result? More people open, read, click, and convert on your emails—so your email ROI increases.

Low deliverability means your emails reach fewer subscribers. Naturally, your emails then get less engagement, which further reduces your deliverability in a vicious yet avoidable cycle.

How do you improve deliverability?

• List hygiene : Collect emails ethically, remove inactive contacts, and use double opt-in. More on this one shortly.
• Get your content right : Send quality emails to people who genuinely want to receive them. All great email marketing strategies do that.
• Encourage engagement : Make emails a two-way street to prompt replies.
• Follow privacy laws. There are a few you need to follow in order to maintain healthy delivery: GDPR in the EU, CAN-SPAM in the US, CCPA in California, and CASL in Canada.

The email marketing metrics you should be tracking have changed rapidly over the last couple of years. 

That’s in large part because of privacy updates that hamper accurate metric tracking.

One practical example: Don’t put much emphasis on open rates. Open rates have always been kind of a vanity metric. They don’t tell you how good your email is. They tell you how good your subject line is, and how much recipients liked your past emails.

And in 2022, some email clients automatically open all images. Since tracking pixels are image elements, guess what that means for accurate reporting?

iOS15 rightly gave subscribers the option to opt out of tracking. And it’s likely that most iOS users chose not to let marketers track opens on their emails.

Instead of open rate, here are four metrics we recommend tracking—even if you don’t have time to track the rest:

• Conversion rate : The percentage of recipients who convert based on your email
• Revenue per subscriber : Revenue earned per subscriber on your list
• Revenue per email : Revenue earned per email
• Click-through rate (CTR) : The percentage of recipients who click any link in an email

To improve the metrics you’re tracking, create really good emails. That’s what will drive clicks, conversions, shares, forwards, and overall email marketing performance.

Your ESP is email marketing software that automates your campaign distribution.

You can handle almost all aspects of email marketing from your ESP: email templates and flows, email writing, list hygiene, segmentation, even basic tracking.

The right ESP will set you up for success. 

Here are the email marketing tools we most often recommend, based on your business type:

• SaaS, apps, B2B : CustomerIO , Iterable . These generally offer the most flexible automations. They're best for the complex email marketing systems that SaaS businesses often require.
• Ecommerce : Klaviyo , Drip , Mailchimp . Each has unique ecommerce-specific features and seamless integrations with Shopify.
• Creators/influencers : ConvertKit . ConvertKit was built for creators. It comes with easy content-upgrade features that other ESPs lack. And it’s not bloated with ecommerce features that creators don’t need. It’s simple and easy to use, and it allows creators to focus on … creating. It’s also priced fairly for individual creators—not full-blown businesses.

Typically, late morning around 10am in the recipient’s time zone is the best time to send emails.

But the better way to approach send times is to personalize them to the recipients. Email marketing tools provide Send Time Optimization to automatically send your email at the time when your recipient is most likely to open it.

And another tip: Try delaying your welcome email.

Most marketers set up a welcome-email automation that greets new subscribers immediately after signup.

Welcome emails are a critical opportunity to move leads down your funnel. They tend to get more opens than other promotional campaigns.

To get more people to open and read it, delay your welcome email by 15 to 45 minutes in your ESP.

The time delay removes the subscriber's mental connection between their signup and your email. This bypasses the reflex to ignore. You’ll likely get more opens as a result.

We hinted at list hygiene earlier when we covered deliverability—it’s an email best practice that’s often overlooked.

Be sure to apply these three important tactics:

• Use double opt-in.
• Clean your list regularly.
• Make it easy for people to unsubscribe.

Use double opt-in to improve email engagement

A low open rate doesn’t necessarily mean people are ignoring your emails.

It’s possible your emails weren’t opened because a visitor:

• Misspelled their email address
• Used a fake email
• Used an old corporate email

Broken emails can be a drag on your email deliverability.

That’s one of the many reasons why it's a wise idea to use a double opt-in confirmation for subscribers.

Double opt-in means subscribers get a confirmation email, which they must click before they can be added to your list. It ensures that people truly want your emails.

The result: fewer emails going to spam, and greater engagement from your recipients.

Clean your list each quarter

We recommend deleting inactive contacts from your email list for two reasons:

• Since email platforms charge per contact, inactive contacts can cost you upwards of 50% of your email bill.
• The higher your open rate, the more Google delivers your emails to inboxes as opposed to the spam folder. You can increase your open rate by removing contacts who don't open your email.

That's yet another benefit of removing inactive contacts: Those who remain see your emails even more.

Here’s a process you can use to clean your list:

• Once per quarter, duplicate your email list, and search for contacts who've been inactive for over three months.
• Before you remove them, try a win-back email campaign. Explain that recipients will be removed if they don’t start engaging with your emails.
• Once you have a cleaned list, test a new campaign for a higher CTR.

Make it easy to unsubscribe

Make it easy for folks to unsubscribe. Include a clear unsubscribe link in the footer of your email. There’s no sense in burying it—if people stay on your list because they can’t find your unsubscribe link, then they’re weighing it down. Or they might find it easier to just mark your email as spam.

The best email marketing is built on trust

There you have it! Implement these email marketing best practices, and you’ll be well on your way to a growing list of people who trust you and choose to buy from you.

Inboxes can be overwhelming. So the best approach is a human one: Show subscribers that there are humans behind your emails—people who truly want to help solve their problems. That's how your email will rise above a flooded inbox.

At the end of the day, if you create great email content for people who actually want to hear from your brand, you'll grow your list, your leads—and your business.

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Read these next, 15 swipe-worthy email marketing examples to inspire your next campaign.

Marketers are always on the hunt for the best email marketing campaigns. In this post, we break down 15 high-impact emails and show you why they work using a simple 4-part framework. By the end, you'll know how to decide which examples make sense to pattern-match in your own campaigns.

How to Write a Marketing Email: 17 Steps to More Conversions

Follow these steps to write great marketing emails—the kind that connects with subscribers and drives conversions.

Email Segmentation: How to Personalize Your Campaigns for More Conversions

Most companies—from small businesses to venture-backed startups—simply get segmentation wrong. In this post, we'll simplify email segmentation so you know which strategies actually matter.

The 9 Most Important Email Marketing KPIs

Digital marketing trends change fast, but one thing has been incredibly consistent for years: the effectiveness of email marketing. In this post, we focus on the KPIs that practicing marketers at top companies are using to build their email marketing engines.

Email List Growth: 19 Tactics to Help Grow Your Email List in 2022

Email marketing has one of the highest ROI's around, with an average of $36 made for every $1 spent. In this post, we cut through the noise with a proven 3-step process to start growing your email list the right way, right now.

Email Deliverability Essentials: How to Get More Emails into Your Recipients’ Inboxes

Email deliverability is the percentage of emails that make it to subscribers’ inboxes. Find out how email deliverability works, why it matters, and how to improve it.

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2023 Email Marketing Trends: Predictions from 20 Experts

By kelsey johnson december 19, 2022.

2022 was a good year for email, what with all the disruptions on social media platforms, the rise of AI-generated content, and ongoing improvements in email technologies like AMP for email.

We’re expecting 2023 email marketing trends to be even more interesting, especially after asking 20 email marketing experts what they think will be the big in 2023. 

Here are the email marketing trends and technologies they think will matter most: 

• Reduced dependence on social media
• AI assistance in content creation
• BIMI and DMARC for email authentication and brand authority
• Alternative metrics to open rates in a post-Apple MPP world
• AMP for email
• Increased optimization for dark mode
• Design choices to engage the 2023 reader

Email marketing in an economic downturn

• Optimizing the customer journey
• Technology consolidation
• Bonus: Yahoo’s top-of-inbox email navigation

Creators and businesses will shift from social media towards email

What : Creators have already been moving their audiences to email in 2022 to contend with a fear of temporary social media bans and the drive to build closer connections. But 2023 could very well mark the switch from forward-thinking people to most creators asking their audiences to connect via email — and even an audience understanding of the need to do so.

Why : The end of 2022 marked obvious turmoil with Twitter , but also questions about a U.S. legal ban on TikTok and a decline (or change) in Instagram’s algorithm and popularity . All this is resulting in insecurity from those who depend on social media for their marketing or livelihood.

“Marketers will wake up from their dream of social being their main channel in 2023,” says Mor Mester, Head of Content Marketing at EmailVendorSelection. “They’ll realize that email and SMS marketing together delivers much better results.”

What to do : If you depend on social media marketing, work to convert your social media followers into email subscribers . This can include creating lead magnets and incentivizing your followers to opt in to your email list. Test out ways to connect with your social audience on different channels.

“2023 is the year when creators need to choose a partner who does email as their thing, not as an add-on.” Chris Vasquez, Chief Product Officer at AWeber

And be cognizant of the tools you choose for your email marketing.

“It’s time to stop trusting social media companies with your newsletter,” says AWeber head of product Chris Vasquez. “With Twitter shutting down Revue and Facebook shuttering Bulletin, 2023 is the year when creators need to choose a partner who does email as their thing, not as an add on.”

Mor Mester is the Head of Content Marketing at EmailVendorSelection . He has 5+ years of experience in email marketing and marketing automation.

Chris Vasquez is Chief Product Officer at AWeber.

AI assistance in content creation like writing and images

What : If you’re keeping up on what’s new in online marketing, you have probably heard of ChatGPT. It’s an open-source AI writing tool that you can interact with like it’s a person. AI writing tools like ChatGPT, CopyAI, and Canva’s Magic Write have seen a surge in popularity. That has queued them up to be one of the big email marketing trends for 2023.

“2023 might be a turning point for AI-assisted content creation. Canva’s release of Magic Write, based on OpenAI’s GPT-3, is a strong first step and a clear signal in that direction.” Massimo Arrigoni, CEO at BEE

Why : “The role of an email specialist is becoming a hybrid of marketer, creator, and Master of AI Prompt Craft,” says Jordie van Rijn founder of emailvendorselection.com. “AI tools can compose the perfect email, create summaries, propose subject lines, draft headlines, and create images as well. All while using proven copywriting formulas, the tone-of-voice and word count you tell it to. For organizations, this means that time spent on those tasks and the cost of email marketing can go down. Or the investment can go into other areas, like email marketing strategy and automation.”

“Some will probably experiment with AI-generated personalization on a scale,” says Radek Kaczynski, Founder and CEO at Bouncer. “However, those who will be the most successful will be the ones who use AI as an inspiration added to their knowledge of their recipients and their own intuition.”

What to do : If you want to get involved with AI content, it’s time to practice prompts. According to the experts, the key to effectively using AI in your emails is knowing what to ask the AI in the first place. Start practicing in ChatGPT now and you can become a “Master of AI Prompt Craft” in 2023.

But don’t worry too much about AI taking your job. “As the barrier to creating acceptable content gets lower, people will want higher quality content,” says AWeber’s Chris Vasquez. “There are some things that AI can’t replicate, like analysis you get from proprietary data and experiments. For newsletters to gain and capture interest will require a shift from sharing generic information to specific things you’ve learned, or stories that you can tell that an AI just doesn’t know about.”

Massimo Arrigoni is the CEO at BEE Content Design .

Jordie van Rijn is email marketing consultant at emailmonday and founder of emailvendorselection.com .

More businesses will implement BIMI and DMARC for email authentication and brand authority

What : Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a new set of verification for your emails alongside SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. When you have BIMI enabled, a brand logo will appear in the inbox next to your message.

Here’s what AWeber’s BIMI logo looks like in an inbox:

Here it is on a mobile app:

“2023 will be the year that businesses really start to take advantage of BIMI and its brand-enhancing benefits.” Brian Westnedge, Sr. Director, Alliances & Partnerships at Red Sift

Why : BIMI can help boost your brand’s visibility, build brand recognition, and reinforce trust. When readers see your emails in their inbox with a verified brand logo, they know it’s not a phishing or spam email.

What to do : Get ahead of the game! Set up BIMI for your email domain and stand out from the crowd before this becomes commonplace. Here’s what you’ll need:

• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication set up
• An SVG file of your logo
• Access to change your domain DNS

This Litmus blog post will walk you through the steps to get BIMI set up for your domain .

Brian Westnedge is the senior director of Alliances & Partnerships at Red Sift.

Email marketers will seek out alternative metrics to open rates in a post-Apple MPP world

What/why : As of September 2021, any emails you send to people who use Apple Mail are subject to Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) . What does that mean? Well, for email marketers that means your open rates likely appear higher — sometimes much higher — than they truly are.

After a year of sending emails in this post-Apple MPP world , marketers are finding more accurate and important metrics than open rate to assess the success of their email campaigns.

“A major trend for 2023 is drifting away from basic metrics like open rates and toward more meaningful KPIs.” Ann Handley, Digital Marketing & Content Expert

Ann goes on to say, “It’s partly driven by new data privacy rules making open rates chaotic and unreliable. Yet it’s also driven by our need to use email more strategically.

I see my own email newsletter (annhandley.com/newsletter) as a nurturing tool. So I track what I call the Open To Write Back Rate (OWBR) as a key indicator of engagement: How many subscribers hit reply and write back to me?

Why? It’s an important signal of engagement (AND ensures deliverability!).”

What to do : Identify the key metrics to track success in your own campaigns. Can you track success from clicks, sales from an email, or other engagement metrics? It might be time to encourage more in-email engagement with AMP for email. 

Ann Handley finishes by mentioning that “email newsletters help build relationships and trust. In 2023, adjust your metrics accordingly.”

Ann Handley , chief content officer at MarketingProfs, is a keynote speaker and Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

More AMP for email usage, specifically for transactional emails but also to create engaging content

What : AMP for Email is a framework to make your emails interactive and dynamic. You can make your emails interactive in many ways with AMP: Imagine a poll that you can take directly in an email (without navigating to another page) or a carousel that allows you to click through multiple images.

AMP for email has been around for years, but as more ISPs start to support it — the most recent being Yahoo in 2022 — email marketers will start to implement it. 2023 could be the tipping point for AMP for email that brings into mainstream email marketing trends.

“Brands adopting solutions like AMP Emails will drive greater user satisfaction and provide a better experience for their subscribers.” Matthew Vernhout, VP Deliverability (Americas) at NetcoreCloud.com

“Marketers will continue to focus on building consumer engagement in 2023. That means providing a seamless experience within the email message itself. Brands adopting solutions like AMP Emails will drive greater user satisfaction and provide a better experience for their subscribers.”

— Matthew Vernhout, of NetcoreCloud.com.

Why : People are already used to interacting with polls, quizzes, etc. on social media. It’s time they were able to interact with emails the same way. Plus, AMP for email can help you get more clicks — providing one solution to the Apple MPP tracking issue.

In addition to being fun and interactive, AMP for email is also useful. AWeber Product Manager  and AMP expert Dave Stys foresees more interactive AMP being used in 2023. 

“In 2023 I’m expecting interactive emails to really catch on,” Dave says. “The first place you’ll see them is in transactional emails like real-time order tracking and shipping statuses, product ratings and reviews, appointment scheduling, and subscription and account confirmation.”

Imagine tracking where a package is without even having to leave an email. That’s just the beginning of what AMP for email can do. 

What to do : AMP for email is already available in many email service providers, including AWeber. Set your account up for AMP for email and think about which interactive elements make sense for your emails.

Matthew Vernhout is the VP Deliverability (Americas) at NetcoreCloud.com .

Dave Stys is an expert AMP for Email speaker and developer and product manager at AWeber.

Increased optimization for dark mode users to improve CTR and personalization

What : Dark mode is a display option for apps, computer screens, and many smart devices that “flips” the colors — dark background and light text. Reading a screen in dark mode alleviates eye strain and can reduce battery usage.

Why : A recent study showed that 81.9% of smartphone users use dark mode ! And since 81% of all emails are now read on mobile devices, it’s time for email marketers to start optimizing. (Currently, only ~5% of emails are optimized for dark mode.)

“If you aren’t optimizing your emails for dark mode, 2023 is the year to get it done.” Emily McGuire, Email Strategist at Atlassian

Plus, BEE CEO Massimo Arrigoni says, “Sending emails compatible with dark mode will boost your sender reputation.” That just makes sense. Better emails for more people will result in more opens, clicks, and better deliverability.

What to do : “If you aren’t optimizing your emails for dark mode , 2023 is the year to get it done,” says Emily McGuire, Email Strategist at Atlassian. “What does that look like? Outline transparent PNG images in white so they’re not lost on a black background. And use dark mode friendly colors for your text and backgrounds.”

Dark mode “switches” your email’s colors. So, in addition to outlining your PNG images, choose contrasting colors for your emails — like dark gray on white.

Emily McGuire is the email strategist at Atlassian.

Massimo Arrigoni is the CEO at BEE Content Design.

2023 email marketing trends in design

What/why : Every year, the attention span and interests of readers evolves — and designers need to evolve with it. Here’s what the experts think will be big email marketing trends in design for 2023.

Rise of neo-brutalism design

“The neo-brutalism aesthetic has become an increasingly popular trend for email marketing.

Neo-brutalism is characterized by strong angles and geometric shapes to create an atmosphere of certain strength and resilience. We’re seeing more tech companies adopt this design style – particularly those who are looking for a cutting-edge approach to their marketing campaigns (think Figma and Gumroad). They’re drawn to its bold angles, clean lines, and graphic elements that come together to offer an unforgettable visual presentation.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C tech brand, if you want your emails to stand out from all the noise in your customers’ inboxes, consider embracing neo-brutalism as a design strategy.”

— Rukham Khan, data-driven marketing enthusiast, technology researcher, and writer at AllNewBusiness.

Example of neo-brutalism design from Figma:

Source: Email Newsletter Examples

Rukham Khan is a data-driven marketing enthusiast, technology researcher, and writer at AllNewBusiness . He believes trust should be the basis for all marketing communications.

Increased use of GIFs

“ GIF s are going to be a real game changer in 2023. They offer a fun and creative way to grab your customers’ attention in the right place of your email and drive more conversions.”

— Annette Palmieri, BEE

Annette Palmieri is the Growth Marketing Specialist of BEE Content Design.

Video in emails

“In 2023, I expect more immediate brand adoption of the use of video in email , to deliver more authentic storytelling experiences and increased engagement in the inbox. The market will begin to showcase available email innovations, enabling video to automatically play in email for up to 60 seconds, without the need to click a link to go to a browser or a play button to deliver compelling experiences.”

— Lisa S. Jones, CEO at Eyemail

Lisa S. Jones is the Founder and Chief EyeMail Officer (CEO) of EyeMail Inc.

Easy-to-read templates

“The human attention span can be compared to that of a goldfish. If you want your content to convert, stay short and simple in your design. Avoid useless content and focus on what really matters to your readers (and your business). Grab attention and highlight what’s important with bold typography and emotive images.”

Design diversity

“We’ll see more diversity in email styles – both design-wise and content-wise. For example, instead of sending just pretty HTML emails promoting the next sale – or even presenting the newsletter roundup – we’ll send intermittent “personal, plain-text” reach-outs that touch on the intersection of brand story and customer need. These pattern interrupts will encourage more brand engagement.”

— Nikki Elbaz

Email specialist and founder of Nikki*Elbaz .

What : There have been extensive conversations in the news throughout 2022 about a potential economic downturn . That means two things for 2023 email marketing trends: 

• Preparing your own business and marketing practices for a recession.
• Understanding your customer’s changing needs during a recession.

Here’s what the experts have to say:

“The 2023 Song of the Year is going to be the one called ‘Do more with less,’” says Lauren Meyer, CMO at Socketlabs. “With tighter budgets and less resources, email marketers will start squeezing every bit of insight they can from email performance metrics well beyond opens and clicks. It’s a year for doubling down on what is working, to the tune of better segmentation and optimizing inbox placement.”

“In an economic downturn email marketers are required to be highly reactive to business needs, without in most cases any additional resources,” says Dela Quist, Founder of Alchemy Worx. “I see the trend will be for smart marketers to take advantage of their ESP’s design automation capabilities. Features such as drag-and-drop email builders and well-stocked template libraries are a must if you want to deliver quick results. If you have them, use them. If not, look around.”

“As marketers, it’s important to understand how crisis may be impacting our customers’ needs and how we can address those needs in our marketing messaging and campaigning.” Komal Helyer, award-winning CMO at Fractional

“When we are in an economic crisis such as a cost of living crisis, our needs can become more acute and pressing,” says Komal Helyer CMO at Fractional. “This can affect our behavior and our ability to make decisions. As marketers, it’s important to understand how crisis may be impacting our customers’ needs and how we can address those needs in our marketing messaging and campaigning.”

What to do : Take a look at your business first. How can you better track what’s truly working in your emails? Then, focus on your customers. What are their “must-haves” and how can you highlight what you sell to help them?

Lauren Meyer is CMO at SocketLabs.

Dela Quist is Founder of Alchemy Worx the largest email marketing agency.

Komal Helyer is an award-winning Fractional CMO with over 20 years of experience in email and digital marketing.

Businesses optimizing the customer journey with technology

What/why: When you sit down to write an email, it’s easy to forget all of the interactions you’ve had with your audience. One person may have bought something from your store and gotten several transactional emails in the past day. Another may have signed up for a lead magnet and are currently receiving your welcome emails. You might have just talked to a third on the phone.

“In 2023, technology and aggregated data will give us a much better understanding of our customers and our relationships with them.” Radek Kaczynski, Founder and CEO at Bouncer

What to do : Map out the potential journeys of your customers and identify places where you can improve your messaging, or send more or fewer emails.

Radek Kaczynski is Founder and CEO @ Bouncer , an experienced deliverability expert and e-mail verification consultant, and a believer in the possibility of improving human to human e-mail communication.

Technology consolidation — using as few platforms as possible for what you need

What : With platforms like AppSumo constantly enticing you to try new tools, you may have found yourself using a multitude of technologies for different tasks. According to our experts, one of 2023’s email marketing trends will be the year of consolidating your marketing technology (martech).

“One of the big trends that I think everyone should be focused on in 2023 is making sure that every organization fully understands their current martech strategy.” Spencer Kollas, VP, Client Partner at Merkle

Why : “A seamless user experience will save people’s time and improve their focus,” says Radek Kaczynski, Founder and CEO at Bouncer.  “For example, email marketing or marketing automation solutions might integrate with the best email verification API… and provide powerful email verification functionalities inside.” 

What to do : Take a look at the marketing tools you already use. Which of them has the most functionality? Can you replace a landing page builder or link-in-bio tool with your email marketing tool?

Spencer Kollas is the VP, Client Partner at Merkle.

Bonus to watch: Yahoo’s top-of-inbox email navigation

Keith Kouzmanoff, postmaster at inter7.com is watching out for innovations in Yahoo’s inboxes. He says, “Yahoo announced in October 2022 a new email layout streamlining images, attachments, reminders, orders, subscription services, gift cards and more. It is called top-of-inbox email navigation and it looks very promising. 2023 looks like a new email interaction for end-users.”

Keith Kouzmanoff is senior email postmaster at inter7.com .

What do you think the biggest 2023 email marketing trends will be?

What do you think is going to be the next big thing in email for 2023? Leave a comment below👇!

Keep reading:

Kelsey Johnson

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• Sep 27, 2022
• 11 min read

Cold Email Case Study: How Cold Email Drove Dramatic Growth For These 8 Startups

Can you guess what keeps marketing executives around the world up at night? It’s the pressure they have on their marketing budget. According to a survey among CMOs , marketing budgets have climbed to 9.5% of total company revenue in 2022 , a significant increase from 6.4% in 2021 . Budget increases however don’t always translate to increased revenue that’s why it’s so crucial to focus on marketing activities that maximize your budget. There are many ways on how you can spend ( or blow ) your marketing budget but email marketing remains to be one of the most cost-effective and high-leverage marketing channels out there, with an astounding 3600% ROI or $36 for every dollar spent according to a survey among marketers .

Today, we’re going to take a look at how these 8 B2B cold email case studies have helped unlock massive growth for startups.

Let’s dive right in. 💦

1. A Single Cold Email Was All It Took To Get Mark Cuban To Sign A Deal Worth $500,000 🎯

First on our list is the story of Dhruv Ghulati, the founder of Factmata . Ghulati had a big problem to solve, rampant fake news, and hate speech has been plaguing the internet causing around $78 million worth of damages per year, according to their estimates. He knew he needed funding, not just from anybody, but from billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban . He then set out to write the perfect cold email to see his need through.

On his first try, he immediately nailed the pitch within a day of sending the email. To his amazement, Cuban responded favorably by asking him to send over more information.

Cold Email Template

Here’s the exact cold email text Ghulati used.

Cold Email Strategy

Mark Cuban receives around 750 to 1,000 emails every day. So what made this cold email so effective?

No nonsense pleasantries and straightforward.

He presented a pressing problem and provided a clear value proposition.

The message catches the attention of its reader because of how personal it was - Ghulati mentioned in the email that Mark Cuban had been vocal about the topic.

Cold Email Results:

About 9 months later, his powerful email message successfully led to a $500,000 investment from the billionaire himself. That’s just one email though, imagine how much more can a perfectly written, and targeted cold email achieve when done scalably over thousands of leads. 🤯 Related: Wondering how to stand out the way Ghulati did with Mark Cuban? Check out our killer guide on this topic.

2. How This Struggling Startup Leveraged Cold Email To Scale From 1.5k to 100k MRR in 12 Months 🚀

Nathan Barry of ConvertKit tried everything from content marketing to webinars to partnerships but nothing seemed to make his startup grow past $1500 MRR. He then realized that these marketing strategies weren’t paying off. He ditched the inbound approach and pivoted to an outbound marketing strategy in the form of cold email marketing.

Cold Email Template:

Here’s the exact email he used.

He was targeting his competitor’s existing client base, it’s no easy feat to grab the attention of your competitor’s clients. Here’s how this cold email template won them over.

His email focused on his reader’s frustrations and not on the “pitch”.

He made the email personal by mentioning respected bloggers that were in the same space as the readers.

The email ditched the fluff, by being short and punchy. Exactly how a good cold email ought to be.

Scaled his startup from a plateau of 1.5k to 100k MRR in 12 months with minimal ad spend.

Related: Cold email has gotten a bad rap because of bad cold email practices . Check out our guide on cold emailing tips to get you on the right track.

3. The Cold Email That Started A $100 Million Empire 💸

You probably wouldn’t believe it if we said that a humble email helped put Jason Cohen of WP Engine on the path to a $100 million empire. But that’s exactly what happened. Cohen had a brilliant idea but needed to reach a very specific audience, in this case, he was targeting WordPress consultants. Through research, he used their pain points to address a need, and so he wrote a winning cold email that would later set the stage for his eventual success.

Here’s the cold email template he used.

Image credits: Harry Dry of Marketing Examples

Cold Email Strategy:

The email was extremely successful, he achieved a stellar 100% response rate. Let’s break down how irresistibly good this email was.

Because he only had a few minutes to make a good impression, he opened with a no-frills intro. Cold emails are like elevator pitches, don’t waste time by beating around the bush.

The email is brilliant because notice how he doesn’t reach directly into the prospect’s pockets by jumping straight into the pitch.

He personalized the email by mentioning how he understood, valued, and respected how busy WordPress consultants are.

Today, WP Engine is a well-loved, and thriving business with more than 500+ employees earning about 100 million dollars per year . And all of this began with a humble cold email campaign.

4. “The Greatest Cold Email Ever” Helped This Startup Stand Out From Its Competitors 🏆

Neil Cocker of Ramp T-Shirts produces personalized t-shirts. While the startup doesn’t sound as cool as anything with “AI” in it, nor is it groundbreaking, it’s really their cold email strategy that helped them stand out from a mundane and saturated industry. Neil Cocker could probably go down in email history as the writer of one of the “ greatest cold emails ever ”.

Back in 2017, Cocker had a clever idea that would make his company stand out from the competition. The plan was to send cold emails that included photos that had a mock-up of what the company t-shirt would look like if Ramp T-Shirts had printed it out. They did this for over 50,000 companies.

Here it is below, photos grabbed from the original post made by Cocker on Medium.

It’s not too hard to see how extremely well-made this email template is. Here’s why we think this email is a cold email masterclass.

Their email begins with the subject “I’m wearing a {company name} t-shirt!” . This is what we call a “pattern interrupt”. It's essentially an eye-catching sentence that compels them to literally stop scrolling. The subject was effective and intriguing that they got a consistent 50% open rate from it. By using a clever subject line, they perfected the first cardinal rule of writing effective cold emails, making sure leads open your email . No matter how excellent and persuasive your copy is, if your recipients never make it inside the email itself, then everything else wouldn’t matter.

The icebreaker was simply immaculate, by beginning with “nobody likes cold emails, do they?” it immediately lowers the reader’s guard by coming off as charming, informed, and not “salesy”.

It’s the photo that truly takes the cake. Who wouldn't keep reading if you saw your own company’s logo printed on a t-shirt worn by someone who isn't your employee, right? The photo is witty, charming, and downright effective. The personalized photo was so effective at grabbing the reader’s attention that it keeps them engaged for the rest of the email.

Always seek to back up your claims. In this case, a screengrab showing a testimonial establishes credibility and trust. Social proof makes their pitch sound more persuasive.

As in all B2B cold email case studies, personalization consistently ranks as the top differentiator if you want to stand out from the hundreds or thousands of cold emails your readers get.

According to them, their cold email campaign was such a success that they would often receive responses along the lines of “ best cold email ever! ”. The campaign resulted in an impressive 25% click through rate, and although they didn’t reveal how much revenue it generated, they did say “let’s just say — Tens of thousands of pounds, dollars and euros! 😉”

Like Ramp T-Shirts, we’re firm believers in the power of an effective icebreaker, in fact, it's a standard feature of The Scale Lab ’s cold email strategy; we carefully research prospects in order to craft bespoke icebreakers that “hook” them in, and keeps them interested throughout the email.

Related: Want to learn the exact cold email framework we use to consistently deliver high-quality B2B leads? Check this out.

5. How Cold Emails Drove $20 Million In Sales For This Marketing Agency 💡

From a humble apartment office 15 years ago to having about 250 employees, Gabriel Shaoolian of Blue Fountain Media has truly come a long way. Before his success, Gabriel tried to increase his company’s revenue through a variety of sales and marketing tactics but the one strategy that has really worked for them, and helped change their fortunes was cold emailing . The move proved to be extremely profitable, in fact, they were able to amass $20 million in revenue directly attributable to their cold email campaigns.

Blue Fountain Media certainly kills the cold email game, and in his Entrepreneur.com blog post , Gabriel gave an example of what a great cold email would look like. Here’s his template.

We’re pretty sure that Blue Fountain Media uses a more custom template depending on the prospect but this general template gives us an idea of how they do it. Here’s why it works.

By beginning with a strong icebreaker, the email sets itself apart from all the other generic emails by mentioning something specific and relevant to the prospect.

The second paragraph establishes credibility and expertise by mentioning how they’ve had “similar” success with other related companies. The phrase “help boost our clients’ results” piques the reader’s interest. Of course, who wouldn’t want to be more successful at what they do?

In a cold email avoid friction words that make you sound like a salesman, even though you are trying to sell something. The clever use of the word ‘ share’ in the sentence “I’d love to share these successes with you…” comes off as friendlier, and not “salesy”. It certainly sounds way better than the word “present”, apart from your boss, almost no one would want to hear your “presentation”.

Drove over $20 million in agency revenue directly attributable to their cold email campaigns.

6. This SaaS Company Got 60,000 New Signups Thanks To Cold Emails ✍️

It’s a well-known fact that the cost of acquiring a new customer is significantly higher compared to retaining existing ones. Signups are the lifeblood of any SaaS company, and when growth marketer Dunja Lazić of Toggl wanted to expand their user base, she turned to cold emails to get the job done.

The strategy was to send a cold email to convince companies like Zapier, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Capterra, and ProductHunt in an attempt to feature their product through traffic referral deals, and PR partnerships. Take note that these companies receive hundreds of pitches from SaaS companies every day, so her emails had to stand out from the crowd.

In her Medium post, Dunja shared tips on how she successfully crafted her cold emails that eventually led to 60,000 new signups during the campaign.

Here are our favorite takeaways.

Strike a conversation with your prospects. In a cold email, the last thing you want is for the prospect to feel like you’re pitching them something. Dunja made sure her emails were very engaging, and conversational as compared to salesy.

Always think about what’s in it for them. Resist the temptation to make the email all about what you can offer because that’s the fastest way for your prospect to hit the delete button - or worst, the dreaded mark-as-spam button. Focus on providing value, and clearly state what is the benefit for them.

Find something in common. Think about the last time you met someone new, chances are you were trying to find something in common. Having something in common acts as a great conversation starter. Mentioning things in common in your icebreaker will help increase your chances of getting a response.

Drove 60,000 new sign ups for their SaaS startup.

Related: Wondering how you can generate 60,000 leads for your company? Check out how we create thousands of warm leads at The Scale Lab.

7. This Agency Consultant Swears By Cold Emails, In Fact He’s Made Over $1 Million Worth Of Contracts Through It 🙌

To say that Ty Frankel of Agency Empire swears by the power of cold email is an understatement. The 24-year old former music producer and 7-figure agency owner’s portfolio has been built on cold emails.

His cold emails helped him land hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contracts with industry giants like Mercedes-Benz, Red Bull, Sony, Warner, and The Super Bowl to name a few.

Here’s his advice on nailing the cold email game.

Create systems, and automate everything. Ty is a firm believer in having systems in place that run like clockwork. Email marketing worked well for him because it is scalable, and he had a framework that enabled him to scale up without affecting the performance of his agency. Email marketing tools like Lemlist have automation built-in for this purpose.

The money is in the follow-up. Cold email campaigns are Ty’s bread and butter, but his first cold email doesn’t always get him a reply. His email campaigns would contain anywhere from 4-7 follow-up sequences. As an example, it’s not uncommon for him to sign a big-ticket contract eventually after 6 follow-ups .

Continuous improvement is key in email marketing. Once you’ve run your first few campaigns, study what worked and what didn’t, then double down on the wins. Cold emails have a lot of moving parts, from your list of leads to the email itself. Even the world’s greatest cold email won’t help you one bit if you get your prospecting off. Try to A/B test subject lines, different email body templates, and icebreakers to see what works well. A campaign with bad results shouldn’t be viewed as a failure, but rather as an opportunity - take it as feedback.

Drove over $1 million worth of contracts for his agency.

Related: Want to learn how to set up your own email marketing system? Check out this guide.

8. How A Cold Email Led To This Startup’s 2.5 Million Seed Round 🌱

Allie Janouch of Mapistry certainly knows that there is wisdom behind failures. Her first attempt at cold emailing a VC did not turn out as she had expected, so instead of giving up, she did her homework, and went back to the drawing board. She studied what went wrong with her first email, and went on to revise the cold email template.

Thankfully, she got it right this time around. The cold email was noticed and went on to eventually secure seed funding to get her company on the path to growth.

Cold Email Template 1:

Let’s take a look at her first attempt, all photos were taken from the original post on Medium .

Cold Email Mistakes:

So what went wrong here?

Vague value proposition. She casually mentions Mapistry but failed to put her company in the best light possible.

Overall tone lacks self-confidence

This is a primary example of why most people think that cold emails don’t work. Many cold emails don’t work because of how poorly written they are. In this case, although it was personalized, and her icebreaker was great, everything else went downhill after it.

Cold Email Template 2:

Now let’s take a look at her second attempt.

Let’s break down what makes this email effective.

No frills intro, she immediately engages the reader by pointing out the problem. Take note, this was a VC pitch, so she had to hit hard in the first few lines to keep the reader engaged.

She establishes credibility by showing impressive facts about her company.

The email was very personalized. Allie went the extra mile by researching about the investor, Jason Lemkin, and going through some of his posts to find a relevant piece of information she could leverage. Notice how she mentioned the name “Peter” in the last paragraph, she was referencing an interview that Jason had done with Peter before.

This time her CTA was solid. Instead of assuming he had time for this, she used a low friction question by saying “do you have any time the week after next?”

Generated their first $2.5 million seed round

Related : Like Allie, everyone struggles with their cold email template at one point, and if that’s you then you must check out our ultimate guide on B2B cold email templates.

Final Thoughts 🧠

Cold emails are wise and cost-effective investments that generate an unprecedented amount of ROI when done well, and these 8 B2B cold email case studies are proof that cold emails deliver results. The crux of the matter is are you doing it right? Setting up an effective B2B cold email system is not just hard work, there’s also no guarantee of working at the onset if you don’t know what you’re doing. We’ve helped B2B companies meet their sales quotas by taking the guesswork out of lead generation by doing the heavy lifting for our clients. We take care of the tedious prospecting and outreach, so that you can focus on closing more deals. Want to learn how we can consistently fill your sales pipeline with sales qualified leads? Come and say hello or drop us a line at [email protected] . Over to you. 😇

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Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide (Expert Tips + Data to Know)

Learn email marketing best practices from creating a strategy to building a list to tracking results.

EMAIL MARKETING PLANNING TEMPLATE

Use this template to strategically organize your email marketing. Available for Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

Updated: 01/26/24

Published: 01/24/24

I‘m pretty sure I’ve said this in a few blog posts already, so if you‘ve heard this from me before, I apologize, but it’s true: In addition to being a blogger, I‘m in charge of curating and sending out HubSpot’s Marketing Blog newsletter.

So, I know a thing or two about email marketing.

Done correctly, email marketing can be as powerful as any other marketing tactic today. But notice the key phrase: done correctly.

Fortunately, you‘ve get this handy dandy guide you’re reading that will set you up for success in your email marketing strategy.

Without further ado, let’s review the best ways to leverage email marketing. I'll also cover benefits and statistics that show the importance of email, just in case you need extra convincing. Let’s dig in.

What is email marketing?

Getting started with email marketing, how to send marketing emails, email regulations you should know, email marketing tips.

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending promotional messages or newsletters to a list of subscribers via email.

The goal is building customer relationships, promoting products or services, increasing brand awareness, and ultimately driving sales.

In my experience, email marketing allows me to reach my target audience directly with personalized and relevant content. It's also cost-effective, easy to track, and provides valuable data for analyzing campaign success.

Marketers have been using email as a channel for almost as long as they've been using the internet. The first marketing email was sent in 1978, resulting in $13 million in sales.

A Beginner's Guide to Email Marketing

How to execute and measure successful email marketing campaigns

• Growing an email list.
• Remaining CAN-SPAM compliant.
• Using email automation.
• Segmenting your audience.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Email has been one of the most highly used marketing channels ever since.

This is because email is a flexible yet cost-effective way to reach many people relatively quickly. I can also personalize my message to target specific audiences and generate leads.

Email marketing can take many different forms. These campaigns can include a single email announcing new content, an ongoing newsletter delivered regularly, or contacting customers about product updates.

Email isn’t as shiny as newer channels, like messaging and social. However, email is an effective way to build an audience that gets results.

“One of my favorite parts about email marketing is its intimacy,” says Rob Litterst , head of strategy and operations for HubSpot’s Newsletter Network.

“Access to someone‘s inbox is sacred, and for a person to welcome you in, there’s already a certain level of trust that you just can't achieve with other platforms,” he says.

I know it's easy to get overwhelmed with the vast possibilities of email marketing, so let’s break down a few key steps to get you started building a solid email campaign that will delight your customers.

You can think of these steps as creating a successful email marketing strategy .

1. Create an Email Marketing Strategy

You can learn how to build an effective email strategy and send emails that people actually want to read. It just takes a plan (one that can be broken down into a few key steps).

Think of the following five steps as an outline for your email strategy. We’ll dive deeper into some of these in a moment.

Email Marketing Planning Template

Organize your email marketing strategy and metrics with this free template.

• Gather data
• Summarize results
• Manage A/B tests

2. Define your audience.

Effective emails, whether a campaign or a one-off, start with understanding your audience.

Like everything else in marketing, start with your buyer persona , understand what pain points they’re dealing with, and tailor your email campaign to your audience’s needs.

3. Establish your goals.

Usually, before I think up campaign goals, I gather some context.

I always want to know the average email stats for my industry and use them as benchmarks for my goals. This should be your process as well.

6. Make a schedule.

Decide how often you plan to contact your list and inform your audience upfront.

This way, they'll know exactly what to expect ahead of time. Forgetting this can lead to high unsubscribe lists and even get you in their spam.

In addition, once you set a schedule, be consistent. It will build trust and ensure you stay top of mind for your audience.

7. Measure your results.

This should come as no surprise. As marketers, we measure everything. Being meticulous about every key metric will help you make small changes to your emails, yielding large results.

We’re going to touch on the exact KPIs to monitor in a bit (or you can jump ahead).

Now that you understand the steps to creating an email marketing strategy, we‘ll look at what’s involved in building your email list.

8. Choose an email marketing platform.

An email marketing provider (ESP) is an excellent resource if you're looking for any support while fine-tuning your email marketing efforts.

For example, HubSpot's Email Marketing tool allows me to efficiently create, personalize, and optimize marketing emails that feel and look professional without designers or IT.

There are a variety of features to help me create the best email marketing campaigns and support all of my email marketing goals.

Additionally, I can analyze the success of my email marketing so I can share the data that matters most to my business with my team. The best part? HubSpot's Email Marketing service is available for free .

Start using HubSpot's Email Marketing Service for free.  

Here are examples of features services like HubSpot offer to consider when choosing an email service provider :

• CRM platform with segmentation capabilities
• Good standing with Internet Service Providers
• A positive reputation as an email service provider (ESP)
• Easy-to-build forms, landing pages, and CTAs
• Simple ways to comply with email regulations
• Ability to split test your emails
• Built-in analytics
• Downloadable reports

9. Build Your Email List

Now to my favorite part: filling the email list with eager prospects excited to hear from you.

There are many creative ways to build your email list (and, no, purchasing emails ain’t one).

Tactically speaking, list building comes down to two key elements that work cohesively to grow your subscriber numbers: lead magnets and opt-in forms .

Featured Resources

• The Email Newsletter Lookbook
• How to Create Email Newsletters That Don't Suck

Here's how I build and grow my email list.

10. Use lead magnets.

Your lead magnet is exactly as it sounds: It attracts prospects to your email list, usually as a free offer.

The offer can take many formats, should be valuable to your prospects, and is given away for free in exchange for an email address.

There’s just one problem: People have become hyper-protective of their personal information. You can’t expect to receive an email address without exchanging it for something valuable.

Think about a lead magnet that is relevant, useful, and makes your prospects’ lives easier.

Here are a few types of lead magnets you could create:

• Whitepapers.
• Infographics.
• Reports or studies.
• Checklists.
• Webinars or courses.

If you’re short on resources, you can even repurpose existing content to create lead magnets .

11. Create an enticing opt-in form.

Your opt-in form is how you get a prospect’s information to add them to your list. It’s the gate between your future leads and the incredible asset you created with them in mind.

Here are some tips for creating an enticing opt-in form:

Create an attractive design and attention-grabbing header.

Your form should be branded, stand out from the page, and entice people to sign up. You want to excite readers with the offer.

Make the copy relevant to the offer.

While your goal is to get people to enter their information, it isn’t to deceive them. Any information on your form should be a truthful representation of the offer.

Keep the form simple.

This could be one of your first interactions with your prospect. Don’t scare them away with a long long-form several fields.

Ask for only the most essential information: first name and email is a good place to start.

Set your opt-in form for double confirmation.

It may seem counterproductive to ask your subscribers to opt into your emails twice, but some research on open rates suggests that customers may prefer a confirmed opt-in (COI) email more than a welcome email.

Ensure that the flow works.

Take yourself through the user experience before you go live. Double-check that the form works as intended, the thank you page is live, and your offer is delivered as promised.

This is one of your first impressions of your new lead — make it a professional and positive one.

Next, let's take a moment to cover some universally accepted email marketing best practices regarding how to send marketing emails.

• Implement email segmentation.
• A/B test your marketing emails.
• Analyze your email marketing performance.
• Set email marketing KPIs.
• Adjust email components to improve results.
• Use an email marketing report template.

If all goes well, you’ll have built a robust list of subscribers and leads waiting to hear from you. But you can’t start emailing just yet unless you want to end up in a spam folder, or worse, a blocked list.

Here are a few important things to remember before you start emailing your list.

1. Implement email segmentation.

Once you’ve added people to your list, you must break them down into different segments.

That way, instead of having a monolithic email list of everybody, you’ll have easier-to-manage subcategories that pertain to your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences.

Our subscribers are humans, after all, and we should do our best to treat them as such. That means not sending generic email blasts.

Why should you segment your email list?

Each person who signs up to receive your emails is at a different level of readiness to convert into a customer (which is the ultimate goal of all this).

If you send a discount coupon for your product to subscribers that don’t even know how to diagnose their problem, you’ll probably lose them. That’s because you’re skipping the part where you build trust and develop the relationship.

Every email you send should treat your subscribers like humans you want to connect with, as opposed to a herd of leads you’re trying to corral into a one-size-fits-all box.

The more you segment your list, the more trust you build with your leads, and the easier it’ll be to convert them later.

How to Segment Email Lists

The first step in segmentation is creating separate lead magnets and opt-in forms for each part of the buyer’s journey. That way, your contacts are automatically divided into separate lists.

Beyond that, email marketing platforms allow you to segment your email list by contact data and behavior to help you send the right emails to the right people.

Here are some ways you could break up your list:

• Geographical location.
• Lifecycle stage.
• Awareness, consideration, and decision stage.
• Previous engagement with your brand.

In reality, you can segment your list any way that you want. Just make sure to be as exclusive as possible when sending emails to each subgroup.

2. A/B test your marketing emails.

Not all email lists are created equal. Some audiences prefer personalization, and others will think it’s spammy. Some audiences will like bright, eye-catching CTA buttons. Others will prefer a more subtle call-to-action.

You’ll never know what type of people make up your email list until you test the variables. That’s where A/B testing comes in handy.

“If you‘re considering making any structural or content alterations to your email marketing, A/B testing is an excellent way to determine if the changes will be successful or worthwhile before they’re implemented on a larger scale,” says Madison Zoey Vettorino, marketing manager and SEO content writer for HubSpot’s Website Blog.

Surprisingly, not many brands leverage it. A 2021 Litmus study found that 44% of marketers rarely A/B or multivariate test their emails. Only 19% do it often or always.

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12 great case study examples (plus case study writing tips)

GatherContent Contributor, Writer

5 minute read.

Interviewed by:

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Lead with Content

How to put content at the centre of digital transformation.

Padma Gillen

Digital Content Consultant

This long-form content style is also becoming more common as more marketers discover its value. According to Hubspot’s 2021 State of Marketing report , more than 30% of marketers use case studies as a primary marketing media—up from 13% in 2020.

If you’re new to the world of case studies, we’ll be diving into what case studies are, why they’re important, and how to create your own. We’ll also highlight some compelling case study examples that you can learn from.

What is a case study?

A good case study highlights customer stories showing the following:

• The problems the business faced before using a product or service
• How the product or service proposed to solve the problems
• The before and after of using a product or service
• The measurable positive impact of the product or service on metrics such as click-through rate, website traffic, or sales

While case studies are most often product or service-focused, sometimes businesses use them to share their brand or founder story.

These types of case studies typically focus on organizational progress, such as how they grew their revenue or website traffic. One example is this Outfunnel case study on how the team saved over 80% of its time with user onboarding.

Why are case studies important?

They may not suit every business. But case studies are beneficial, for example, for helping SaaS brands reach future customers.

If they make sense for your industry, case studies should be an important part of your content marketing strategy for many reasons.

Three reasons you should incorporate them as soon as possible are:

• To provide value to your audience: At its core, the best marketing doesn’t just drive sales; it serves its audience. Case studies are a brilliant way to teach your audience tips they can incorporate into their businesses. It can also serve as research for industry experts to quote.
• To show off your expertise: A great case study is a perfect blend of data and storytelling. It showcases your expertise to your target audience, most likely dealing with similar issues. By telling a good story in your case studies, you’re essentially saying, “Look how we made everything better for X client—we can do that for you, too.”
• As social proof: Because case studies are available to the public, they’re undeniable social proof—better than hard-to-believe testimonials with client initials. This makes them extra valuable as MOFU and BOFU content ; they can drive sales at the click of a button.

Good to Know: Not sure how to use case studies? They work well as lead magnets, landing pages, repurposed blog posts, and, if you have the capacity, even video content!

12 real-life case study examples to bookmark

Reading about the mechanics of case studies is more straightforward than writing case studies from scratch.

That’s why we’ve gathered 12 real-life marketing case study examples you can review before you embark on creating yours.

1. GatherContent | University of Edinburgh

What works: In this great case study, GatherContent includes quotes from the client (the University of Edinburgh) about how their software has improved their content workflow. This adds a human element and will help readers with the same issues identify with the client.

View more GatherContent case studies .

2. Omniscient Digital | AppSumo

What works: Omniscient Digital includes client feedback in video format and shares the results they achieved in a digestible bullet point format.

3. Bit.ly | Vissla

What works: Besides hosting this case study on their website, Bit.ly provides a PDF link that can both be viewed online or downloaded. Plus, the PDF is visually appealing and easy to read.

4. Asana | Autodesk

What works: Asana leads with their impact and includes basic information about their client to the right of the page so the reader immediately gets bite-sized background information.

5. Shopify | Bombas

What works: Shopify includes a video in their case study, as well as multiple eye-catching images of Bombas products. This ensures that the case study serves both companies, possibly generating customer interest in Bombas socks.

6. Outfunnel | Alight Analytics

What works: Outfunnel has repurposed its case study into a blog post, which increases its visibility. The study is also full of client quotes, which adds valuable social proof.

7. Sapling | Zapier

What works: Sapling also shares quick preliminary information about Zapier on the left panel and includes several screenshots to show the impact of their product on the company’s processes.

8. BigCommerce | Skullcandy

What works: The quick metrics in bold hit readers quickly and highlight BigCommerce expertise to potential customers even before they read the entire case study.

9. Google Ads | L’Oreal

What works: Video format. Few things beat hearing the client praise the service and explain the process and results of the campaign in their own words.

10. ActiveCampaign | Your Therapy Source

What works: ActiveCampaign efficiently showcases the problems and solutions before delving into how they helped the client achieve desired results.

11. Intuit | Xenex Healthcare

What works: The main benefit is highlighted on the first page of the PDF and the rest of the study delves into the process and the nitty-gritty of the product’s impact.

12. Grayscale | Upwork

What works: This page features minimal text. It focuses on quotes from decision-makers at Upwork and ends with a call-to-action that will likely drive conversions.

How to write your own case study

How can you write engaging, effective case studies like the examples above? Here are six steps.

1. Identify a worthy case

Think of projects—either for yourself or for clients—that got outstanding results. Then, whittle it down to the cases that your target audience is most likely to relate to , perhaps because they experience the same problem or have the same goal as in the case.

2. Reflect on your chosen case

Once you’ve decided on the case you’ll start with, do some deeper reflection on the details. What was the project goal? What challenges did you encounter along the way? How did you overcome them to reach your goal?

3. Think about differentiation

Take the last step even further and think of anything you did differently than others might. Did you an experimental tactic or strategy or create a custom solution? If so, use those details to subtly show potential customers why they should be interested in what you have to offer.

4. Gather quotes

Next, get hard-hitting quotes from project stakeholders or clients. Having their thoughts on goals, project obstacles, the solutions provided, and the outcomes will make your description of the case more credible.

5. Draft your case study

Time to turn the details you’ve compiled into a case study draft. How? We’ll talk about the best format for case studies shortly.

6. Add visuals

Next, create visuals that will reinforce the main points of your case study. These could include:

• Charts or screenshots to show the change in metrics before and after the project
• An infographic to give a brief visual overview of the case
• Pictures of deliverables (e.g. a web design agency might show a picture of the new site it designed for a client)
• Product images such as screenshots from within your software that was used on the project

After any designated reviewers and approvers give their stamp of approval on the case study, it’s ready to be published and promoted!

What’s the best case study format?

We’ve seen A+ examples of case studies and gotten some more context on how to create them for your brand or organization. Now, it's time to get to work. As you do, remember to include the following vital sections in your case study format:

• Client name and profile
• The problem
• Your solution (and screenshots!)
• Before and after ( real results with data)
• Appealing visuals, photos, illustrations, infographics, charts, and graphs
• A memorable CTA

Ready to get started? Thankfully, you don’t have to go it alone.

GatherContent—a powerful tool for case study creation

GatherContent makes it possible to keep track of all your case study research —even while working with your marketing team. You don’t have to guess what stage the piece is at or consult another tool to know when your part is due or who to pass the torch to.

GatherContent is a content hub that helps you keep all your content creation in one place , whether you’re writing blog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, or case studies. With content modeling features like Components , you can effortlessly maintain brand identity throughout all your case studies.

Read more customer success stories here to learn more!

Techniques for collaboratively prioritising content

Learn six collaborative methods for prioritising content so your team can be aligned and have confidence in the content being published..

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