Last updated on February 21st, 2025 at 05:51 am
There are 4 billion daily email users.
And unsurprisingly, 37% of brands are increasing their email marketing budget.
But increasing budget and rising interest doesn’t guarantee more results — only better tactics promise better results.
Here, we’ll give you 8 email marketing ideas that actually work… and at least a few you probably haven’t heard of before.
Let’s dive in!
By the way, you can use ClickFunnels not only to sell products and build funnels, but also to create an email list, set up automations, and lots more. Get a free trial below!
1. Create a Soap Opera Sequence
Let’s start at the beginning.
What’s the first thing you send to your new email subscribers?
Maybe you’ve been emailing for years and maybe you’ve got a list of thousands of subscribers… but for each new subscriber, the experience is brand new.
And naturally (or literally) the most valuable thing you can do with those first few emails is try to get the new subscriber to buy your frontend product.
I’m talking about the product of yours that is the most popular and the easiest for people to purchase.
This should be a product that requires people to pull out their wallet… without emptying it.
At ClickFunnels, our frontend products are often books like DotCom Secrets or Traffic Secrets, or low-ticket courses like our $100 One Funnel Away Challenge.
How do you get new subscribers to buy?
By creating a Soap Opera Sequence.
This is a series of 5-7 emails that tells your story, introduces your brand, and drives people to your front-end product.
Like a soap opera, the emails guide the visitor irresistibly from one “episode” (email) to the next… and eventually to buying your products/services.
Here’s the gist of the email flow…
- Set The Stage – This is where you introduce yourself, build a bit of rapport, and tell people what they can expect in your upcoming emails. You also want to build some anticipation.
- High Drama → Backstory → Wall – This is where you capture them with a high-drama moment, tell them a bit of backstory, and then reveal the wall you came up against.
- Epiphany → The One Thing – This is where you reveal your big epiphany, how you came to the realization that changed everything.
- Hidden Benefits – This is where you’re going to talk about the benefits of your product that your target market probably isn’t even thinking about… the hidden benefits.
- Urgency CTA – This is where you’ll create urgency or scarcity to push your most stubborn readers over the edge.
Here’s a great breakdown of how this email sequence works from Ryan Wegner…
If you want a more detailed explanation of how this works, get a free copy of Russell Brunson’s bestselling book, DotCom Secrets ← just pay shipping.
2. Think Like Seinfeld
What does Seinfeld have to do with email marketing?
Unless you’ve read DotCom Secrets, the answer shouldn’t immediately come to mind.
To answer that, let’s start with a bit of dialogue from Seinfeld. Jerry and George are trying to pitch their TV show idea to a producer, Russell Dalrymple…
- Russell Dalrymple : So what have you two come up with?
- Jerry Seinfeld : Well, we’ve thought about this in a variety of ways, but the basic idea is, I would play myse…
- George Costanza : Uh, may I?
- Jerry Seinfeld : Go ahead.
- George Costanza : I think I can sum up the show for you in one word. Nothing.
- Russell Dalrymple : Nothing?
- George Costanza : Nothing.
- Russell Dalrymple : What does that mean?
- George Costanza : The show is about… nothing!
- Jerry Seinfeld : Well, it’s not about nothing.
- George Costanza : No, it’s about nothing.
- Jerry Seinfeld : Well, maybe in philosophy, but even nothing is something.
- Susan Ross : What’s the premise?
- Jerry Seinfeld : Well, as I was saying, I would play myself, and… as a comedian living in New York, and I have a friend and a neighbor and an ex-girlfriend, which is all true.
- George Costanza : Yeah, but nothing happens on the show. You see, it’s just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read, you eat, you read, you go shopping.
Ironically, Seinfeld itself was a show about nothing… and yet it’s one of the most popular and long-running television shows to ever be produced.
Do you ever struggle to figure out what to write about in your emails?
Don’t overthink it.
Here are some questions to get you thinking…
- What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned recently?
- What are some of your favorite quotes and why?
- How did you come up with the name for your business or blog?
- What would be the perfect way to spend a day off?
- Who have been some inspiring people in your life and why?
- What has happened to you that’s funny or interesting lately?
All of those things can become emails to your audience!
The more you email, the more revenue you’ll generate. In fact, most successful email marketers say you should generate at least $1 per subscriber per month… but that increases if you email more often.
And so emailing your list doesn’t need to be complicated. Keep it simple, tell a story or share an anecdote, and relate that back to one of your offers or products.
Here’s an example of what this can look like…
And here’s a video with some more helpful details regarding this strategy.
3. Tag By Your Value Ladder
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that when you send the right emails to the right people, engagement rates increase.
In fact, when Mailchimp compared segmented campaigns to non-segmented campaigns, results were better across the board.
But what subscriber information should you segment by?
It stands to reason that — since the goal of email marketing is to generate revenue — the most important way you can organize your email list is by who has purchased what.
If, at a glance, you can see (and filter by) who on your email list has purchased specific products, that creates a better experience right away.
It means you can save your customers from promotional emails for products they’ve already purchased. And if you think about your value ladder, it also means you can target the right people with the right products at the right time.
And as all marketers know, timing is everything.
A value ladder is just a depiction of your products and the flow in which you intend for customers to purchase each. Here, for example, is the value ladder that a dentist might use…
Someone comes in for a teeth cleaning, and they schedule a teeth whitening after talking with the dentist and finding out it’s surprisingly affordable. Then they get a retainer and maybe they eventually get cosmetic work.
From left to right, those products ascend in value and price.
Now imagine that you thought about your email marketing segmentation in terms of your own value ladder.
Then you could easily create automated flows or send broadcasts according to the products certain people have already purchased… and the next natural product they might want to purchase.
Here’s what this might look like…
- A week after people buy your frontend product, you send them a promo email for the next product in your value ladder with a special offer.
- One month after people purchase the second product in your value ladder, you send them a promo email for the next offer.
So on and so forth.
But how do you track buying behavior so you can actually do this?
You can use ClickFunnels to sell and market your products. You can also use it to build your email list, craft automations, and (yes) even create tags and segmentations that allow you to do just what we’re talking about.
Just go to your “Contacts” and filter by product ownership.
Then select all of those contacts and give them a tag for that product.
You can do this for all of your products. And then you can create behavioral rules that automatically add the appropriate tag when someone purchases one of your products.
This is a great way to make sure you’re sending the right promotions to the right people at the right time. And that can mean a lot more sales.
4. Make Revenue When You Get New Subscribers
I just learned about this email marketing strategy.
But I can’t get it out of my head because it’s so interesting.
I was talking with a friend of mine who has a lot of experience in the email marketing world. We were discussing my email newsletter, The Tonic.
I told him that we spend about $1,200 per month on Facebook ads and get subs at about $1 each.
He then told me we could cover that cost and maybe even make money with our lead-gen funnel if we just recommend another newsletter for people to join.
What?
I then learned that there’s a pretty unique tool called Sparkloop — this is basically just a platform where email newsletters can do two things…
- Grow their newsletter for a per-subscriber price of their choice
- Recommend other newsletters and get paid for each subscriber you send their way
Both are worth exploring.
But it’s the second one that really caught my attention — and should catch yours, too (particularly if you have an email newsletter).
My friend said a lot of newsletters add a second newsletter recommendation to their lead-gen funnel just to cover the costs of advertising.
We’re currently getting this set up.
Once someone signs up here…
A form will pop-up that looks like this…
And guess what?
Every time that someone signs up for 1440, we get paid $4!
So even if only 1 in 4 people join 1440 after joining The Tonic, that’ll cover the entire cost of our advertising with Facebook.
Pretty cool, right?
We’re also going to start adding some other newsletter recommendations to our newsletter emails themselves to generate a bit of extra revenue.
As a bonus, you could also use Sparkloop to grow your newsletter at a rate you can afford (you get to set your cost per subscriber and your total monthly budget).
5. Get Sponsors
I’ve been on Jacob McMillen’s email list for a long time — it’s an email list that serves freelance writers like myself.
I still remember the first time I opened one of his emails and saw a sponsor inside…
And why not?
If you’re sending emails and you’re not sure how to monetize those emails, why not seek out sponsors who want to also get in front of your audience?
These businesses will pay you to include them right inside of your email content.
Here’s what that looks like for my own newsletter…
How much you can get paid for these sponsorships will depend on the size of your list and your average open rate.
For my own newsletter, we have 11,000 subscribers, a 35% open rate, and we email five days per week. We’re able to generate about $4,000 per month when we’re fully booked — which breaks down to a cost of $200 per email.
Here’s a nifty calculator you can use to determine how much you might be able to charge per email.
But how do you find sponsors?
The lowest-hanging fruit is to put an “Advertise” link somewhere in your emails so that people on your email list can sponsor you if they’re interested.
Of course, it might take some time to generate interest.
The more direct path is to reach out directly to brands in the same niche as you with an email like this…
- Hey,
- My name is Mike, and I’m the co-founder of The Tonic.
- I’m reaching out because we have a few open sponsorship slots this month in our newsletter of 10,000+ readers, and I’m confident your cookies would appeal to our audience.
- Approximately 4,000 people open each of our daily emails, and our sponsors are averaging 112 clicks on their ads.
- Please let me know if you’re interested.
- – Mike
To find businesses that sponsor emails, you might consider signing up with Who Sponsors Stuff – a company that monitors which brands are sponsoring newsletters and sends you that list with email addresses for those companies. Just reach out and pitch them!
Either way, here are two sponsorship funnels that I really like when it comes to making buying sponsorships in your emails easy.
The first is from Funds For Writers. The advertising page shows dates you can book and gives you all the details you need…
By clicking on the PayPal link, you can easily book a slot and send her the copy you want to use. Super quick and simple and she stays booked nearly all the time.
The second example is from For The Interested.
The sponsorship page gives you all the details you need…
And you can click through to book your slot…
The simpler it is to book a slot, the more sponsors you’re going to get.
And you can build all of this super easily with ClickFunnels and our e-commerce tools — you could create a simple store dedicated to selling your sponsorship slots.
6. Run a Survey to Get Demographic Information
Do you know your audience?
When most business owners run surveys to their audience, they often think they’ll know what they’ll find… but the results always hold a few surprises.
Those surprises can help you serve your email list better (it can also help you get sponsors by sharing demographic information).
When you know who they are, you can give them what they want.
Here’s a really simple survey we ran at The Tonic, for example (we just used Google Forms to create it).
This gave us a good idea of how our list was engaging with our emails and what type of content they most appreciate.
You could do something similar.
Although Typeform surveys seem to get better results.
We now periodically send out demographic surveys to our list to maintain a clear idea of who we’re serving.
Of course — in our world of iOS 15 and privacy data — people aren’t always so willing to give up personal information like this.
To solve that, I recommend doing a little giveaway.
We always do a $100 Amazon gift card giveaway. To enter, people have to send us the “Thank You” page of the survey.
7. Ask a Simple Question to Increase Engagement
Over time, some subscribers might get used to your emails — a little too used to them.
So that they become disengaged and just ignore your emails when they hit your inbox. For that reason, it can be helpful to send a re-engagement campaign aimed at rekindling the fire.
How?
One of the best ways to do this that I’ve ever seen is by just asking these people a question. Because if you can get them to reply, that’s a high level of engagement and they will probably start reading your emails going forward.
Here are some things you might ask…
- What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing with your business/life right now?
- If there was one thing that could make your life easier, what would it be?
- What do you think is the most important factor in success today?
- How has your approach to XYZ changed since then?
- What’s the one thing you wish people knew about your work/hobby/passion?
Asking disengaged subscribers these questions can help re-engage them in a meaningful way.
It can also give you valuable insight into what resonates with your audience.
8. Reverse Engineer Your List-Growth Funnel
List growth is no walk in the park.
In fact, as someone who’s grown an email newsletter from 0 to 11,000 in two years — I would say that figuring out how to grow our list has been the trickiest part.
The good news is that once you find a funnel that works… It’ll work for a long time. AT least 60% of our 11,000 subscribers have come through the same exact funnel.
But how do you find a funnel that works in a reasonable amount of time?
Look at what your most successful competitors are doing!
- How are they growing their email list?
- What lead magnet are they using?
- What do their ads look like?
- What do they say in their welcome email?
It’s usually free to get on an email list — so I’d recommend subscribing to all of your competitors to see how their lead-gen funnel works.
If it works for them and they have the same target market as you, then it’ll likely work for you as well.
This is how we created a funnel that worked for The Tonic.
We found a newsletter similar to ours called For The Interested and we discovered that he drives Facebook ad traffic to an article like this…
And then at the bottom he has a simple CTA to join his newsletter.
We figured we’d give it a try.
So we created this Facebook ad…
Which goes to this super simple article…
At the bottom of the page — just like the For The Interested newsletter lead-gen funnel — is a CTA to join our newsletter…
And guess what?
This is our most efficient and effective lead-gen funnel to date!
Over the past week, we’ve got each subscriber for just $0.68!
The lesson is simple.
Look at what your competitors are doing and then replicate their methods in a way that works for you, your brand, and your target audience.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing — like every other type of marketing — is always about trying new stuff and seeing what sticks.
Now you’ve got 8 new things to try.
These are strategies that I (or other email marketers and business owners) have actually used to grow their lists, engage with their subscribers, and make more money.
Try a few. See how it goes. Iterate as necessary.
The path to email marketing success is paved with experimentation… so experiment!