12 Email Marketing Tips for One-Person Teams
Solo email marketers, brace yourselves for a treasure trove of wisdom directly from the minds of founders and marketing managers. From focusing on quality over volume to balancing customization with volume, discover the top twelve strategies and resources they recommend to elevate your email marketing game.
- Focus on Quality Over Volume
- Leverage Email Automation Tools
- Quantify Revenue Contribution
- Utilize AI for Refined Messaging
- Integrate SEO in Email Content
- Consider Outsourcing Tasks
- Use AI-Powered Writing Tools
- Maintain a Clean Email List
- Maximize Efficiency with Templates
- Avoid Over-Customizing Emails
- Embrace Scale in Email Marketing
- Balance Customization with Volume
Focus on Quality Over Volume
Simple. Focus on quality, not volume. Results, not campaigns sent. Spend your time wisely understanding the target demographic, creating an irresistible offer, and positioning the product or service in the right way, and you can outperform larger teams tenfold—every damn day of the week.
Casey Jones
Founder, Head of Marketing, CJ&CO
Leverage Email Automation Tools
My top tip for a one-person email marketing team is to leverage automation. Email marketing automation tools can help you manage your time and resources efficiently, allowing you to schedule campaigns, segment your audience, and personalize your messages with ease. This not only increases your productivity but also enhances the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Ours is one such too, which offers robust features for managing and automating your email marketing efforts. It allows you to create automated sequences based on specific triggers, ensuring your emails are timely and relevant.
Additionally, continuously educate yourself about the latest trends and best practices in email marketing. Resources like the blogs of HubSpot, Litmus, and Smartlead offer valuable insights.
Remember, the key is not to do everything manually but to work smarter by leveraging the right tools and staying updated with industry trends.
Alka Gupta
Content Marketing Lead, Smartlead.ai
Quantify Revenue Contribution
As a one-person email marketing team, I highly suggest quantifying how much revenue you generate through your email marketing campaigns and asking for a percentage as commission.
For example, if your goal is to generate email leads, find out what percentage of leads buy and what their CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is. From here, you can say, “I generated 10,000 email subscribers, and because 1 out of 20 email subscribers end up buying and the average CLV is $300, I made $150,000 for this company.”
Even if your bosses aren’t willing to give you a commission on the revenue you generated, you can use this calculation to stand out when applying for jobs in the future.
Scott Lieberman
Owner, Touchdown Money
Utilize AI for Refined Messaging
For a one-person email marketing team, my top tip is to harness the power of AI, like ChatGPT, to refine your messaging. It’s crucial to get feedback, and in the absence of a team, AI can provide valuable insights and suggestions to enhance your email campaigns. This approach allows you to continuously improve your content, making it more engaging and effective. Embrace AI as your virtual teammate to elevate your email marketing strategy.
Justin Silverman
Founder & CEO, Merchynt
Integrate SEO in Email Content
One essential tip I’d offer to a one-person email marketing team is to prioritize the integration of SEO best practices within your email content. By ensuring your newsletters are rich in relevant keywords and valuable content, you’re not only engaging your subscribers but also increasing the odds of your emails being shared and potentially featured in online content, amplifying your reach.
To aid in this endeavor, tools like Ahrefs for keyword research and Google Analytics for tracking engagement can be invaluable. Consider crafting a comprehensive content calendar that aligns with your SEO strategy to maintain consistency and relevance in your communication.
Alex Taylor
Head of Marketing, SEO Specialists, Digital Signage
Consider Outsourcing Tasks
Don’t hesitate to outsource. Being the only person on a marketing team doesn’t mean you must handle everything alone. I’ve been in that position, and trying to do it all just stretches you too thin. Honestly, there are times when you need additional assistance.
For instance, if you’re particularly good at something critical to your business, like writing or graphic design, then continue doing it. But for other tasks, it might be smart to bring in specialists.
In such situations, I recommend hiring freelancers or virtual assistants (VAs). There are many VAs available online who can handle repetitive tasks (like posting content on various platforms) efficiently and quickly. This approach can be cost-effective, as these individuals work independently, meaning you don’t incur office-related expenses!
Lucas Ochoa
Founder & CEO, Automat
Use AI-Powered Writing Tools
For solo email marketers, my best tip is to take advantage of AI-powered tools instead of spending hours writing everything from scratch. Services like HoppyCopy can generate email sequences, newsletters, and various email campaigns really quickly with minimum guidance.
With everything that goes into marketing, this is the only way a solo marketer can compete with large teams and established brands. AI tools also allow you to A/B test your marketing messages to see what converts best.
Juliet Dreamhunter
Founder & AI Strategist, Juliety
Maintain a Clean Email List
Building and maintaining a clean email list is crucial for the success of your email marketing efforts, especially for a one-person email marketing team! A clean email list helps improve deliverability, and when you regularly remove inactive or invalid email addresses, it reduces the chances of your emails being marked as spam, ultimately ensuring that your messages reach the intended recipients’ inboxes.
Cleaning your email list also helps reduce bounce rates. Bounces can occur when you send emails to invalid or non-existent addresses, so keeping your list up-to-date minimizes these bounces, contributing to better email deliverability.
It helps to dedicate some time each week to maintain your lists and to simplify some processes to make it easier when there is only one person monitoring. Implement an email verification process for new subscribers to ensure that the provided email addresses are valid. This can prevent issues with bouncing and improve deliverability. Also, provide opportunities for subscribers to update their preferences, including email frequency and content preferences. This helps you tailor your emails and retain engaged subscribers.
Lastly, providing opportunities for subscribers to update their preferences, including email frequency and content preferences, helps you tailor your emails and retain engaged subscribers.
Ray Wang
Principal, RW Digital
Maximize Efficiency with Templates
One key tip I’d offer to a solo email marketing team is to leverage tools and templates to maximize efficiency. With limited resources, automation and pre-designed templates can be lifesavers. They should utilize email marketing platforms like Mailchimp or HubSpot for automation and A/B testing. This can save them time and help improve campaign effectiveness.
Additionally, they should also explore pre-made templates offered by these platforms or design resources like Canva to maintain a professional look without spending excessive time on design. By streamlining the processes, they can free up more time to focus on creating compelling content and nurturing customer relationships.
Johannes Larsson
Founder and CEO, JohannesLarsson.com
Avoid Over-Customizing Emails
Don’t over-customize the emails. While personalization and customization are the keys to grabbing your target customer’s attention, taking them too far might lead you to the spam folder. Knowing too much about the reader might make them feel uncomfortable, leading to a negative perception of the brand. This can raise privacy concerns, which can lead to less trust.
There is a possibility that instead of clicking and being impressed by the email, they might mark you as spam. Create a thin line between customization and over-customization and know where to stop. This will help you take better advantage of customizing while making sure you convert your readers into customers.
Len Gauger
Owner, Connect Space
Embrace Scale in Email Marketing
If you’re a one-person email marketing team, my biggest tip would be to re-evaluate your perception of scale and volume in your email marketing effort. Typically, the success of an email program has quite a bit to do with scale—things like the number of customers you have, how frequently you mail, the size of your email list, and so forth. The number you likely have in your head that you think is “big enough” to have results is probably one or two orders of magnitude too small.
Therefore, do not be afraid to aggressively grow your list or send out emails more frequently. While keeping quality high is really important, subscribers are not always as sensitive to volume as marketers fear. The lack of instantaneous feedback also means that it can take a while for everything to shake out and for you to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Focus on building and nurturing your list, experiment with your campaigns, and always be prepared to scale your efforts. By doing so, you’ll not only meet but potentially exceed the results you’re aiming for.
Blake Smith
Marketing Manager, ClockOn
Balance Customization with Volume
If you’re solo-nailing it, by far your scarcest resource is time. Always give your hour an arbitrary number, and never do anything manually if there is a paid alternative that costs less. It’s a numbers game: If you hand-write perfect emails with a 95% open rate, it’s still not effective if you can only churn out a handful a day.
On the flip side, completely lackluster and generic campaigns that yield a 5% open rate burn through leads without squeezing enough value out of them. The sweet spot, obviously, is in the middle: Customize just enough to have an as-high-as-possible rate of contacts with as-high-as-possible open rates.
Instead of very few huge campaigns, run a lot more smaller campaigns where you experiment until you’ve found the right threshold for your audience.
Thomas Strobl
Founder, Fugoya
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