Whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, email marketing is not dead. And here’s why: the stats prove it. For starters, email marketing was the biggest driver of Black Friday transactions (Custora), 77% of consumers prefer email (Exact Target), 7 of 10 consumers redeem email promotions (Excelerate) and email ranks as the #1 tactic for building customer awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention (Gigaom Research).

So if you’re not implementing email marketing as part of your marketing strategy, or if just want to refresh your email strategy, 2017 is the year to do it.  Here’s some tips that we use when creating or restructuring our client’s email strategies:

1.Do a 2016 Results Comparison- Pull your email data from 2016 into an excel spreadsheet to compare what emails worked and what didn’t.  Things to look at are open rates, click through rates, days/times sent and subject lines. Search for patterns or any common trends in both the top performing emails as well as the under-performing emails.

2.A/B Test- Set up multiple A/B testing campaigns in order to optimize the effect of your emails. This is something that you should always be doing in order to maximize your email marketing efforts. Whether you’re testing time of send, day of send, email subject line, from line, personalization, layout or content, make sure to take notes of what’s working vs. what’s not so you can analyze the results.

3. Optimize For Mobile- If your emails aren’t already mobile-friendly, they should be. Not only will a responsive design template improve your click-through rate and conversions, but without, users will not be able to interact with your emails properly and will eventually delete or unsubscribe.

4.Test Different Variables- Testing different variables can help provide insight to constantly improve your open and click through rates. Try emojis in subject lines or custom animated gifs in the body to refresh otherwise stagnant B2C email campaigns. For B2B companies, try personalization in email subject lines.

5.Resend Your Emails- Are you not getting enough engagement from emails? Try resending to those who didn’t open the email the first time around. This is an easy and simple tactic. Change the email subject line and send out the email again 48 hours later.