The 80/20 Rule Of Email Marketing: Focus On These 20% For 80% Of Results

Do you want more results out of your email list but don’t want to put more effort into your email marketing strategy?

Email marketing is still one of the reliable forms of marketing for blogs, and it fits in nicely with social media marketing as well.

In this post, we share tips on how to see maximum results from your email list with minimal effort.

What is the 80/20 rule in marketing?

The 80/20 rule actually predates marketing. Its real name is the Pareto principle.

It was named after Vilfredo Pareto, the man who introduced the concept. While tending his garden in the late 1800s, Pareto noticed that 80% of the peas he harvested came from only 20% of the pea pods in his garden.

He soon realized this principle could be applied to other areas of life as well, which led him to the realization that around 80% of the land in his native Italy was owned by only 20% of the nation’s population at the time.

Thus, the law states that in many cases, 80% of consequences come from just 20% of causes.

When applied to marketing, the law means that 80% of your results should come from only 20% of the work you put in.

How to apply the 80/20 rule in email marketing

1. Understand what drives results in email marketing

Your email copy is important, but in reality, the elements that affect your list the most are opt-in forms, subject lines and personalization.

You can really do a lot to improve the results you see from email marketing by applying these changes:

• Using lead magnets to encourage more of your audience to subscribe
• Optimizing your subject lines to encourage more of your subscribers to open your emails
• Segmenting your email list so you can personalize the emails you send to subscribers
• Using automation sequences to apply even more personalization to your list

Email copy is important, but by focusing more of your efforts on the techniques listed above, you can maximize the results you see from your list.

2. Add lead magnets to your opt-in forms

Whether you’re promoting your email list on your blog or from your social media pages, you need to give your audience a reason to subscribe.

“Subscribe to my newsletter for more tips” is not going to cut it.

Create something your audience can only get if they subscribe to your list. This can be something they have to download or something they can only access in an email.

Here are a few lead magnet ideas to get you started:

• Template
• PDF guide
• Ebook
• Whitepaper
• Quiz or survey results
• Free asset, such as an icon set or royalty-free music
• Checklist
• Workbook
• Cheatsheet
• Free consultation
• Webinar access
• Free course
• If you’re a social media creator, use your email list in place of a blog. This way, your followers can get extra content by subscribing to your list

Whether you’re a blogger or a social media creator, offer lead magnets as bonuses to your content.

If you publish a tutorial, offer a printable PDF that breaks down each step in the tutorial like an instruction manual.

Consider creating entire landing pages for your lead magnets to market them more effectively, as if they were a product.

3. Optimize your email subject lines

Open your personal email inbox for a moment. What do you see?

You probably see a lot of different emails from loved ones, work and/or school, updates from stores you shop at, and marketing emails from various businesses.

If you use Gmail, those marketing emails likely appear in the Promotions tab alongside every other marketing email you’ve received since you last cleaned out your inbox.

This is what your subscriber’s inbox looks like as well. This is why one of your top priorities as an email marketer should be to optimize your subject line.

Every email has a subject line and preheader text that are meant to demonstrate what the email in question contains and why the recipient should open it.

These are the bits of text you need to optimize.

The subject line is the bold text to the left while the preheader text is the lighter text to the right.

Use your subject line as a headline for your email and your preheader text as a summary. You can also get a little creative and write your preheader text in a way that plays off of your subject line.

For the most part, you should focus on optimizing your subject line in these ways:

• Making sure your subject line represents your email copy. Clickbait will only get you unsubscribed and a spam label
• Including power words that trigger emotions in your reader, including words like master, proven, limited, painless, discover, devastating, etc.
• Using numerals in place of written numbers, such as “5” instead of “five”
• Using bracketed calls to action at the start of your subject line, such as “[Enter Now]”
• Use the FOMO (fear of missing out) phenomenon to your advantage by letting your subscriber know they’re missing out, such as “[Free Guide] Mother’s Day is approaching! Build her a Victorian bird house before it’s too late”

4. Segment your email list

You might have a very specific niche or create the same type of content again and again, but how can you really be sure your entire email list is interested in every email you send out?

You can’t!

This is why segmenting your email list is vital to its success.

Email segmentation is the practice of breaking your email list into different chunks that separate subscribers into interest groups that represent the topics you cover, the stages that exist within your niche (beginner, intermediate, pro), and the products you sell.

Or at the very least, product categories.

You create segments using whatever segmentation tools that are available in your email marketing app.

Integrations with platforms like WordPress and Shopify as well as marketing automations allow you to segment your audience automatically based on actions they take while subscribed to your list.

How to use email segments

Once you set your segments up, you can personalize your email list by only sending certain emails to segments that would be interested in them.

For example, if your content is all about outdoor activities, including fishing, hunting, camping and hiking, you can create individual segments for each individual activity.

You can even create product segments if these activities represent categories in your store as well.

Then, when you have a new fishing reel to promote, only send emails about it to subscribers who are in the fishing segment of your list.

You can even create separate segments for “customers” and “non-customers” so you can market to them differently as well. Customers have already bought something from you, so they’re easier to convince than non-customers are.

You can still send broadcast emails to your entire list, but these segments will allow you to deliver personalized experiences to your subscriber.

5. Set up automation sequences

Automation sequences are triggers that occur within your list that are based on actions taken by your subscribers.

If we use the outdoor activity creator as an example again, and that creator has a lead magnet for a fishing guide, they can build an automation sequence that segments a subscriber into the “fishing” segment automatically if they subscribe through an opt-in form that offers the fishing guide as a lead magnet.

You can send emails automatically through automation sequences as well.

For example, you can promote old posts through an automation sequence that promotes one post per email and sends the emails out once a week. You can create one for each segment.

You can build automation sequences for your store as well by sending new customers promotional emails automatically a few weeks after they completed a purchase.

The possibilities are endless with automation sequences but are mainly dependent on the features available in your email marketing tool.

6. Analyze your email marketing results

The point of the Pareto principle is to work smarter by ensuring a small amount of the effort you put in impacts the majority of the results that you see.

Focusing on your lead magnets, email segmentation, subject lines and automation will help, but if you’ve already been at this email marketing thing for a while, you likely have a lot of data you can sift through. This will help as well.

Analyze your results right now, including your subscription rates, open rates, click-through rates and unsubscribe rates.

Then, optimize the different areas of your email list in the ways that we taught you. Optimize them one by one so you can see what’s working and what’s not.

Offer different lead magnets to see which ones increase your subscription rate. Write different subject lines to see which style increases your open rates.

Hopefully, your email copy and what you have to promote are compelling enough already. This means that the majority of your results from email marketing will come from the work you put in before your subscriber even clicks on your email.

If you write different types of emails, including newsletters for your content, promotional emails for your products, etc., pay attention to which kinds net you the highest open, click-through and conversion rates.

These are the emails you should focus most of your efforts on.

Final thoughts

The Pareto principle can be applied to every marketing channel or discipline. Not just email marketing.

That said, email offers higher ROI than other marketing channels and by a significant degree.

So, if there’s one marketing channel to apply the 80/20 rule to – it’s email.

It all boils down to working smarter. Not harder.