Use your abandoned carts, email confirmation and more as an extra reinforcement of your brand. “Explore having some fun with your automated emails. Use email marketing to direct customers to a more interactive experience, whether it’s through a livestream event, 1:1 video co-shopping, or a metaverse implementation.”- Brittany Rycroft, director of marketing, GhostRetail Email marketing automations are powerful––and still underutilized The typical experience of ‘clicking around a catalog from an email’ really hasn’t changed that much in the past 30 years. Point them to an experience with relevant content. “Don’t simply point customers to a product page. If a subscriber opens every email and never clicks, that’s an opportunity for a different type of outreach.”- Abby Siciliano, email expert and director business development, Tinuiti Ask for a preferences update, or offer a discount. “If an email recipient hasn’t opened an email in a month, don’t continue to send the same content at the same cadence to them. The recommendation here is to be cautious, and ask yourself if the efforts invested in re-engaging inactive segments could instead be automated, and energy reinvested in list growth––therefore focusing on the future, not the past.”- Ananda Farge, senior strategist, CRM and email, Tinuiti Don’t ignore customer data and signals––change how you communicate, instead While it’s a good idea to have a re-engagement strategy in place, suddenly emailing a large group of inactive contacts can create spikes in email bounce rate, including hard bounces and complaints, and can even lead to blocklisting.

Focusing on inactive segments––long-term unengaged contacts––often results in low performance and can unleash email deliverability issues. “Increasing cadence––such as adding a lot of resends––can quickly cause list fatigue and drive subscribers away. When testing your email design, make sure it looks great on mobile devices in addition to the standard desktop layout.”- Ashley Ismailovski, CRO operations manager, SmartSites The large majority of emails that brands send are opened on smartphones instead of a computer or laptop. “Approach your email strategy from a mobile-first perspective. Oftentimes, one channel performs differently depending on the brand and where the customer is in their journey.” -Ryan O’Connor, director of growth, SmartBug Media “A missed opportunity for many brands is to A/B test key flow messages with both an email and an SMS version. night sends––or day of the week––you might see an extraordinary difference in conversions.”- Brandon Matis, owner at Luxor Marketing “A/B testing send times is one of the most underrated strategies I see with brands. Despite the simple design, the experience feels premium and has been shown to increase engagement rate, upsell, and cross-sell.”- Eli Mitchell, director of partnerships at Lexer A/B test everything––send times, number of emails, CTAs, SMS vs. No frills in the design templates, these simple text-based emails or SMS messages build real human connections with customers. “Use proactive 1-to-1 outreach for your high-value VIP customers. It’s grossly underused, but it has innumerable benefits if executed well for engagement rates, email deliverability, and sales.” - Adam Kitchen, CEO, Magnet Monster “Use email as a 2-way communication channel with customers. Just ask people to share and engage beyond opening and clicking.” - Christopher Maroney-Petitt at Ecom Growers Ask people to reply to 1) engage in a poll, 2) be put on an early access list for a product launch, or 3) answer a question that helps with list segmentation. Personalization will help your user experience stay relevant and keep them coming back for more.” - Tennessee Allgood, lifecycle marketing senior manager, Stak Agency Make your emails conversational––and you’ll stay out of spam, too You want to personalize your emails the best you can with the data you have. As buzzwordy as it sounds, zero-party data is the key to unlocking the potential of your email and text marketing program.” - Ben Zettler, digital marketing & ecommerce consultant, Ben Zettler Digital How do you get there? Surveys, quizzes, etc. Focus on specific messaging that aligns with a particular group of users’ interests. “Dynamic content within email marketing campaigns and flows can be extremely powerful when done well. Collect zero-party data––and actually use it

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