Are your email marketing efforts falling flat? Is your email list not the cash cow it used to be? Had it with your emails falling flat? Ready to make your email blasts more than just noise?

Don’t go anywhere - help is on the way. I've got the insider advice you need to dodge typical errors and turn those messages into moneymakers. Let’s turn things around - no more throwing cash down the drain. It’s high time we got smart with our email marketing to enjoy some well-deserved profits.

Let's dive into the three big blunders that might be sinking your email marketing efforts and keeping those conversions just out of reach. From misinterpreting email open rates to ineffective calls to action, these common mistakes can quickly turn your emails into missed opportunities.

Don't sweat it; consider yourself covered by my expertise. By identifying and addressing these errors, you'll be well on your way to boosting your email marketing ROI.

Forget about what these so-called “experts” say about email open rates. Most of what you read is just “echo chamber” stuff with everyone copying what everyone else says just so that they can sound like they know something.

But the real email experts have always said that email open rates don’t mean anything. Never have and never will.

I know this sounds controversial. But IMO, Apple actually did the email marketing industry a favor by hiding all intelligence about email a few years back. Thanks to iOS15 and beyond, we marketers can’t tell if someone actually read our email or if they’re using an Apple device, and all it did was download the email to their inbox where it may or may not have been read.

Have open rates gone up since iOS15? Yes, they have. But not as much as you’d assume.

There are a set of specific conditions under which an Apple device will download a user’s emails ahead of time.

So, what’s the solution? Email click rate. That metric has always been the proper metric that the real email marketers look at.

Think about it. Why do you send an email? No. You don’t send an email just so that someone will read it. You send an email because you want to use your email to get the reader to go to your website. It’s on your website where real business takes place.

Total clicks count the number of times that your readers clicked a link in your email. Unique clicks count the number of individuals who clicked a link in your email.

I hardly ever look at total clicks. I always look at unique clicks. I don’t care about how many times a link was clicked. I care about how many people clicked a link in my email.

Click rate is calculated as the total number of clicks in an email as a percentage of the number of emails that the mailbox providers accepted. The email’s click rate gives you a holistic view of your email. It gives credit to both the subject line and the content of your email.

Click-to-Open rate is calculated as the number of people who clicked in an email as a percentage of the number of people who opened your email. The email’s click-to-open rate focuses more on your email content. Of the people who read your email, how many were persuaded by your email’s call to action to click a link.

I do look at both click rate and click-to-open rate, although I focus more on the latter.

Too many email marketers think that the sole purpose of email is to sell. That’s wrong.

The purpose of email is to build relationships. And all relationships are built on trust.

I came up with my Buyers’ Circles of Trust customer engagement model based on my years of experience.

Business relationships start at the outer-most circle where there’s little to no trust. Use email to move from one level of trust to the next inner level. And to move to the next inner level there needs to be a transaction. And your prospect/customer needs to trust you enough to want to engage in the transaction you’re proposing.

I did an email coaching session a few months ago for founders and CEOs of million-dollar companies. One of the attendees mentioned they were having problems with getting people to give their phone numbers for a sales rep to call them.

So, there’s the transaction.

But instead of the medium of exchange being money, it’s a phone number.

Make sense?

As I dug deeper into their email campaigns, they realized that they hadn’t done a good enough job building enough trust with their prospects that they were willing to give them their phone numbers. And the further we talked, the clearer they became on what they needed to do to build more trust long before asking their prospects for their phone numbers.

Most inexperienced email list managers treat email as nothing more than slapping the electronic version of a mailing label on a campaign flyer or promotional postcard.

They have a list and that’s all they send to.

So, the problem is that they send to the same list of contacts again and again and again.

Unfortunately, the people who never read your emails are actually controlling whether your emails make the inbox or the spam folder or get rejected outright.

You didn’t know that did you?

So, the first thing you need to do is get your deadbeats off your email list.

By “deadbeats,” I mean people who’ve either never read your emails since signing up, or for whatever reason have stopped reading them, and haven’t read them since.

There’s always going to be the same set of people who like your emails. These are the people you want to be sending your emails to.

Stop sending your emails to people who haven’t read your emails in the past 90 days (or past 120 days, etc. depending on how often you send your emails.)

Now, let’s do the math.

The same number of people are going to be reading your emails. So, the numerator of your open rates (and click rates) will stay pretty much the same. But since you’ve stopped sending emails to your deadbeats, the denominator is smaller. A smaller denominator means a higher open rate and a higher click rate.

A rise in open rates and click rates is exactly what the mailbox providers want to see from you. So now, they’ll start routing more of your emails to your recipients inboxes instead of their spam folders.

Brilliant, eh? And it’s so easy to do.

Wrapping your head around email marketing's subtle tricks can be the difference between making or breaking your budget.

Let's get real about engagement – clicks tell the story far better than mere opens. They're the true measure of who's really tuning in and who’s not.

To really get those conversion numbers climbing, nail down calls to action that not only grab attention but also earn the trust of your followers.

Fine-tuning your email approach to truly know your audience—and knowing when it's time to stop emailing those who just aren't into it—can really make your email game much stronger.

Once you've got these three essential bases covered, watch as your emails start raking in profits like never before. Keep these points in mind and watch your email marketing ROI grow.