Direct Email Marketing: Strategy and Design

I’ve written, designed, and tested consumer emails for companies across every sector: nonprofit and for-profit, B2B and B2C, tech start-ups, freelance operations, & more.

Using Mailchimp, Salesforce, Constant Contact and others throughout my career, I’ve utilized lead generation and segmenting tools, combined with strategic copy and design, to continuously increase open rates and click-throughs in every new campaign.

Email Marketing Success Story

An obvious but sometimes overlooked strategy for increasing open rates is considering the consumer behaviors of your specific demographic. When I assumed the marketing manager role at Atlantic Acting School, we had two separate email lists – prospective adult students (appx. 18–35) and parents of children for our kids offerings. We sent them at the same time on the same day, alternating weeks.

Theorizing that those two very different demographics were likely to have very different schedules, I shifted the parent emails from midday on Thursday to 8:30am on Saturday morning. After doing so, we saw an average 21% increase in opens for our kids’ list emails.