If only there were an app to make users open their emails. Life would have been easier, true! But thankfully, we have dedicated strategies that ensure they do the same.
These are tried and tested methods that go beyond any random hack and help you read your users. Read along as we discuss 5 ways to improve your email campaign performance.
Do not worry; we have ensured that real-life examples are included at each step to help you better understand this concept. There is no need to complicate one of the most important marketing tools that exists. But before that, a quick look at the basics.
What “Email Campaign Performance” Actually Means (Before You Fix Anything)
To begin with, you have to keep two things in mind. Ticking off the names in your list to send the email is irrelevant. It doesn’t really matter if you follow through with it religiously. Secondly, it is not only about opening an email. I mean, sometimes users open the email just to delete it.
Moreover, with Apple’s privacy policy in place, you won’t even know if the email reached an actual user or if it's just the server. Therefore, your metrics need to be smart and, most importantly, understand user behavior. You need to answer a few basic questions, like:
- Did the email lead to a click? A conversion? A sign-up? (Click-Through Rate, Conversion Rate)
- Was the email relevant to the user, or was it simply ignored? (Engagement Rate)
- Did it make them move forward towards a purchase? (Funnel Progression)
- Did it strengthen or weaken trust? (Spam Complaints, Reply Signals)
- What was the unsubscribe rate? (Bounce Rate, Deliverability)
If you see that your email campaign doesn’t tick any of the boxes, it is time to act fast. Here are your 5 ways to improve your email campaign performance:
Way #1 — Fix Your Technicalities Before Fixing Your Copy
Let us begin with the boring technicalities first to get it over with. Here is the thing: your potential users are concerned about privacy, and their mail provider will do anything to protect it. So, a random hack or quick trick ain’t going to solve this for you. You are dealing with real people with real-life implications.
An email sent is not always an email received because your emails get filtered into spam, promotions, or blocked, and you don’t even get to know about it. The solution? A dedicated check.
- Authenticate Your Side Of Things: All email providers care about are senders who are real and authorized to send emails. Therefore, your digital signatures, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, ensure that your emails actually reach inboxes.
- Do Not Rely On Buying Email Lists: This will never work in your favor, no matter how convenient it sounds. Especially in today’s time, people get irritated with “unwanted” emails that they didn’t sign up for. Moreover, it also hurts your reputation and risks being marked as spam.
- Keep a Track of Bounce Behaviour: A high bounce rate is a red flag alert and tells the providers you are in trouble. Along with spam complaints, instant deletions, and frequent unsubscribes weaken inbox trust as well.
- Send Emails Gradually: If there is a spike in your volume out of the blue, that is another big no. It looks suspicious and might feel like a phishing attack. The idea is to take your own sweet time to pick up the pace eventually with time.
Way #2 — Write for One Reader, Not Your Entire List
This doesn’t mean that you send one email per day or start addressing your users by their first name. No! It is all about acknowledging the search intent or going for your target users directly.
Think about it this way: you have launched an AI writing tool for marketers, and you are sending it to people involved in academic research! How does it help them, apart from just a “good to know” information? Or, another mail to delete and unsubscribe from.
This generic email trope not only irritates users but also leads to losing them forever. The solution?
- Segment Your Users Based on Their Behavior: Just the “Writer” job title is not enough for you to start sending our emails about your new tool. The idea is to understand what they are clicking, searching, downloading, or signing up for. (A marketer and researcher are both writers, but they are poles apart, and this is where you make all the difference).
- Match One Email to One Problem: You can talk about your tool’s scalability issue in one email and its research capabilities in another. The moment you set out to fill every possible gap, you connect with no one. Not only that, but your users get confused about what exactly you are trying to do.
- Personalize With Precision: The most important thing here is that you need to be honest with yourself and your campaign. Nobody opens an unknown email until they know it is going to help them. So, instead of the generic “Meet your new superpower writing assistant,” try something more personal and intimate.
➜ “tired of brainstorming for hours”, “scared that AI will take away your voice”, etc. Everyone likes to be seen and acknowledged, and in fact, that is one reliable marketing hack that always works.
Now, the last layer of the problem, how you will write such search intent-oriented emails with your generic AI tools. Don’t worry, this is where we come in. Either you rely on HumanizeAI.io’s trusted humanizer and get it done, or simply let our AI Email Writer take it up for you. Not only do you get emails that are personalized but reflect your brand story, emotion, and uniqueness as well.
Way #3 — Optimize for Clicks, Not Just Opens
You must remember that these steps come into play after you are sure that your campaign has failed. In other words, you have to be a bit aggressive from here on. Hence, your goal automatically shifts from just opening the email to taking further action.
The perspective here is simple:
“They opened it.” → “They did something.”
Think about it this way: you sent out a newsletter telling your potential users to follow your social media. Or, you ask them to download a certain free version for a test run, etc.
In other words, at this point, opening the email is not really enough, and you need real-time results. Celebrating the success of your open rate for a minute is fine, but only if you know what to do next.
- Align Your Subject Line With the Action: Consider this example, you receive an email that promises skincare insights. The moment you open it, there is an additional download and other formalities. The results? You get annoyed and mark everything as spam.
- Design Every Email Around One Primary Action: Every email should come with one call to action. You can either ask your users to subscribe, download, or sign up. The moment you ask them to do it all, they often do none.
- Reduce the Lag After the Click: There is a fine line between information overload and promotion. Imagine that you run a dietary supplement website. Now, if your emails are all about flashy weight loss pictures and other irrelevant details, there will be a disconnect. When users open an unknown email, they want to know what they are looking at immediately.
- Measure Action Quality, Not Just Volume: You already know this by now, the aim is to get meaningful clicks. The high-volume traffic factor rarely works with emails or gives any sustainable results. In simpler terms, 10 users following your CTA is a bigger win than you sending 100 emails.
Way #4 — Get the Timing and Frequency Right
Even your best-written email will fail if you clog the inbox every day. It is as same as any human relationship. If you keep texting your friend twenty-four-seven without any breaks or pauses, they will eventually get a bit unsettled. You might think you are keeping in touch, but for them, it is disturbing. In the email world, it means faster deletes, muting, or worse, which is unsubscribing.
You might feel like you will fade away if the users don’t hear from you every day, and this is where you are wrong. All you need is a quick reevaluation of your schedule:
- Let Actions Decide Timing, Not Calendars: Your emails should be triggered by user actions like sign-ups, clicks, downloads, or inactivity. If you feel like you need to do more, you can surely plan it once-a-week basis, and that is it. You do not want to be the brand that “irritates everyone.”
- Give Users Time to Act: Not everything happens at an instant with real-time users. The moment you send them a guide, newsletter, or subscription plan, you have to wait. This not only piques their interest naturally, but also makes you look less pushy and desperate.
- Analyze Your Unsubscribe List: A sudden rise in your unsubscribe list is a clear indication that there is something wrong. It can be either your content, the frequency, or any other technical factors. This is why data analysis is core to email marketing.
- Use AI to Spot Fatigue Early: With AI in the technical picture, you can always have the upper hand. It can identify engagement drop-offs and other leaks for you to make decisions accordingly.
Way #5 — Treat Every Campaign as a Feedback Loop
The problem with email marketers is that we tend to think of email campaigns as one-time events. You send an email, check the numbers, decide to feel good or bad about it, and move on to the next campaign.
We keep forgetting that the users we send the emails to do not share the same urgency. In other words, every email campaign leaves behind a lot of clues for us to learn from.
✅ One low-performing campaign rarely means that it is a failure. The drop in engagement over time should be the concern more than anything else.
✅ A rising unsubscribe rate tells you that something is wrong. It is never about your incapability but your missing context.
✅ Clicks that lead to sign-ups, downloads, or replies are way more important than traffic overflow.
✅ Changing subject lines, copy, timing, and audience all at once makes the entire feedback meaningless. Small, intentional changes help you understand what actually was the actual issue was.
Always remember that the strongest email campaigns are the ones that are responsive and evolve with user behavior. It was never about instant results or some magic trick that fixes everything.
Email Campaign Performance Is Built, There Are No Shortcuts
Expecting greatly from your campaign is only human. However, the moment you realize that it is completely dependent on real-time user behavior, your perspective will shift. The magic numbers that you read on LinkedIn or a random marketing guide are nothing but gimmicks, clout-chasing behavior.
To be honest, strong email campaign performance is built slowly, through trust, relevance, timing, and consistent learning. And it all begins with the moment your mail reaches the inbox, but it grows when you start writing for the search intent. For real users and not some random blog post or video that says otherwise.
Every open, click, unsubscribe, or inactivity is not a red flag, but an indicator that is trying to tell you something. The more you start treating it as a conversation and less of a challenge to crack, things will become simpler, easier, and aligned.