What Email Marketing Strategies Work Best for Businesses? [Insights from 85 Companies]

It’s common advice to experiment with your email marketing strategy to see what works for your business. But, with so many options to try, it can be hard to know where to start.

To help businesses like yours find the best strategies to follow, we teamed up with Macgyver Marketing and other partners to understand what’s working for companies. We surveyed 85 businesses of every size and industry to find advice for everyone to try.

This survey is connected to our Email Benchmarks for All Companies (HubSpot) Benchmark Group. This group includes more than 1,300 companies that anonymously share their HubSpot email metrics in exchange for access to groupwide benchmarks. You can join it for free if you’d like to compare your HubSpot email performance anonymously.

Here are the insights we gained from the survey and Benchmark Group:

• Email Benchmarks for All Company Sizes and Industries
• Trends in Email Marketing Strategies
• 4 Proven Strategies to Boost Email Open Rates and Engagement
• 5 Real Examples of Successful Email Campaigns and Why They Worked

Email Benchmarks for All Company Sizes and Industries

Before we go over our survey results, let’s see what typical email marketing performance looks like according to the Email Benchmarks for All Companies (HubSpot) Benchmark Group for context. All of the following Benchmark Group data is from October 2024.

1,338 contributors had a median of 68 emails unique clicked (clicks within email campaigns).

Meanwhile, 1340 contributors had a median of 870.5 emails unique opened (opened emails).

Trends in Email Marketing Strategies

In the closed-ended section of our survey, we asked respondents about their company structures and email strategies.

Most of the companies that answered our survey have fewer than 50 employees.

79.22%, the majority of respondents, handle their email marketing in-house rather than outsource it.

When we asked participants how much of their digital marketing budgets they spare for email marketing, the largest group – 40% – stated 5% to 10%.

We then explored these two areas of email marketing:

• Email Marketing Tactics, Platforms, and Content
• Successes and Challenges in Email Marketing

Email Marketing Tactics, Platforms, and Content

Many of the questions in the closed-ended part of our survey focused on various elements on email marketing strategy, such as tactics, platforms, and content types.

The top email marketing goal for survey participants was split. While one-third consider generating leads their top goal, another third want to convert leads into sales.

When we asked how often companies send emails, 44%, the largest portion of respondents, stated they send non-automated campaigns once a week.

Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing platform among respondents, with 30% using it. (If you’re also a Mailchimp user, you can join our Mailchimp Benchmarks for All Companies Benchmark Group to get benchmarks for your metrics.)

The most popular email strategy among respondents is segmenting email lists and sending different emails to those segments, with more than 50% choosing this option.

If they could only choose email campaigns or automated emails, 58.44% would choose email campaigns and 41.56% would choose automated emails.

Among email-related and adjacent channels, participants ranked 1:1 email communication and email marketing campaigns/newsletters as their top choices.

Successes and Challenges in Email Marketing

We also asked a few questions related to successes and challenges in email marketing.

Respondents found customer stories/testimonials, personalized recommendations, and educational content their most effective types of email content.

The top metric respondents use to gauge email success is click-through rate (30%), with conversion rate to a qualified lead or sales opportunity a close second (28.57%).

Out of the challenges businesses face in email marketing, respondents found growing email lists the hardest to face.

4 Proven Strategies to Boost Email Open Rates and Engagement

The closed-ended part of our survey looked for real-life, successful strategies and emails. When we asked participants to share their most effective strategies for improving open rates and engagement, four came up:

1. Show the Importance of Your Product’s Mission
2. Personalize Emails Beyond the Recipient’s Name
3. Keep Your Emails Concise
4. Add a Little Mystery to Your Subject Lines

1. Show the Importance of Your Product’s Mission

Every product has a job or mission that your customers need to be convinced of before they can buy it. Emails that show the importance of this job or mission will prime your customers to believe in your product, too.

According to Databox’s own Peter Caputa IV, its Move the Needle newsletter serves this purpose. “Our Move the Needle newsletter helps us turn prospects into trialers of our free product. Most of our customers need to embrace the idea of being data-driven before they’re ready to really take advantage of our product well,” Caputa says.

Caputa continues, “In our newsletter, we feature stories of other companies leveraging data to improve their growth rate or profit margins. We also share data from surveys we run and benchmark studies we’re doing so that they can see how other companies are performing and what they might be doing differently. When they embrace the idea of using data to better manage performance, they’re more likely to trial our product.”

Notice that not all of these emails are directly product-related. Instead, they focus on the power of data, which then puts the reader in the mindset of using a product like Databox.

2. Personalize Emails Beyond the Recipient’s Name

While email personalization is a popular strategy, many companies don’t take it very far. It’s easy to set a personalized field for the recipient’s name and call it a day. But, two companies that participated in our survey used advanced personalization techniques that encouraged readers to click and engage.

According to Lucas Talmas, DYODE focuses on email click-through rates as a metric rather than open rates due to iOS’s email previews, and personalization is a big part of this strategy. Talmas says:

“We’ve seen great success by personalizing our email content,” says Garrett Yamasaki from We Love Doodles. “Our strategy involves segmenting our audience based on their interests and previous interactions with our site.”

Yamasaki continues, “For instance, we send customized product recommendations and care tips tailored to the specific breed of doodle a customer owns. This relevance drives higher open rates and engagement. We optimize our email send times based on user activity patterns, significantly increasing our open rates.”

3. Keep Your Emails Concise

Two respondents noticed concise and neatly formatted emails driving engagement and clicks. Mobile email apps and customers’ response to AI both influence this trend.

EmailBulkSender’s Farhan Siraj explains this strategy: “One of the ways we have been able to drive engagement in our email campaigns is by keeping the email content short and focused. Due to the overuse of generative AI in emails recently, a number of businesses are crafting incredibly descriptive emails that can often overwhelm readers. I believe the best strategy in modern-day email marketing is getting to the point quickly and clearly explaining the solutions you are offering to the readers.”

At Prestige Homebuyers, Warner Quiroga uses this philosophy in formatting. Quiroga says, “Most emails are read on phones now, so making them mobile-friendly with a clean, uncluttered layout is important. I use short paragraphs, larger fonts, and a single column design to improve readability on smaller screens.”

4. Add a Little Mystery to Your Subject Lines

Even though open rates aren’t the full picture in email performance, your customers need to open your emails to do anything else with them in the first place. So, the right subject line can lead your customers on the path to engagement. Two respondents add an air of mystery to their subject lines (without relying on clickbait) to increase open rates and engagement.

“Using subject lines with an air of suspense work fantastically with our audience,” says Michael Nemeroff from Rush Order Tees. “Once you’ve piqued someone’s curiosity, it’s challenging for them to just ignore your prompt. They feel compelled to open the email and find out the true message behind your subject line.”

Nemeroff continues, “Subjects like ‘We’ve found the best X for your next Y’ or ‘Here’s a special for you’ are just a few examples of the suspenseful headings that captivate our subscribers. I should say, though, that while a captivating headline is great for boosting our open rates, we also have to ensure that the content behind those headlines are up to par. The last thing we want is to click bait people into opening irrelevant emails and risk losing subscribers.”

Schutt Media’s Andrew Schutt says:

For more examples of subject lines that pique curiosity, check out our list of email subject lines that succeeded in real life.

5 Real Examples of Successful Email Campaigns and Why They Worked

As part of the open-ended section of our survey, we also asked participants about a recent successful email campaign and why it succeeded. These five emails use a variety of tactics to keep customers engaged.

1. VBOUT’s End of Year Email
2. eCactus Solar’s Solar and Storage Show Invitation
3. 108 Degrees Digital Marketing’s 50th Anniversary Campaign
4. Velin Dragoev’s Caffeinated Link-Building Campaign
5. Delante’s Timely Pain Point Email

1. VBOUT’s End of Year Email

Sometimes, all you need to do is do a little work for your customers. By helping its customer catch up on updates, VBOUT sees success in its year-end emails.

Georges Fallah says, “Among our various email campaigns sent to over 20,000 subscribers, we typically see a 28% open rate and a 1.2% click-through rate. However, our most effective campaign is our End-of-Year Holiday email, which consolidates new feature releases and announcements into a single comprehensive update. Despite traditionally low customer activity during this period, this campaign consistently achieves high engagement.”

Fallah continues, “We believe its success stems from subscribers’ keen interest in catching up on the latest developments in our brand, which they may not have explored during monthly updates. We introduced this annual campaign in 2022 & 2023, and plan to continue due to its effectiveness.”

2. eCactus Solar’s Solar and Storage Show Invitation

Language plays a critical role in email engagement as well. A personal-sounding email draws more positive attention than anything that sounds cut-and-paste. eCactus Solar witnessed this difference in an invitation email they wrote for an exhibition.

This specific email invited contacts to meet the eCactus Solar team in person at the Solar and Storage Show at the NEC in Birmingham, England, last October. “It must have felt like we were asking the recipient directly (which we were). If we were asking them to stop by, it would have come across as 100% genuine, because if we were not there the emails would have been pointless. Exhibiting involves a significant cost for the stand, so that creates the impression of investment and company value,” says Jason Lavis.

Lavis adds, “The invitations were completely genuine, and if they were also planning to attend the exhibition, there would have been some psychological pressure to reply, as they would likely see us anyway. This is in contrast to ‘evergreen’ text, which anyone from any company could cut and paste into their email.”

3. 108 Degrees Digital Marketing’s 50th Anniversary Campaign

Special events like anniversaries can also spark engagement because of their temporary nature. Positive events encourage people to share their well wishes, and any marketing campaigns related to limited-time events encourage customers not to miss out. 108 Degrees Digital Marketing found success with this type of strategy for one of its clients.

MaryAnn Pfeiffer says, “We ran a series of campaigns last year for a client who was celebrating their 50th anniversary. That’s a long time for any business, but the focus of each campaign was never the client, but instead their place in their community, the people they have connected with over the years, and the general history of the city (from their perspective). Overall open rates were higher than past campaigns, and more importantly, engagement was exponentially higher than past years. With one campaign alone, we received over a dozen testimonials from subscribers who wanted to tell us THEIR story with the brand.”

4. Velin Dragoev’s Caffeinated Link-Building Campaign

While it not be what you first think of when you think of email marketing, respectful link building involves many of the same tactics. SEO consultant Velin Dragoev used a genuine approach to a link-building email campaign that built links and engaged the reader.

“There was one link-building campaign I ran for a client in the coffee niche. They had run a lab study on the average amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee where they found that the commonly quoted amount of 95 mg was a misconception. I segmented my link-building prospects by the type of anchor text they had used to link to our competitors and I specifically looked for prospects using the 95 mg statistic. I then sent a massive email campaign where the subject was something along the lines of ‘Correction for your article’. It was a huge success and our client got lots of high-quality links for it,” Dragoev says.

5. Delante’s Timely Pain Point Email

When a problem comes up due to to current happenings in your industry, you can send an email offering a solution to that pain point to get an urgent response from your customers. Delante saw a common issue and gained high engagement when it presented help.

Mateusz Calik says:

Calik continues, “The campaign had five times the average open rate and grew a lot of new subscribers and visitors to our website. We’ve never been able to replicate this success, and I doubt we will be able to come up with something as creative and catchy as this campaign.”

Improve Your Email Strategy With Databox Benchmark Groups

You now have some ideas for improving your marketing emails. But as you work towards better performance, you may find yourself wondering how you’re doing compared to other businesses. By knowing how other businesses are doing, you can see what good performance looks like.

The Email Benchmarks for All Companies (HubSpot) Benchmark Group offers a way to do just that. In exchange for anonymously sharing your HubSpot email metrics, you can learn how the other group members are performing in those metrics.

It’s free with a Databox account connected to the metrics you want to compare. Join the group to see it for yourself, and get a Databox account for free if you don’t already have one.