Powerful UK fitness influencers for your next campaign

Influencer marketing has quickly become an essential digital marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes. Last year, influencer ad spending was projected to reach a staggering $30.81 billion, increasing to $47.80 billion in the next three years.

Understanding what influencer marketing is, and how to apply it successfully today, demands niching down. If you’re a UK company, particularly if you’re a brand selling health-conscious or fitness products, you should consider working with local UK fitness influencers.

Read on to learn more about how to find and vet UK fitness influencers in 2024, alongside examples of 27 of today’s biggest creators.

Understanding the UK fitness influencer landscape

To better understand the landscape of today’s UK fitness influencers, we need to apply three key approaches: identifying them, analyzing their performance and evaluating their credibility.

Identifying key fitness influencers in the UK using Tagger

There’s no shortage of UK fitness influencers on social media. Due to the sheer number of active influencers today, you’ll likely need to use influencer marketing management tools like Tagger to measure your campaigns and find the right individuals for your brand’s identity.

Within Tagger, you can access an extensive database of influencers to find the right person for your company. You can achieve this using thousands of search filter combinations, including filtering influencers by their follower count, or the total sum of shares their profile has achieved.

Evaluating the authenticity and credibility of fitness influencers

You’ll need to evaluate the credibility of any fitness influencers you’re considering working with. This involves making sure their engagement is legitimate, and that they follow compliance guidelines like those of the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority). The ASA is the UK’s independent advertising regulator across all forms of media, including social media marketing.

By using Tagger, you can ensure you’re always working with authentic influencers who align with your particular brand. If they pass your evaluations, you’re well on your way to mastering a successful influencer marketing strategy.

Analyzing audience demographics and engagement

Once you’ve started a campaign with a UK fitness influencer, you can continue to use Tagger to analyze individual influencer metrics, like post count or total sum of likes, as well as overarching trends and the performance of your influencer campaigns.

What to consider when choosing UK fitness influencers?

There are several factors you should consider when choosing between influencers, particularly the following:

Audience demographics and relevance to your brand

When analyzing audience demographics, you should make sure that an influencer has the same target audience as your company. This ensures they’re already engaging with your target customers, and means their content is likely more relevant to the needs of your business.

Engagement metrics: quality over quantity

It’s tempting to simply contact the UK fitness influencers with the highest engagement figures, but this isn’t always wise. For example, you may prefer an influencer who gets a lot of shares over someone who attracts a lot of reactions, depending on if you’re prioritizing reach or impressions in your campaign. Or, an influencer could have a high comment count that looks impressive but is mostly generated by bots. Always make sure you’re considering an influencer’s engagement quality, for example by selecting a few of their posts at random, and checking whether any comments are from legitimate accounts.

Authenticity and alignment with your brand values

Before you work with them, you need to make sure everything an influencer posts, even posts you’re not affiliated with, also aligns with your brand’s values. This mitigates risks for your company, as any issues that occur with an influencer’s career could negatively impact your reputation.

This authenticity, in terms of how professional and reliable an influencer is, can end up being just as important as other metrics to track influencer marketing success, like conversions and impressions.

Ensuring compliance with ASA guidelines

As the number of people becoming full-time influencers has increased, so too have guidelines and laws designed to regulate them. You need to ensure any of the fitness influencers you work with follow all current guidelines, particularly regarding advertising. A reliable set of guidelines are those published by the ASA.

Leading fitness influencers in the UK

Based on the factors above, here are some of the top fitness influencers in the UK today. We’ve used Tagger to filter influencers based on both YouTube and Instagram followings.

1. Joe Wicks (@thebodycoach)– 4.7 million Instagram followers, 2.81 million YouTube subscribers

With an Instagram following of a whopping 4.7 million followers and close to 3 million YouTube subscribers, Joe Wicks is one of the most noteworthy UK fitness influencers today. His popularity skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he remains one of the most influential people in the UK fitness world. Wicks posts weekly workout videos on his YouTube channel, as well as healthy recipes and inspirational content on his Instagram.

 

2. Tom Daly (@tomdaley) – 3.2 million Instagram followers, 1.18 million YouTube subscribers

Tom Daley is an Olympic gold medalist who has amassed a colossal social media following, becoming one of the biggest male UK fitness influencer examples in terms of reach. Tom posts regular vlogs on his YouTube channel, as well as occasional workout videos. He then also posts frequent diving and workout reels on his Instagram.

3. Ryan Terry (@ryanjterry) – 2.5million Instagram followers, 191k YouTube subscribers

Ryan Terry is the 2023 Mr Olympia champion and a three-time winner of the Arnold Classic. He posts motivational reels on Instagram and lengthier workout videos on his YouTube channel.

4. Gemma Atkinson (@glouiseatkinson) – 1.9 million Instagram followers

Former soap star and UK celebrity Gemma Atkinson has become one of the leading female UK fitness influencers in terms of followers. She combines motivational Instagram posts with her podcast, The Overshare, to provide advice on how to keep fit while being a mother.

5. Kim French (@kimfrench87) – 1.6 million Instagram followers

Kim French launched the Believe by Kim French fitness app and has one of the largest Instagram followings of today’s UK fitness influencers. She posts multi-reels for workouts designed for specific body parts, as well as exercise advice.

6. Matt Morsia (@mattdoesfitness) – 1 million Instagram followers, 2.26 million YouTube subscribers

Matt Morsia stars in the UK’s rebooted Gladiators TV show and has a substantial following on both Instagram and YouTube. He creates popular motivational Instagram posts, but his larger reach is on YouTube where he regularly creates training videos, alongside unconventional content like a house-building vlog.

7. Gabby Dawn Allen (@gabbydawnallen) – 1 million Instagram followers

Former Love Island star Gabby Dawn Allen is one of the UK’s biggest Instagram fitness trainers. She hosts the What the Health show and posts lifestyle content alongside workout reels.

Female fitness influencers in the UK

Below are some of the biggest female UK fitness influencers working at the moment. To do this, we analyzed cross-platform correlations across Instagram and YouTube, and chose influencers who are all creating content in unique ways.

1. Meggan Grubb (@meggangrubb) – 1.3 million Instagram followers, 536k YouTube subscribers

Meggan is one of the biggest UK fitness influencers on Instagram and has a growing presence on YouTube. She founded both the clothing brand Move with Blue and the Beyond app for women’s fitness, and regularly posts exercises, meal plans and parental advice.

2. Natacha Oceane (@natacha.oceane) – 1 million Instagram followers, 1.7 million YouTube subscribers

Natacha is a biophysicist who curates training programs approved by the Team GB Olympic Team. She posts exercise tips on her Instagram, and workout routines on her YouTube channel.

3. Courtney Black (@courtneydblack) – 838k Instagram followers, 61k YouTube subscribers

Courtney is one of the fastest-growing UK fitness influencers with a huge Instagram following. She hosts live workouts through the Courtney Black app, and also posts workouts and dieting advice on her Instagram and YouTube channel.

4. Chessie King (@chessieking) – 705k Instagram followers

Chessie is an experienced social media influencer, who’s worked with some of the biggest names in fitness, including Nike and Adidas, and creates short motivational workouts and lifestyle reels.

5. Lucy Davis (@lucydavis_fit) – 671k Instagram followers, 254k YouTube subscribers

Lucy styles herself as the “no BS fitness girl” and posts regular workouts and exercise reels on her Instagram. On her YouTube channel, she posts vlogs about her fitness achievements as well as hybrid fitness challenges.

Male fitness influencers in the UK

The following represent a few of the notable male UK fitness influencer examples on social media today, which we found using the same strategy as in the above section.

1. Simon Chu (@striking.coach) – 1.2 million Instagram followers

Simon is a Muay Thai coach with a gym based in Leeds. He posts sparring videos on his Instagram and has several online tutorials hosted on his website.

2. Michael Griffiths (@mac_griffiths) – 1 million Instagram followers

Michael is a former Love Island contestant with a notable Instagram following. He works as a transformation coach, and posts workout routines alongside collaborations with fellow Love Island alumni, boxer Tommy Fury.

3. McKenna Crisp (@mckennawcrisp) – 696k Instagram followers

McKenna is a Gymshark athlete and frequently shares updates of his workout journey on Instagram.

4. Alex Beattie (@alex.beattie) – 627k Instagram followers

Another former Love Island contestant, Alex now promotes muscle strength and weight loss training routines through his workout reels and motivational posts.

5. Wayne Bridge (@waynebridge03) – 276k Instagram followers

Wayne is a former Premier League footballer. He now uses his Instagram to promote how he keeps fit in retirement. Wayne is an older fitness influencer, which is far less common across the industry. If you were looking to market your products to an older audience, you could use Tagger to filter influencers by age, and find more influencers with an audience similar to Wayne’s.

 

YouTube fitness influencers in the UK

Influencers tend to use YouTube to post longer content. This is worth remembering if you’re looking to start any influencer campaigns, as the different types of content available on each platform, and the demographics of their user bases, will impact your overall reach.

These five YouTube influencers create fitness videos, as well as more experimental viral videos, and were chosen using Tagger’s filters for UK fitness influencers with high YouTube subscriber counts.

1. Eddie Hall (@eddiehallwsm) – 2.87 million YouTube subscribers

Former World’s Strongest Man Eddie Hall has one of the most successful YouTube channels of any current UK fitness influencer. He creates sparring videos with other famous sportspeople, workouts, eating challenges and viral content.

2. Lucy Wyndham-Read (@lucywyndhamread) – 2.38 million YouTube subscribers

Lucy’s home workout fitness channel has over 1,000 workout videos, with some of her most popular videos regularly amassing millions of views. She’s also published several workout and diet plans on her website.

3. Joe Fazer (@JoeFazer) – 1.53 million YouTube subscribers

Joe has grown to become one of the biggest male UK fitness influencer figures on YouTube. His videos regularly reach millions of views and involve fitness challenges, vlogs, and body transformation advice.

4. Gabriel Sey (@GabrielSeyOfficial) – 410k YouTube subscribers

Gabriel Sey has published over 700 videos on YouTube since starting his channel over a decade ago. Several of his fitness tips videos have exceeded a million views, and he also posts vlogs about his fitness journey, alongside diet advice.

5. Lottie Murphy (@LottieMurphy) – 398k YouTube subscribers

Lottie Murphy creates approachable pilates and flexibility videos on her popular YouTube channel and hosts more in-depth routines on her website.

Instagram fitness influencers in the UK

Fitness is well-suited to Instagram thanks to its focus on photo and video content. These five UK Instagram influencers all have huge followings and evidence the growing popularity of fitness influencers on the platform.

1. Lucy Mecklenburgh (@lucymeck1) – 1.7 million Instagram followers

Lucy Mecklenburgh is a former UK reality TV star, having appeared in The Only Way is Essex as well as several other shows. Alongside lifestyle content, she uses her Instagram to promote dietary advice and fitness tips, and launched the Results Wellness Lifestyle app to support women looking to lose weight.

2. Danielle Peazer (@DaniellePeazer) – 1 million Instagram followers

Danielle is a wellness influencer who specializes in dance workouts. She creates dance workout and exercise reels on Instagram and YouTube, whilst also posting lifestyle advice.

3. James Stirling (@london_fitness_guy) – 983k Instagram followers

James posts home workout content that uses minimal equipment, which has helped him nurture a huge Instagram follower count. He also offers more intensive workouts through his fitness app, PWER.

4. Claressa Shields (@claressashields) – 824k Instagram followers

Claressa is an undisputed boxing champion and former Olympic athlete. On her Instagram, she posts motivational content, sparring sessions, and pre-fight exercise routines.

5. Talia and Giulia Harte (@thehartesisters) – 810k Instagram followers

The Harte sisters are former Team GB skiers who now manage their own UK fitness influencer careers. They publish workout reels on Instagram, often with both beginner and advanced options or variations for home and gym workouts.

How to start marketing with UK fitness influencers

You should now have a greater understanding of how to find UK fitness influencers in your niche, as well as some of the biggest names promoting fitness content. If you’re planning to start utilizing influencer marketing in your business, you’ll need the right tools for the job. Learn about some of the best influencer marketing tools available in 2024 to find the right UK-based influencer to power your next campaign.

 

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How to use LinkedIn hashtag analytics to boost content reach

With over a billion members in 200+ countries and territories worldwide, LinkedIn is one of the most popular social networks for brands looking to reach a professional audience.

But with millions of posts flooding users’ feeds daily, how do you make sure your content gets noticed? Hashtags may be the answer. LinkedIn hashtags are searchable, which increases your content’s reach and gets your posts in front of more of the right people.

In this article, we’ll dive into why hashtags matter, how they boost your brand’s visibility and how to use LinkedIn hashtag analytics to add fuel to the fire of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Table of Contents

• What are LinkedIn hashtag analytics?
• Why tracking LinkedIn hashtag analytics is important for your business
• How to generate LinkedIn hashtag analytics

What are LinkedIn hashtag analytics?

LinkedIn hashtag analytics reveal how popular specific hashtags are on the platform and how they impact content performance.

For example, hashtag analytics offer insight into how many people see your posts because of the hashtags you use, which hashtags get the most traction and how much engagement your posts get because of those hashtags. Understanding the data behind your hashtag strategy will help you fine-tune your approach and content to reach more of your target audience.

Why tracking LinkedIn hashtag analytics is important

On LinkedIn, 40% of users organically interact with a page weekly, making it an excellent choice for brands that want to get noticed without paid promotion. Adding LinkedIn hashtags to your organic content can help it reach an even broader audience, but you need to be strategic to make the most of them. This is where LinkedIn hashtag analytics come into play.

Here are the top reasons why you should keep track of LinkedIn hashtag analytics.

Identify the best hashtags for your brand

Have you noticed that a particular hashtag has a high follower count and consistently drives engagement on your company’s posts? Those are good signs that you should keep using it. Analyzing these metrics over time will allow you to pinpoint the exact keywords and phrases that resonate the most with your audience.

Understand which hashtags compliment your brand

Prioritize relevancy over popularity to reach the people most interested in what you’re sharing. For example, suppose you’re a social media marketer at a B2B marketing software company for small businesses. You might opt for the more specific #smallbusiness hashtag, with around 800,000 followers, over the general #marketing, with over 20 million followers. Despite its smaller follower count, picking the more relevant hashtag will help you cut through the noise and speak directly to your ideal customers.

Subscription design service Superside recently used this approach for a LinkedIn post promoting an upcoming webinar, using very niche hashtags like #aitutorial and #3dmoviestylecharacter with a broader but still targeted hashtag #characterdesign, which has over 14,000 followers.

Track the sentiment for certain hashtags

A solid social media strategy also tracks how people feel about the content you’re putting out. Monitor what hashtags drive more positive or negative engagement to ensure your content hits the right notes.

For example, creating a Listening Topic in Sprout Social will enable you to analyze the topic’s most common keywords and hashtags and see a breakdown by sentiment for related keywords and hashtags.

Monitor your competitors

Incorporating hashtag analysis into your competitive monitoring will help you optimize your social media strategy by staying competitive and increasing your share of voice more relevantly. For example, if competitor posts with specific hashtags consistently get high engagement, that’s an indicator that those hashtags are hitting the mark with their audience, and you may want to start incorporating those or similar keywords into your content.

Sprout’s Listening solutions make this process easy. They enable you to gather key metrics like volume, engagement, likes and impression breakdowns for specific competitor hashtags, or a broader overview of your competitors’ top hashtags.

How to generate LinkedIn hashtag analytics

Not all social media analytics are created equal. Knowing how to generate this data will make all the difference in maximizing your post reach and engagement. From leveraging built-in LinkedIn tools to browser extensions to third-party social media management platforms, here are the primary methods for generating LinkedIn hashtag analytics.

Use the native LinkedIn hashtag analytics

LinkedIn offers follower count numbers for all hashtags. To see how many followers a hashtag has, use this URL formula:

https://ift.tt/UpGaRPjkeyword

For example, if you wanted to see the follower count for #socialmediamarketing, you would enter the following URL into your web browser:

https://ift.tt/UpGaRPjsocialmediamarketing

The follower count will be displayed prominently at the top of the page. It’s not the most efficient system, but this method will show you the popularity of specific hashtags. From there, make a shortlist of industry-specific hashtags and test them to see how they affect performance.

Use a LinkedIn hashtags analytics extension

Hashtag Analytics is a free Google Chrome extension by Engage AI. The tool allows you to check hashtag follower counts directly on LinkedIn, get real-time insights while scrolling through your feed and get hashtag suggestions as you write your posts.

It also offers additional data like hashtag follower growth over time, the maximum number of likes and comments based on the top 20 recent posts and the total reach of a post after incorporating hashtags.

To start exploring hashtags, add the extension to Chrome, log into LinkedIn, and access the tool icon in your browser.

Use a third-party social media scheduling tool

Creating a tag for different hashtags in Sprout Social will enable you to track how each one performs in engagement, reach and clicks across your posts. Say, for instance, you work for a virtual event software company and want to compare posts with #eventprofs to ones with #eventtech.

Creating a tag for each hashtag will enable you to generate Tag Performance Reports that provide metrics like impressions, engagements, engagement rate (per impression) and top posts. This data will help refine your social media strategy and drive more meaningful interactions with your target audience.

Harnessing the power of LinkedIn analytics

It’s challenging for brands to stand out in the ‘pay to play’ social media landscape. Fortunately, hashtags are an easy way to boost your content and organically get it to the right people. Just make sure you monitor your hashtag analytics to see which hashtags drive the most results to maximize your LinkedIn content efforts.

Of course, hashtags are just one feature that can affect content performance. If you want to dive even deeper into the world of LinkedIn performance data and learn more about the best platforms to track metrics, check out our roundup of the top LinkedIn analytics tools on the market.

The post How to use LinkedIn hashtag analytics to boost content reach appeared first on Sprout Social.

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How to be a successful affiliate marketer: Growth strategies & tips

Did you know the average affiliate marketer makes just over $8,000 a month?

Not bad for a job that lets you work anywhere, set your own hours, and earn passive income.

But, as always, there’s a catch:

That figure is massively skewed by affiliate marketers with 10+ years of experience, who bring in an average monthly income of $44,000+.

Meanwhile, if you’re in your first year of affiliate marketing, you can expect a slightly more humble return of $636 a month. Which probably won’t even cover your bills, let alone fast-track you toward a life of luxury.

Still, if you can get through those tricky first two years, the rewards are there for the taking.

And we can help you get there by sharing our top tips on how to be a successful affiliate marketer…

Where to post affiliate marketing links

Let’s start with the basics of how to promote an affiliate link. There are four main channels you can use, each with its own strengths and weaknesses:

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves building a search-friendly website that targets the types of keywords your audience is looking for. It’s the #1 source of traffic for affiliate marketers.

But SEO is tough. If you’re targeting a keyword with decent search volume, you’ll likely be competing with huge, generalist publishers like Forbes and Business Insider, so you’ve got your work cut out getting anywhere near the top #10 search results.

Organic search is also extremely volatile, with a 13-month study of 28,000+ domains finding that <5% of websites maintain their top #10 rankings for a whole year.

👍 SEO pros:

• Free traffic source
• Targets qualified shoppers searching for specific information
• Once you’ve built a well-optimized site, it can keep generating traffic for years

👎 SEO cons:

• Building an SEO-friendly site takes a lot of time
• However much work you put in, it’s extremely difficult to outrank massive publishers
• Search engine algorithms change regularly, so your rankings could tank overnight

Email

Email marketing has the highest return on investment of any marketing channel, yet it’s something of an untapped resource — especially among new affiliates. In fact, experienced affiliate marketers use email marketing 47.8% more than beginners.

Not only are the expenses minimal (just the cost of your email marketing platform), but investing in email also reduces your reliance on search and social algorithms by letting you share affiliate links straight to your audience’s inbox.

👍 Email pros:

• Low costs
• Superb return on investment
• Reduces reliance on search and social algorithms

👎 Email cons:

• You’ll need some sort of external mechanism to grow your email list (like a landing page or website)
• It could take time to grow your email list

Paid media

Paid ads on search engines and social media mostly work on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, which is exactly what it sounds like: you create an ad, set a budget, and only pay when someone clicks through to your landing page.

It’s a quick and convenient way to drive traffic to your affiliate site — you can build an ad campaign in a few minutes, then start generating clicks the moment you set it live. However, it’s not cheap, with an average cross-industry cost-per-click of $4.22 (and no guarantee that the clicker is going to buy anything).

Given that you might only be making a few bucks in commission per sale, PPC just isn’t cost-effective in a lot of affiliate niches.

👍 PPC pros:

• Building ad campaigns is quick and easy
• Once a campaign goes live, you can start generating traffic instantly

👎 PPC cons:

• Costs-per-click are prohibitively high in some niches
• Once you stop paying, your traffic stops too

Organic social

Organic social media involves posting on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok without any PPC ad budget. So it’s kind of like SEO: you’re relying on the quality of your content and your optimization efforts to reach your desired audience.

Unfortunately, organic reach on most social platforms has plummeted in recent years. To make matters worse, the likes of Facebook and TikTok want to keep you on their platform, not click through to an affiliate website (or your affiliate partner’s store) — so it’s becoming increasingly unreliable as a traffic source.

Which explains why affiliate marketing experts use organic social media 26.7% less than beginners.

👍 Organic social pros:

• Free source of traffic

👎 Organic social cons:

• Organic reach is declining on most social platforms
• Hard to turn social views into website traffic

The most effective strategy for affiliate marketing success

Most successful affiliate marketers use a combination of channels to reach their audience and drive traffic toward their affiliate partners’ websites.

It always pays to diversify. That way, your whole business model won’t be ruined by a single algorithm update. Also, the more your audience sees your content, the more likely they are to click through. Which, in turn, means they’ll see more of your affiliate links too.

So leveraging multiple channels is nothing new.

However, there’s one specific multichannel affiliate marketing strategy that’s surprisingly underused.

It works like this:

1. Identify a specific pain point your audience wants to solve
2. Build an online course to help answer that pain point
3. Promote the online course (typically, the course is free, but some affiliates charge a small fee for their course content)
4. Use the course to recommend specific online tools or products that will help resolve your audience’s pain point
5. Whenever you promote a tool or product, add an affiliate link so you get paid when people click through and buy

This tactic is so effective because the people who sign up for your online course are looking for answers — and they trust you to provide them. 

So when you recommend a product, they’ll sit up and take notice.

Let’s take a look at a real affiliate site that’s making bank through this technique…

CASE STUDY: Legendary Marketer

Legendary Marketer is a marketing education company that offers (paid) online courses on topics like selling digital products and building a coaching business.

But that’s not the only way Legendary Marketer makes money. It also employs the strategy we described in the previous section to generate a ton of affiliate commissions.

Despite the variety of courses it sells, Legendary Marketer’s homepage is geared toward promoting one specific product: its 15-Day Online Business Builder Challenge. 

Just look at these two prominent CTAs:

When you click through, you’re greeted with messaging that speaks to arguably the biggest pain point for anyone trying to build an online business: figuring out how to get started.

Legendary Marketer promises to help you overcome that challenge — and all for the low, low one-off price of $7.

In fact, the price tag is practically irrelevant. If you try to quit the page, you’ll be hit with an exit intent popup offering exactly the same course for just $1:

Why so cheap?

Because they don’t particularly care how much money they make from actually selling the course. Their real earner involves peppering their course content with product recommendations (and affiliate links) to generate clicks and commissions.

As an added bonus, enrolling in the course requires handing over your email address to Legendary Marketer — which means they can keep sharing recommendations straight to your inbox.

To be clear, none of this means the 15-Day Online Business Builder Challenge isn’t legit.

There’s nothing wrong with earning money from recommending high-quality products, just so long as you’re upfront and honest about it.

Other affiliate marketing course ideas

I think we can all agree that Legendary Marketer has hit on a highly effective affiliate marketing strategy.

But we’re not necessarily suggesting you do exactly the same thing. After all, there are plenty of other niches to target and pain points to solve. For instance:

Pain point: Get your first 500 email subscribers

This is a classic concern for new affiliate marketers (and, indeed, for any business owner or content creator who wants to leverage the benefits of email marketing), which makes it a fantastic fit for an online course.

Before you start creating the course content, you’d seek out a bunch of affiliate programs for tools to help people build their email list. We’re thinking:

• A graphic design tool like Canva for designing and creating a lead magnet
• A landing page builder like AWeber to create a lead capture landing page
• An email marketing platform to set up automated campaigns (again, they can do this through AWeber)

Pain point: Earn six figures on Etsy

Another common pain point — because every Etsy merchant wants to make more money.

You’d follow the same process when building this online course: consider all the tools Etsy sellers might need to grow their revenue, then sign up for the relevant affiliate programs and add their links to your course content. Tools like:

• PickFu for optimizing product images, descriptions, videos, ads, and product pricing
• Vela for managing Etsy product listings
• Outfy for automated social media management for online stores
• LeadDyno for promoting an Etsy store through affiliate marketing

And, of course, AWeber for building an email list and running newsletter campaigns to drive traffic to an Etsy store.

Pain point: Make your first dropshipping sale

Like affiliate marketing, dropshipping is a popular side hustle, helping people build a revenue stream without dealing with many of the biggest challenges of running a “proper” e-commerce business, like:

• Spending a ton of cash upfront on products
• Managing store inventory
• Dealing with product shipping

So it’s not hard to see the appeal of launching a dropshipping store. But, just like with any online business, most wannabe dropshippers don’t know where to begin — making this a perfect online course niche.

Again, there’s no shortage of products (with affiliate programs) you can promote, including:

• E-commerce platforms like Shopify
• SEO tools like Semrush
• Product-sourcing tools like Dropship
• E-commerce social media management tools like Outfy
• Shopify theme vendors like ThemeForest 

Plus they’ll need an email marketing tool, which is where AWeber comes in.

4 affiliate marketing best practices to drive more clicks and sales

Building a successful affiliate marketing business isn’t just about having the right strategy. You also need to execute it effectively. Make it happen by following these best practices:

Choose a diverse range of affiliate partners

Your affiliate partners — also known as advertisers — are the people who pay you for promoting their products. So it’s fair to say they’ll play an integral role on your journey to affiliate marketing success.

Naturally, affiliate advertisers want to build robust, mutually beneficial relationships with their best affiliates. 

But it’s important to remember that they’re businesses, not charities, so they might be compelled to change their terms and conditions at a moment’s notice. For instance, Amazon  — one of the world’s biggest affiliate advertisers — famously slashed commissions across multiple categories back in 2020, putting a major dent in many affiliate marketers’ earnings.

If you put all your eggs in the metaphorical basket of a single affiliate program, a similar decision from your affiliate partner could decimate your business. 

So it definitely pays to spread the risk around by promoting multiple affiliate programs (e.g. other markets like eBay and Etsy are a good substitute for Amazon).

Promote quality affiliate products

When you’re looking for affiliate partners, it’s easy to be blinded by attractive commission rates.

But the reality is that the highest-paying products aren’t necessarily the best for your audience. Sadly, the exact opposite is often true: they’re only paying big commissions because otherwise no one would recommend them.

While it’s tempting to focus on making as much money as possible in the short term, your affiliate business will be a whole lot more sustainable if you exclusively promote high-quality products. So take the time to check out customer reviews before signing up — and, ideally, recommend products that you actually use.

Build an asset, not a social channel

Sure, there are real affiliate marketers making big money from their followings on platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

But there’s a problem: those folks don’t actually own their audience. TikTok and YouTube do.

You might be thinking: “So what? I don’t care if TikTok holds all the cards as long as I’m still making money.” However, there are some major downsides to this approach.

For starters, tastes in social media change fast. If people suddenly lose interest in your chosen social platform, BAM, there goes your audience — and there’s no guarantee they’ll follow you to a different platform.

It also leaves you overly reliant on social algorithms. If TikTok or YouTube decide they don’t want people to see your content anymore, you’re dead in the water.

That’s why we believe the best route to becoming a successful affiliate marketer is to build your own website. Or, at the very least, a landing page you can use to capture email addresses.

Target high-intent keywords

Earlier in this article, we pointed out that SEO is the top traffic source for affiliate websites.

But not all search traffic is equally valuable.

It’s fine to have one or two pieces of content dedicated to top-of-the-funnel topics (like how to start an online business). But the bulk of your SEO-focused articles or videos should target commercially focused keywords.

Typically, commercial keywords look like this:

Commercial keyword type	Example
Best {product type}	Best dog food
Best {product type} for {pain point}	Best dog food for sensitive stomachs
{Product X} vs {Product Y}	Harringtons vs Wainwrights puppy food

People searching for these sorts of terms are close to making a buying decision. So if they find (and enjoy) your content, there’s a good chance they’ll click through to your affiliate partner’s site and make a purchase.

Supercharge your affiliate marketing success with AWeber

Building a successful affiliate marketing business is hard work. And there are no guarantees — otherwise, every affiliate marketer would be a millionaire.

But we can guarantee that you’ll stand a much better chance if you build an email list, then target your subscribers with regular newsletters recommending all your favorite products.

That’s why you need AWeber.

Our drag-and-drop builder and AI writing assistant make it quick and easy to create beautiful, engaging, high-converting marketing emails, while our landing page builder and signup forms give you all the tools to grow your list.

Sign up for your free AWeber account today.

And, once you’ve done it, why not join our affiliate program and spread the love?

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5 skills you need to get promoted in 2024

Getting a promotion isn’t always easy. It is a long process that can take months and sometimes years. Paul Balcerak of Copacino+Fujikado and Skylar Piro, Senior Manager of Enterprise Success here at Sprout Social, broke down their own unique career trajectories and gave social marketers of all sophistication levels tips on career growth and how to tackle hard problems they’ll encounter along the way.

The content was just too good to keep in the box, so we’re sharing the five skills you need to get promoted here, with you. We’re also offering our social marketing career growth template if you would like to deploy some of the tactics we will discuss in your own life.

Skill #1: Building a strong foundation & mental strength

Going for a promotion is a big undertaking. It’s really a job within your job, and there are going to be a lot of ups and downs along the way. Take some time at the outset to make sure you’re mentally prepared for that.

Paul and Skylar broke down the foundational work you need to do to get a promotion in  into two categories:

• Connect: Don’t make assumptions. Connect with your leaders, share your intention, and make sure you are prioritizing the right things.
• Begin your pre-work: Get organized, starting with collecting your numbers. How are you making an impact today? How have you grown your social and digital marketing channels in the past year? How do you want to grow those numbers this year?

One of my favorite quotes in the webinar came from Skylar right here:

Organization is KEY here! A lot of the work that you put in to get a promotion happens over time, so you want to make sure you are organized and have a clear path forward. It’s a lot easier to ask for a promotion if you and your manager set the conditions for that promotion before you enter the process.

One of the key ways to set these conditions is by starting with the data. It’s the only way you can directly align your work and success with business goals and impact. Sprout’s custom reports feature enables you to collect the numbers that matter in one place, which is the first step in telling the story of what you’ve done and where you’re going.

Pro tip: You can even create a few different reports or dashboards, one with your own KPIs, and another with the KPIs that are the most important to your leadership.

Once you have access to the metrics that matter to your business and you’ve made sure you are prioritizing the right things, you’ll want to:

1. Build your prioritization matrix. What can you knock out now and show? What things will take longer but have a big impact on your career? P.S. We’ve included a prioritization matrix in the social marketing career growth template.
2. Double check your reporting is setting you up for future success. Confirm you are tracking the profiles, campaigns and conversations you need to based on what your leader has shared about business goals.
3. Begin your feedback swipe file. As you work towards a promotion, you will set goals. You will meet some—and you will miss some. When balancing all the demands within your organization gets rocky, you will want to turn to your feedback swipe file: a warm, fuzzy place with all the positive feedback you’ve received via email, on social and in-person. This encouragement goes a long way towards keeping your mental health strong and your focus clear.

Next up, let’s set your big goals, commit to them and finalize your plan for social marketing growth and your promotion.

Skill #2: Setting the right goals

Obviously, YOUR goal is getting a promotion…but how do you map that to your organization’s goals?

Our customers have found this social metrics map extremely helpful in tying social goals to business goals.

When you are looking at your work, ask yourself: what is the goal of the pieces of content you’re putting out? How are you performing toward that goal?

Let’s say that one of the KPIs that your boss has introduced is to drive conversion. On organic, you are going to want to be looking at things like link clicks and, on paid, cost per click. This will show that your posts are influencing action and effectively driving toward targeted CTAs. Always keep in mind the metrics that matter…which will vary based on your ultimate goal.

Some of the most common goals Skylar and Paul have seen are:

• Driving web traffic: Click-throughs and conversions with UTMs (we covered this in-depth here)
• Amplification: Brand reach and earned brand mentions
• Engagement: Starting conversations, finding conversations, deep interactions

More than half of marketing leaders say that developing a social strategy that supports the entire organization’s goals is one of their biggest challenges (Sprout Social Index™).

With that big challenge comes the overwhelming decision of where to start. Sometimes you need to start with an “arbitrary” goal.

If you haven’t set goals on social before, the thought process could look something like this: “We’re focused on building brand awareness, so we want to use impressions as our key metric to focus on. We’re at 10,000 impressions per month today, and we want to improve that by 10% by the end of this quarter.”

Then, experiment: If you vastly exceed your goal, you know that you may want to modify your goal to make it more challenging. If you barely reach it or don’t, look at the campaigns you’re running, bring a critical eye to what could be improved and realistically assess your impressions goal with these results in mind.

Competitive benchmarking and self-auditing can give you a good place to start when setting these goals. A great quote from Skylar here:

With self-auditing, I always say to start with a cross channel analysis. Create a high level roll up of all your channels and see what is sticking out. Measure these metrics over a few months/quarters and build KPIs from there. The same can also be applied to competitive benchmarking. Taking the time to understand how you stack up to your competitors can be extremely valuable and help you to push the needle within your organization.

The final steps for skill #2 are:

1. Put plan to page. Put personal development and brand goals plan together based on your data and conversations.
2. Circle back with your leader. “Based on what we talked about, are these the right goals? Is this the right plan to get me there?”
3. Commit. Commit and sign off on your plan. Make a promise to yourself.

Now that we have our goals, let’s track our progress towards promotion.

Skill #3: Tracking yourself like the brand you manage

First, it’s time for a self-audit. Run your personal SWOT analysis.

Once you’ve outlined your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you can begin to track your progress.

• Conduct a regular work-in-progress meeting with your manager and your mentor.
• Evaluate progress on your personal goals on a weekly basis: schedule it or it won’t happen when daily urgencies come into play.
• Check your goals monthly or quarterly to re-adjust as needed.

The final component here is to invest in your own continued education to drive hypergrowth towards your promotion goal. It’s easy to look at continued education as an extraneous cost, but do some math. $200 for an online course that grows your skillset could be worth tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises down the road. Paul had a great quote about this:

I have a rule that if I see a book that I think might be even loosely applicable to my career, I buy it. It’s not a cheap rule, but my rationale is, if I pay $30 for a book and get one good idea from it, that may be just as valuable, dollar for dollar, as a $500 day class down at the local college.

He even recommended two books that have helped him out in the past.

Two recent books I really liked were “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” by Ramit Sethi and “Everything is F*cked” by Mark Manson. They’re ostensibly about personal finance and dealing with feelings of hopelessness, respectively—I’ve apparently got some heavy shit going on—but what they really are, are psychology books on outsmarting yourself and being more productive and proactive. I would recommend both if you’re looking to get a promotion or raise.

Lastly, if you are worried about the cost, see if your employer will pay for it, or if they already have an internal lending library for your department. Many employers will pay for or subsidize continuing education. Take a look at your benefits. Build your case. And then make the ask to see what you can get.

Skill #4: Mastering reporting and social analytics

Sensing a theme here? Data or it didn’t happen. Comfort with data, especially for more creative-minded folks, comes with time and practice. Let’s talk fundamentals.

1. Be proactive. Any report needs to answer a few fundamental questions: “What did we do?” “What impact did it have on our business?” and “What are we doing as a result?” Don’t wait for someone else to answer those.
2. Fight the “so what?” When Paul was in journalism, the hardest question he got about social media was, “So what?” Our Facebook page grew by 200 followers—so what? That last article we posted got 300% more likes than usual—so what? His executives didn’t understand social media speak, so he had to learn to communicate on their terms. Once he was able to bring examples of social media conversations that helped enhance reporting and broadcasts, he was able to connect with what mattered to them and his reporting became more meaningful as a result.
3. Be a good researcher and reporter. You want to be seen as the person in your organization with your finger on the pulse. Learn to use the social listening tools at your disposal to track your brand and be the person who knows all the latest things happening on the social platforms you use, as well as the ones that you haven’t started using yet.

Skill #5: Bulking up your network

Our final skill to master! First, you need a mentor.

Mentors are people who help you see outside your bubble. Where you are your harshest critic, they can help put things in perspective, and where you are your own greatest cheerleader, they can help bring you back down to earth.

• This doesn’t have to be someone you work with every day. But ideally, it is someone you have some kind of existing relationship with. You don’t want to cold call someone with an ask to be their mentee.
• Before you approach them, do your research. Why this person? What do you admire about them? What do you hope to gain from the relationship? Be specific about these things.
• Bring value. Mentor/mentee relationships are reciprocal. What can you do for them?

As Paul said in our webinar:

When our company co-founder Jim Copacino mentored me, we both realized that we could benefit from each other’s strengths. I stood to learn a ton from him about the advertising industry and how to be a successful creative thinker. I also knew a lot about the social media space specifically that he didn’t know as intuitively. Those things are what a lot of our conversations centered on during the two or so years he mentored me.

Let’s close with the major takeaways to focus on this year. You’re on the path to promotion if you:

• Keep track of progress. Keep track of the projects you are working on throughout the year, as well as your numbers. You want to be able to easily reference this, speak to your hard work and communicate the impact you are having on the business.
• Take care of your mental health. We are all human beings who are affected by our circumstances. The fact is, going for a promotion or raise is difficult and it can produce a lot of mental strain. Just as we’ve suggested to check in on your progress toward your goals on a regular basis, check in on your mental health, too. When you consistently tend to your mental health, everything else falls into place a lot easier.
• Understand what is important to your leaders. Take the time to identify what is important to the people that will be promoting you and what they are looking for in that next level. Are there specific business goals that you can help them achieve? Internal proposals you can help them write/execute?
• Make the most of what you have. You may not have all the data you want, or the case studies you think you need. Forget it. What you have in front of you right now, today, is worth a lot more than you think. Don’t trip yourself up with self-doubt.

As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was thirty years ago; the second best time is today.

The post 5 skills you need to get promoted in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

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For legacy industries, influencer marketing is key to evolving the customer journey

When you think of influencer marketing, what comes to mind? A fitness expert touting a new athleisure brand? A get-ready-with-me video singing the praises of the latest plant-based moisturizer?

Even if influencer marketing has become synonymous with industries like fashion, lifestyle products, and food and beverage, its potential extends way beyond that. More than half of marketers say that influencer marketing has a high impact on both their brand’s awareness and customer loyalty, according to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey.

For traditional industries—financial services, healthcare, insurance to name a few—this should be a wake-up call. Brands in these sectors have been slower to embrace influencer marketing for many reasons: industry regulations, assumptions about their target audience, a preference to retain full creative control over campaigns.

But as younger generations’ content consumption and buying preferences converge on social, these are the exact brands that stand to benefit from influencer marketing most. Now is not the time for legacy industries to fall back on traditional marketing tactics if they expect to grow.

Influencer marketing has the power to reroute the customer journey in some of the most traditional spaces. Why stagnate when you can innovate?

Influencers open the door to your next generation of customers

Throughout my time working in influencer marketing, getting incumbent brands to understand the power of influencers has always been a tougher sell. But the “sell” is far from surprising: all businesses need to meet consumers there they are, and increasingly, that’s on social.

To opt out of working with influencers—who have built captive audiences on social—is a total miss.

Marketers identified that the most valuable opportunity with influencer marketing is expanding their reach to new audiences, according to our Q3 2023 Pulse Survey. Given how product discovery habits are shifting, there is an urgent need to get in front of untapped audiences. Consider how 77% of Millennials and 73% of Gen Z car buyers would prefer to handle more of their next purchase from home. Or how 66% of Gen Z has used YouTube, and 44% has used TikTok, to find banking information.

We hear so much about how brands collaborate with influencers for their authenticity, but that only reveals a fraction of the business case. Consumers are smart. They recognize an ad or a paid partnership, even when it’s coming from an influencer they follow and trust. But influencers can afford traditional industries something that has been nearly impossible to achieve to date: the ability to bring a product or service experience to life in a more genuine way.

Take the auto industry. Car manufacturers like Subaru and Toyota are striking a balance between content and experiential quality by tapping influencers to show their vehicles in action.

These partnerships can support buyers’ research process long before they step foot in a dealership, in a way that high-production commercials and website slideshows can’t. There’s no reason a similar approach couldn’t work for retail banks, insurance firms or appliance brands.

Your influencer marketing strategy—and metrics—shouldn’t stand alone

For brands used to running campaigns across TV, print or radio (let alone organic social), influencer marketing poses a new measurement challenge. Nearly half of marketers we surveyed told us they struggle to quantify influencer ROI.

The underlying issue is that influencer marketing can’t be compared apples to apples against other channels like paid social or display ads. Influencer partnerships are unique to media, in that the advertiser gets two outcomes: organic impressions and a creative asset that can be repurposed across channels. There are multiple elements of the spend to consider. Marketers need to understand their industry benchmarks for each channel they use before declaring whether or not an initiative was successful.

Measuring performance solely on the organic influencer posts won’t tell the full story, because your influencer efforts shouldn’t exist in a silo. Strategically weaving influencer assets into your broader media mix is what makes influencer marketing so effective. Defining a clear measurement approach upstream that accounts for the entirety of your “influencer media buy” is how you’ll understand the true impact of an influencer campaign.

The way you measure influencer efficacy will depend on the type of campaign you’re running at any given time. Assessing an influencer partnership aimed at growing brand awareness looks a lot different than gauging one intended to drive repeat customer purchases.

Another important (but often overlooked) variable in the influencer ROI equation is cost savings. Yes, influencers offer reach, they offer content creation expertise. But the content they deliver has legs far beyond social—and at a fraction of the price of working with some creative agencies. A six-month influencer partnership can quickly turn into a full asset library that can fuel your paid efforts, website content and even email marketing. It’s hard to put a price on working smarter.

Getting creative, even in regulated spaces

The magic of brand and influencer collaborations manifests most when marketers relinquish control. Influencers know their audiences and what will (or won’t) land. But letting go of the creative reins is tough for brands beholden to strict regulatory and compliance mandates.

If you can’t escape being over-prescriptive with your content briefs, it’s worth asking if influencer marketing is the right choice for your brand. (Partnering on a Reel that requires formal credits at the end misses the point.) That’s not to say that influencers should get carte blanche, but you do need to strike the right balance between being firm and being flexible.

This means bringing influencers into the concepting phase earlier, so that the end product is a true collaboration. It also means creating clear—not rigid—briefs that are explicit in what cannot be included in order to comply with industry regulations. For instance, alcohol brands often have to ask partners working on summer campaigns not to show any body part in water at a pool or beach. Even a toe in the water could be construed as unsafe behavior while drinking.

Most importantly, brands have to remember that influencer marketing content isn’t simply a studio-produced ad. In the same way mascots like Flo from Progressive or Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World have become cultural icons, influencers can create cultural, relatable moments around your brand in the place your audience spends a majority of their time—on social.

@nationwide

Reminder to celebrate your achievements, just like our partner @latinapreneur. #entrepreneur #SmallBusiness #BusinessTalk #LevelUp

♬ original sound – Nationwide – Nationwide

This doesn’t have to be hard sell content that details the ins and outs of your coverage plans and deductibles. It should lend a voice and (in some cases) a face to your brand, one that lives rent-free in consumers’ memories until they eventually need your product or service.

Chart a smarter customer journey with influencer marketing

Influencer marketing may be less familiar territory for regulated or more traditional industries, but it’s one well worth exploring. Businesses in these sectors have to reach new audiences in order to grow. If you’re not meeting potential customers where they spend the most time, you can’t expect them to invest in you.

Ready to start building a business case for more influencer marketing resources? Use our influencer marketing budget template to expedite the planning process.

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Improve email deliverability with 6 best practices

The number one most important factor in all of email marketing is deliverability. 

Why? Because when you send an email to your audience the goal is to get seen, opened, and clicked. But if your emails never make it to your audience’s inbox, then there is no reason to send an email.

Learn what may be impacting your email deliverability and how to improve the likelihood of your email making it into your audience’s inbox.

What is email deliverability?
Difference between email deliverability and email delivery
Why don’t all emails make it to the inbox?
Tips to improve email deliverability

What is email deliverability?

Simply put, email deliverability is the placement of an email in either an inbox, spam folder, or other folder when the email is delivered to an email address.

What is the difference between email deliverability and email delivery?

Email delivery means that the receiving mail server accepted the email and delivered it to the mailbox, regardless of which folder it lands in.

So, email delivery happens when the email you send by your email service provider (ESP) is accepted by the incoming mail server of the person you're sending it to. In other words, it did not was not rejected or bounced.

Email deliverability = email makes it to recipient’s primary inbox

Email delivery = inbox provider has accepted the email and it will now be sorted into folder (inbox, spam, promotions, or updates)

So if an email provider ever claims they have 99% email delivery rate, your newsletters could still end up in spam, promotions, updates, or some other folder that never gets checked.

Why don’t all emails make it to the inbox?

What’s the secret to better email deliverability? Beyond any technical tips and tricks is a fundamental truth: People are more likely to see your email if you create emails that people actually want to see.

However, there are technical reasons behind this. If an email provider’s algorithm (such as Gmail) thinks a marketing email won’t be engaging enough to a user it won’t deliver that email to the user’s inbox tab.

Gmail – and all email providers – have a strong incentive to give users a good experience. If you opened up your inbox and saw nothing but spam, you might switch to another service. Since it’s in Gmail’s best interest to deliver engaging emails to the inbox, it’s in marketers’ best interest to be engaging.

Gmail measures engagement based on a variety of factors. Positive factors include opens, clicks, and replies. Negatives include ignoring the email or reporting it as spam.

6 Tips to improve email deliverability

1 - Ask new subscribers to confirm their email address

The first step to great email deliverability is asking your new subscribers to confirm their intention of joining your email list. 

This process is called confirmed opt-in, or verified opt-in, in which you send a unique link to a new subscriber when they join your list. 

Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe. 

2 - Use a custom domain

Want your emails to land in subscribers’ inboxes instead of their spam folders? 

Then don’t send your messages from a Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, rocketmail.com, ymail.com, Zendesk or any other free Internet service provider (ISP).

Signing up for a custom domain name to send your messages not only improves long-term deliverability, but it also looks professional, builds authority and creates brand awareness. 

Plus, many ISPs use Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (or more commonly referred to as DMARC) to stop email abuse.

DMARC is the current policy for email authentication. Basically, it’s an ISP’s way to protect itself from spammers pretending to send emails from their network. Any unauthenticated email — no matter how legitimate the content — could end up in a subscriber’s spam folder.

Say you’re sending a bulk message to your subscribers from your Yahoo! address through AWeber (which has its own servers). If Yahoo! can’t verify one of their own servers sent your email, then the message is rejected.

Note: This is not an AWeber-specific issue — it will happen from any reputable Email Service Provider.

3 - Make your “unsubscribe” link easy to find

This may shock you, but unsubscribes are a good thing.

Yes, really. They’re doing you (and your email deliverability) and favor. 

Maybe someone accidentally signed up to your list or realized they no longer want to receive your emails. While these people should unsubscribe from your email list, many often flag emails as spam to prevent them from going to their main inbox. After all, the average email subscriber doesn’t know the impact that can have on a sender’s email reputation.

If that’s the case, make sure your unsubscribe button is easy to find in your email. You might also want to include a line of copy that tells people that if they no longer wish to receive your emails, they should unsubscribe from your list instead of marking you as spam.  

You can even have a little fun with it. Get inspiration from bakery service Goldbelly and how they phrased the text around their unsubscribe button.

4 - Ask your subscribers to add you to their contact list

Ask your subscribers to add your “From Address” to their contact list when they first join. Commonly called “safelisting,” this ensures that they never miss a message from you. 

It also helps improve your email reputation score, which ultimately means more of your emails will get routed to the inbox instead of the spam folder.

Even the best email marketers in the game ask subscribers to take steps to ensure their messages make it to them. Here’s how speaker, author, and Chief Content Officer at Marketing Profs, Ann Handley, handles this conversation with her list. 

5 - Maintain a healthy email list

The best way to improve and maintain your email deliverability is by keeping a clean and healthy email list. 

There are a number of factors that can impact your list hygiene:

1. Typos in the email address
2. Illegitimate email addresses
3. Inactive email addresses

The easiest way to prevent email addresses with typos from showing up on your list is to use confirmed opt-in (aka double opt-in), which requires people to confirm their subscription before getting added to your list. If someone enters the wrong email address, there’s no way they’ll ever receive that confirmation email. This helps keep your list clean of undeliverable messages because no email addresses with typos will pass through to your list.

You can also use an email validation service like Kickbox to verify which email addresses are legitimate and which ones aren’t. Simply import your email list, start the validation process, and remove the email addresses that aren’t valid.

Finally, if you notice that someone hasn’t opened your email in several months, then it might mean they’ve changed email addresses. In that case, you can either attempt to re-engage them or remove them from your list entirely.

6 - Send engaging emails people love

Even beyond deliverability, making your emails engaging is just a good idea. After all, it’s not enough to deliver a message into a user’s inbox. The final, crucial step is to engage your reader so they remember your message. In other words, the recipient ultimately needs to open and read it.

Sending too many unengaging emails may hasten the dreaded “email fatigue.” Which is when users ignore you or unsubscribe when they think you’re sending them too many emails.

The key point is that emails earn their place in a user’s inbox by being engaging. Marketers must re-earn that right with every email they send.

Improving engagement and deliverability

Email deliverability can be a confusing and intimidating topic for many. But at its core, making it to the inbox is really simple: just follow the tips above and aim to delight your subscribers through valuable email content.

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