Hey guys, it’s John Grimshaw!
Q3 is officially here, and at Smart Marketer we’re bringing you a 4-part series breaking down what’s been working in D2C marketing so far in 2025.
In part 1, we talked about paid ads and offers. Today, we’re digging into monetization performance—specifically, how to use email to drive more growth and build better customer relationships.
In this post, you’ll get 4 email strategies working right now across different markets, including:
- 3 easy ways to increase clicks in a “post-Apple privacy update” world
- How we 2x’d email revenue by focusing on WHEN we click send
- And a simple tactic for boosting engagement and list health (without writing a single new email)
Let’s get started!
(And if you enjoy these tips and want to build out a full email and product-launch system for your brand, you can save 40% on our new Email Accelerator Bundle during our 2025 Summer Sale!)
1. Rebuild Your Click Rate to Rebuild Your Revenue
A lot of brands have come to us saying, “Email used to be our biggest revenue driver. Now it’s in decline!” But the truth is, email is still an extremely powerful marketing channel—you just have to adapt.
Namely, instead of judging success strictly based on sales, you also have to focus on clicks.
Yeah, click rates have dropped across the board since Apple’s privacy changes—but it’s not the end of the world. We just have to build systems that encourage email engagement outside of clicking over to a product page.
At Smart Marketer, a recent email just got a 6% click rate (our best performer in years!), and we’ve helped multiple clients boost their click rates from under 1% to over 1.5%.
How’d we do it? With these 3 click-boosters strategies:
- Ask questions – Ask about your customers’ pain points and how they want to improve their life. Then ask them to click over to your site for the answers.
- Click to enlarge – Include an image in your email, with a button or text CTA on it to enlarge or see the whole thing. It’s an easy way to get engagement.
- Invite replies & feedback – This is an easy one. Replies and feedback are super helpful for your brand, and an easy way to get a click.
Across all our clients, increased clicks is leading to increased revenue. This is how you start rebuilding your email results.
(Note: It goes without saying, but don’t use blackhat tactics to artificially inflate click rate. It erodes trust and doesn’t help in the long run.)
2. Don’t End Holiday Sales on a Holiday
This is hands down one of the best things you can do to improve the results of your email promos.
You might think it makes sense to end your July 4th promo on July 4th, but here’s the problem: Nobody checks their inbox on a holiday.
We’ve seen brands kill perfectly good sales by closing when no one’s online.
Instead, push your close date after the holiday and end on a high-attention weekday like Tuesday or Wednesday. That’s when people are back in buying mode and when you’ll get the most eyeballs.
And you don’t have to write extra emails. Just move your close emails a few days later (and remember to adjust your promo calendar accordingly).
This takes very little work, and will result in much stronger closes to your promos.
3. Send Emails When People Are Ready to Buy
Okay, those first 2 tips were good, but broad. Now let’s get more specific.
For years, best practices dictated that send times should be early in the morning because that’s when people check their emails.
But recently we decided to challenge that idea.
For one client, we tested send time performance (9am vs. 12pm vs. 3pm vs. 6pm) and found that the best send time for this client was actually 3pm. It 2x’d revenue per campaign on basically every single email!
Want to find the best send time for your brand? Here’s how to test it:
- Break your list into 4 segments
- Send the same email at different times (something like early morning, noon, 3pm, 7pm)
- Do this over a few weeks and with several emails, so one email or time slot doesn’t skew the results
- Then track revenue and engagement by time slot
This is super simple to test, and once you know when your audience likes to engage you can tailor your sends around that time.
Another reason I love this tip:
It’s NOT about sending more emails, which is the solution people often gravitate toward (and a valid one, but one that requires more work). It’s about squeezing more juice out of the emails you’re already sending.
4. Resend Winners to Less-engaged Subscribers
Don’t assume that a subscriber who didn’t open your email isn’t interested. They may have just missed it.
During our client’s Mother’s Day sale, we used a strategy that increased sales 9% and reengaged 50K leads.
Here’s what to do:
- Take a high-performing recent email
- Resend it to anyone who didn’t open
- Then send it again to a broader, colder segment of your list
For us, this strategy didn’t lead to more spam complaints or unsubscribes—just more clicks, more sales and list reactivation.
A Note on Segmentation
Over the last 3 years, we’ve been more aggressive about segmentation.
We were tired of sending so many emails to people who weren’t opening, which hurts deliverability and overall performance.
So we created “engaged segments” of subscribers who have opened or clicked in the last 30, 60 and 90 days. (This does shrink your list size, but it also boosts overall results and is better for the health of your business.)
Segmentation also helps us find what’s working for our best subscribers, so we can use those wins to warm up colder segments.
People who scream “Email is dying!” usually aren’t segmenting. They’re not taking care of their list, cleaning out unengaged users and working strategically to reactivate them over time.
You can’t run your email strategy the same way you did 7 or 8 years ago and expect the same results.
Build Out a Full Email & Product-launch System
With this post, we only scratched the surface of what’s working right now in email…
But if you want to our complete email marketing system—including every strategy, campaign and automation we use to make email a massive sales channel for our clients—then check this out:
You can save 40% on our new Email Accelerator Bundle during our 2025 Summer Sale. This bundle comes with:
- Smart Email Marketing, and…
- Smart Product Creation
So not only can you build, engage and monetize a valuable email list—but you can continually launch new products that these subscribers will be excited to buy!
This bundle is one of the best deals we’ve ever offered, and when you shop our sale you also get ? 2 bonuses, including our brand new AI Blueprint.
So click here to grab our new Email Accelerator Bundle, and to shop the rest of our Summer Sale!
