In addition to the email marketing strategies that you use regularly, you might want to try some offbeat ones from time to time. They might enable you to boost your sales, increase customer satisfaction and get an additional competitive edge over your rivals. In this article, you’ll discover 10 unusual email marketing strategies that many professionals tend to overlook. If you try them, they might deliver amazing results for your business.

Regularly Review Your Email Lists

According to a popular misconception, the larger your email list, the better. The truth is that if you spam too much and too many recipients find your content irrelevant, that might undermine your IP reputation. The key parameter for your IP reputation is email open rates. You should send emails only to people who will be likely to open them. Consider reviewing your email list every 6-12 months. Don’t be afraid of discarding those recipients who never check what you send them.

Use Hyper Personalized Gift Coupons

Let’s imagine a situation when a certain client buys your products regularly. They always stick to budget-friendly items and you want to encourage them to purchase something more expensive. Try sending them a personalized coupon that enables them to order a pricier product with a discount! This should be a highly efficient upselling technique. It should strengthen the client’s loyalty to your brand and help them establish a more personal connection with it. When planning your hyper-personalization tactics, you should focus on user activity, spending habits and segmentation on the basis of affinities displayed by similar users.

Create Dynamic Subscriber Segments Based on Spending Habits

Instead of repeatedly developing new segments, you might want to resort to dynamic segmentation. It should enable you to automate the process based on triggers, email metrics and your sales strategy. The essence of this approach consists in targeting subscribers based on their activity and amount of involvement. You should take into account such segmentation criteria as customer lifetime value, buyer personas and propensity models. The term “dynamic” means that you should concentrate on buyer journeys for different products instead of individual customer journeys. The preferences of your clients might change over time — but they will keep receiving relevant emails from you.

Make Your Newsletters Interactive

Here are a few examples of interactive elements that you can include in your emails:

• Embedded videos
• GIFs
• Hamburger menus
• App-like navigation

The more interactive your newsletters, the better they can engage your audience. Your clients become involved in marketing activities, which enhances their brand loyalty.

Try Building App-Like in Mail User Experience

Most marketers know that they can make their emails look and function like apps by adding menu buttons, navigation and API-based integration to them. Yet very few professionals follow this recommendation. They are afraid that their emails might fail to work properly on their clients’ devices.

The wisest way out would be to start adding new elements to your emails one by one. Each time you introduce a new element, you should analyze your recipients’ response to it. Leave only those functions that your clients like and keep on experimenting.

Create Email Automation Workflows Based on Evolving Preferences

The automation of marketing processes will enable you to keep your leads always hot. Your sales reps should receive a notification each time a contact in your database becomes a hot lead. They should reach out to this client as soon as possible and try to convince them to close the deal. The two crucial parameters that should help you in this process are;

• Level of engagement (how frequently does this person open your emails and download your content)
• Level of the target audience (job, business size)

Email automation is usually focused on campaigns rather than user behavior. You might be able to sell more thanks to taking the customer-centric position.

Use Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for List Building

Guerrilla marketing can be indispensable for list building and enticing your subscribers with curiosity regarding your upcoming offerings or sales promotions. Some marketers might say they don’t find anything innovative in this approach and have been using it for a while already. But you might find new ways of combining guerilla marketing with other elements of your email marketing strategy.

Curate Personalized Emails Based on Engagement Rates

This strategy is optimal for brands that have a huge list of products. If consumers try to browse their whole product range, it might take them too much time. To help them, you might try to segment your catalog and offer them only those items that they should be most likely to buy.

The main pitfall of this strategy consists in the fact that you might deviate from your sales objectives too easily. To avoid this mistake, you should systematically monitor your analytics and review the automation workflows.

Combine In-Mail Gift Coupons with Cross-Selling-Based Product Bundling

Collaborate with a brand that caters to the same niche as you but is not your direct competitor. You should offer its products with a special discount to your clients and it should do the same with your products. The essence of this trick is to offer only bundled products that can be used together. Since your customer bases largely overlap, all the parties involved should benefit from the deal.

Let People Unsubscribe Smartly

If you ask your subscribers to leave their contacts in an email capture popup, it would be fair to allow them to unsubscribe from your emails in one or two clicks. The optimal location for the Unsubscribe button is at the top of the email or at the bottom, with a text size of about 8 points. The more user-friendly the process of unsubscribing, the more people will respect your brand and the healthier your email lists will be.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you feel inspired to test offbeat email marketing strategies. To be able to measure their efficiency, you might want to try them one by one, combining them with your usual strategies.