Email Marketing in 2026: Content That Converts

[00:00:00] Speaker A: We're hearing a lot about AI this year, but we can't forget about one of our top channels with the highest ROI of them all. We're talking email marketing. I'm Joe Barker. [00:00:08] Speaker B: And I'm David Belville. And this is the Amerilife Marketing Mentors. All right, Joe, so as you mentioned off the top, we've been talking a lot about AI this year, but this topic today, email marketing is something that truly everybody in the health and wealth industry should be utilizing. And today we're going to be offering the best practices, the knowledge, the tips that they need to know. So just a level set, Joe, what is just an easy to remember definition for our audience? If you had to define email marketing. [00:00:48] Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean, I think everybody's pretty familiar with email and it's a communication, it's a digital communication channel, and email marketing is just utilizing that channel for a specific purpose. So it may be to nurture your current list, it could be to, to just provide valuable information like newsletters or emails along those lines. [00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And with literally billions of users worldwide utilizing email every single day, it's just a space that you can't afford to miss. You can't afford not to be interacting with your, you know, your leads. There's cold leads, warm leads, but no matter what, there's opportunities to engage, there's opportunities to educate, and there's opportunities, you know, move them through the funnel. So if you were just getting started, you haven't utilized email before. Maybe you're a new business owner, maybe you're just starting your agency out. What would you recommend is the first thing that people do when they're starting to institute email? [00:01:48] Speaker A: Well, if you're going to start doing mass email, you need to decide what platform you're going to be utilizing. So I think that's really important is figuring out which platform that you're going to be sending your emails from. So there's a lot of rules now that come with email marketing and it's getting it authenticated. Um, it used to be in a world where when you would send emails, you had to worry about trigger words or, or things in subject lines. Now every email platform that we use has to go through an authentication process. So you want to make sure that you're using one that is meant for that mass sending. So outlook is not the best answer. [00:02:19] Speaker B: Right. [00:02:19] Speaker A: When it comes to trying to figure out how to do your, your big nurture campaigns and your big email marketing, something, you know, a lot of people you see use constant contact mailchimp Something along those lines or they use their CRM HubSpot Salesforce. There's a, there's a ton out there. I know in our industry, go High level is very popular. So finding those platforms, making sure that you get it authenticated, will help you with your deliverability and it really gets you set up for success when it comes to email marketing. [00:02:45] Speaker B: So on the topic of CRMs, we've established that we need a platform to send emails from. Can you just talk a little bit to the importance of CRMs and what they can do for an agent or marketer that can keep them organized and ahead of their competition? [00:03:01] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think it's super vital and, and it's a great thing. Like you said, you can't talk about email marketing without talking about the CRM. The fact is, is you can't blast to everybody every anymore the same message because people are at different journeys with you and at different parts of that journey. So an example would be if you have a CRM and say you have new leads that are coming in, you don't want to send the same content to those new leads that you're sending to people that you've been dealing with for three years. It's going to be completely separate messages depending on where they are. And also if, if you currently say you were working with a client and you just closed a new plan for them, the last thing you want to do is send them something about why they should work with you. They're already working with you. The CRM helps you keep that organized. For us, for example, we use HubSpot. [00:03:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:47] Speaker A: It's personally just a platform that we love. So HubSpot is for us. It helps us keep track of where everybody came in from. So we have all their email addresses. We know where everybody came from. We know how long they've been following us, if they've interacted with us, if we've worked with them. So when we send emails, yes, we send newsletters and we updates, but there are certain emails that we only send a certain segmented list within that email platform. So depending on which CRM you're utilizing, they all have those automated workflows and different things that you can begin to deploy, but it just helps streamline and keep everything organized. There's still a lot of people I know that are working in Google sheets. Yeah. And they're trying to keep it organized there. The CRMs just help automate it for you and they take some of that lift off of you. So where you're not manually trying to keep track of people. [00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it truly can become one of the most integral, vital parts of your business, especially when you're using it to its full capacity. Now, you touched on a couple of things that I think that we should revisit. Audience segmentation. You know, of course you're going to define a target audience, but that's not the end of the road there. And then you also talked about personalization. And now with the introduction of AI, it's no longer really an option to personalize your messaging. It's required because if you're not, your competition will be. And so there's plenty of AI tools out there that can help you with this. What recommendations do you have for our audience if they're going to be incorporating AI and hoping to personalize their messaging a little bit more? [00:05:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's, it's almost like sitting down and mapping out your journeys when you get started. So it's figuring out as people come into to your pipeline and they come into to your CRM and your email marketing, what experience do you want to create for them? And so if you have, like I mentioned before, if you have leads that are coming in and they haven't worked with you before, what touch points and what emails do you want them to experience before you know they decide to work with you? Then you have people who are just getting started with you. So say you, you recently sold them an annuity. There's probably something within the first 30, 60, 90 days, there's probably some communications that you, you could still have with them, giving them reassurance, you know, those type of steps. And then you have, maybe they came into your lead list, but it's been over a year since you've had any communication with them. For people like that, that's where you really want to nurture them or re engage them. So that's going to be a completely other separate journey. Keeping them all separate, mapping them out ahead of time is going to help you stay ahead. And then setting up triggers that move them into those other journeys once they take an action. So maybe it's, it's setting it up in your CRM where you move them from a lead to a client or move them from a lead to disengage. There's different settings you put in there, but it sets you up for success. Personalizing it. There's little things you can do like putting in your name and, and, and information like that. There's that level of personalization, but the next level really is accommodating and adjusting your content to where that person is in the journey with you. [00:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So what I'm hearing is always have in mind what you want your audience to do next, and depending on the action, have a plan set out for them to take that next step. That's fantastic advice. So we've got an email platform where starting to utilize a CRM and we've got our segmented audiences. We're personalizing our messaging. So one thing that is so vital, but can easily be overlooked within email marketing is the importance of subject lines. I mean, this is truly how you can hook somebody's attention. This is how you can get their interest, and then once they open the email, making sure that you follow through on whatever claim or promise that you made in that subject line. But, Joe, this is truly an element of email marketing that can make or break a successful campaign. So what, in your opinion, makes a good subject line that somebody's actually going to open? [00:07:52] Speaker A: I think it's making it relevant to the person who. Who's reading the. You know, looking at their inbox and. And reading through them. Look at your own inbox. So take your phone out and actually go look at the inbox and look through all the subject lines and see which ones make you pay attention. It could be little things, like, it's the smallest little tweaks that you can make. This is where testing with email marketing comes into play and keeping track of your analytics of what works and what doesn't. I received an email that the subject line was two words, but it stood out in my inbox when I looked at it on my phone because it was so much white space around it that it draw. It just automatically drew my eye. Emojis. Emojis have always been good. So utilizing emojis, you're going to hear, you know, a lot of people say lately putting in negative emojis. I think it's because people use positive emojis for so long. Utilizing the negative ones just started performing really well. Um, so we saw that as a positive for a while. It was personalizing with your name. We knew if we put the name, your name in there, that. That it was gonna rise those. Or begin to see that rise. The problem is, is as everybody starts catching on to it, everybody's doing it. So you open up your inbox and you just see Joanna 10 times down. Right. None of it's drawing my attention. The other thing I would say is if you're providing value, it's so much easier. Because if you're providing real value and you're communicating in a consistent manner and they like what they're receiving from you. They're gonna want to open the plenty of newsletters. I have plenty of places that I subscribe to and I religiously will open up those emails because I know there's usually something in there that I'm going to learn or that I'm going to find a value. And that is what's going to be key is making sure that while there's a lot of tricks to the subject line, if you provide value it makes it so much easier and it just needs to be relevant to the person who's receiving it. [00:09:35] Speaker B: And on the flip side of that coin, if it can be detrimental to you, your business, your reputation, if you're sending emails and not following through in providing value constantly. So I again making sure you have engaging subject lines that hooks the reader and pulls them in. But then you've got to follow through and always be providing value. [00:09:55] Speaker A: Yeah, let me throw something on top of that actually David is what and that's actually really important is years ago the spam rate. So where people used to report spam, it was a near 1% that most platforms were looking at recently. I was reading where it's.05% now and Gmail's even at a.03%. So imagine 0.3% if they report you to spam, they're going to start blocking you. That's really, really, really important to, because as more if Gmail starts moving you to spam, that's across everything. So it's, it's super important to make sure that you're providing value, you are not spamming. And, and there's little things, I will say there are little things you can do to try to help with that. One of the things that you can do is add your unsubscribe to the top of the email. So when people open it, instead of going to hit the report to spam, hopefully they'll hit unsubscribe. There's little tricks you can do and but the biggest thing is just making sure that you're not spamming and if you're providing true value, otherwise you are going to end up in the spam box. [00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's such a good point. It's always great to revisit that. I want to back up a little bit here because another element of emails that we all see are from addresses and from names. And so if you're sending an email you want to make sure that the person you're sending it to knows where it's coming from. And so that's just another element to highlight, is making sure that there's familiar familiarity not only with you, but with your audience and that they know who they're receiving content from as well. [00:11:21] Speaker A: Yeah, if you're. Especially if they subscribe. So if they subscribe to you, make sure that. That way we know they're expecting it. So they subscribe. They said, yeah, I want to receive emails from you. So that's really vital to make sure that the, the from and. And the information within their matches, the name and everything. I will tell you, when we do email marketing, we do test it. So we will test the from line, we will test the from name, we'll begin to test all of that. The important thing is, is if you to be testing, make sure that you actually are following the analytics and looking at the results to see what that looks like. But it doesn't hurt to test it. Every once in a while you'll see us come out with emails from Amerilife marketing mentors. You'll see my name come across, you'll see David's name come across. And that's what it should be. It's. We're testing, we're just seeing what works, what doesn't, and then we change it up every once in a while. But if it's newsletters or anything like that, it is very important to stay consistent and make sure that it's coming from the same brand. [00:12:13] Speaker B: So true consistency is key. And so on that note, how often should you be getting into somebody's inbox? Because, you know, I could imagine scenarios in which people want a lot of communications with, you know, whoever they're subscribing to or others who, you know, find it spammy or find it annoying. How do you suggest that marketers out there find that right cadence with their audience? [00:12:42] Speaker A: I think it's really important to stay consistent. It's really easy to. To, you know, lose that top of mind when you're not consistently communicating with, with your audience. And so I think it is really important to keep it consistent. But don't just send. Just the send. Yeah. So I would say, you know, if you're looking for that monthly, send. Newsletters are great. Bi weekly, you could do the newsletters. But really it's about making sure that you're providing value. So if you have a ton of value to provide and you know that, that communicating weekly is ideal because you have a lot that you want to give them and you have a lot that you want to share it's not a bad thing. Just watch your metrics and see what that looks like. I like weekly sense personally because I like, you know, keeping that communication open and I like being there as long as I'm providing value. [00:13:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:24] Speaker A: Again, if you're just doing it to say that you did it and to mark it off of that to do list, it's not gonna do anything for you. [00:13:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:31] Speaker A: So I, I recommend weekly, but if you can't do that, try monthly. And I would say, you know, build that into your journeys. Again, go back to that segmentation of a new lead. What is a nurture campaign or what does a campaign like that you could set up to where you're providing value that gets them to a point where they're like, hey, this is, this is great, I want to meet with you to get them to that next point. [00:13:51] Speaker B: And everything that you just said highlights the importance of ensuring that you have a way to track these analytics to track the performance of the emails that you do send. And so, you know, time and time again we'll go back to it, but having a CRM that can, you know, integrate data from other sources is going to be really helpful. So you can test and you can measure the success. And those are two keys to success with really any campaign that you run, but especially with email because there is data that is available to you with each and every send. And I also want to highlight one more thing that you said is making sure that each email has a purpose. We're not just sending to send. So for those marketers out there who have utilized email marketing in the past, how would you recommend that they utilize that data to refine and audit what they did in 2025 so that they can be set up for success in 2026? [00:14:48] Speaker A: I think it's just going through and kind of looking at some key metrics. Hopefully, you know, you have a platform where you can easily sort it to see, you know, what were your open rates, what subject lines caused the highest open rates. And then look at those subject lines and see what was it about those that might have caused it. There's little things like including the word your that could have brought it up because people relate to that word. From there it's looking at the click through rate. So now you got them to open that, but did you get them to take whatever action it, that you, that you wanted them to do? It's really important with email, if you're getting, if there's a purpose of it as far as getting them to take an Action that you only have one per email. So from there, no, that way, you know, okay, they opened it. Did they click through to whatever it was that I was looking for them to do? That's the second metric that I would be watching. And then obviously from there you want to take it all the way through to wherever you took them. Did they take the action there and did it tie all together? There may be disconnections that are happening that you don't realize that you can find by, by reviewing those metrics. But, and there may be topics. So like, well, let's use us as an example. This year we're going to be sending out emails with a ton of value about all the different digital platforms. We're going to start tracking it. What topics really excelled? Yeah, you know, we may, we may assume coming, you know, now that we're in 2026, we may assume that everything we send AI is going to kill it. And we may be surprised when four of our emails are about Facebook and all of a sudden those did great. That's great feedback for us to have and that's how we learn our audience and that's how we learn what's coming. But we can only learn that by actually looking at the, at the metrics and seeing what the actuals were compared against what we thought everyone was going to find the most value with. [00:16:23] Speaker B: So adaptability and flexibility is key. Be willing to pivot and no matter how married to an idea you are, numbers often don't lie, as they say. And so if the numbers are telling you one thing, but your heart's telling you another, try to keep a level head and focus on logic and what your audience is on. Focused, resonating with. And speaking of the audience, I want to go all the way back now. What are some approaches to start capturing an email list? How do you start building one? Especially if you're a new agency owner, you're a new business owner and you're just getting started, obviously you're putting yourself out there and you're networking and you're trying to build a lead list. What are some practical steps that our audience could take today that could perhaps enhance their efforts, make it more efficient or speed up the process? [00:17:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean there's a couple of things you can do. One of our go to and I think a lot of people is the value add and getting the opted in. So whether you're on social media, your website, any of those places, it's, it's providing something of value. So one that we did during the Webinar earlier this month was the 10 prompts that I use on on with chat GPT every day or every month. That was a perfect one. Where, where we use that, we put that out there. Anybody who would like access to it, it's a lot of great value. You sign up for us, give us your email, we'll send it to you. That's. That's how it works. So we're, we're living proof of it all the time, of how to do those type of things, the subscribing to your newsletter. So if you have social channels and you're communicating and you're adding even more value by having your newsletter, put a. Subscribe to our newsletter. There it is. It's right there. I would say I am a huge believer of Provide as much value as you can. Give it all away. Here's the thing, guys. Everything we talk about, everything that really anybody's talking about is out there somewhere for you to find. The fact is, is we're bringing it all together and we're just. We're corralling it all for our audience, which is agents and advisors and FMOs. We're corralling it all and we're making it easy to find all in one space. We're giving it all away, though, and all you have to do is sign up for it, and that's all you have to do for your audiences. So if you work with Medicare agents or Medicare consumers, there's a lot of questions and there's a lot of people that are confused by Medicare and they have a. They. They just don't know where to start. Give. Tell them. Tell them everything. You can tell them the bad things to work or the things to watch out for. Tell them the great things that, that the coverage does. If there's stories out there about, you know, situations where people were. Maybe it was a skilled nursing facility that they ended up in and it was a really sad story. Share that type of stuff so people realize what's happening out there. Give it all away, though. Yeah, don't, you know, don't try to gate everything. Give it all away. And then, and then find those p. Where you can provide even more value. Gate those and then that's where you, you'll see. Naturally you get emails in and then as long as you always provide value, you really don't have to worry about anything. [00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah. I think two. Intent matters a lot as well. Because of course, you know, it. It is a business and we're, you know, everybody's in business to make Money and, and create a life and put food on the table. But time and time again, Joe, we talk to marketers that, that truly have a genuine care for the people that they serve and the communities that they live in and ensuring that, you know, nobody's getting taken advantage of or getting got. And so this is just a really intimate, direct way that you can communicate your value and take care and look after your customer base as well. So to wrap up, Joe, is there anything that we haven't talked about today that you think is vital for our audience to know? [00:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. So I, I would touch a little bit on the layout of the emails that, that are being built. There's a couple of key things that you can do that I think, I think so many people, maybe they just don't know about it or they miss out on examples of that would be the, the button. I see so many people who put buttons in emails and there's no white space around it. So when my, you know, when I'm scanning the email and I'm looking, I see the button because I'm looking for it, but it just blends in with everywhere and everything else where if you just add about 40 pixels, top, bottom, it automatically, because that white space is created, it draws your eye into it. So there's things like that making sure that it's digestible. Nobody wants to read a book in an email. So just get to the point, make it as digestible as possible and, and not have it. I mean, imagine when you open an email, if you see a book, it's like, wow, it's automatically, you feel exhausted just looking at it, not, you know, let alone having to read it. So I think it's like those things to just keep in mind. And again, one call to action, always try to provide the value. And I also highly recommend testing between the images within an email and just doing regular text. There's emails that I have received from people or from companies where they had images in there. And it felt like a commercial email and it felt like a very promotional email. And the message that was in it felt more personal to me though. So to me it would have, I think it would have come over better if they just would have sent me a quick note email with no pictures, no buttons, no nothing. Just tell me what you want me to do. Like, hey, this is great value. Go check this out with a link. I think that in my opinion, there's been emails where I think it would have come over a lot better. So highly recommend testing those. But and then really, that's what it comes to with email marketing. Test, test, test. See what works, see what doesn't. But one email doesn't make a trend either. Make sure that you're testing over time and make sure that you're watching it over time and again. One email does not create a trend. Continue to test and make those little tweaks to see what brings the biggest changes to you. [00:21:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And to that point, one email doesn't create a trend. I often say there's no such thing as a bad post or a bad email because there's always something that you can extract from it. There is always value to be had. And that's what you're talking about, is the testing and gaining that knowledge. So if a certain email campaign didn't work. Yeah, I mean, that's never ideal, but there's so much to be extracted from that so that you can improve upon next time. And it helps you get your to know your audience better. And the more that you get to know your audience, the more that they'll trust you. And as we all know, in the health and wealth spaces, everything is built on trust. [00:22:32] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:22:32] Speaker B: And so how you utilize email marketing, how you communicate with your audience through email, has to be through that lens, is building trust. And if you prioritize that, then you're well on your way to a successful email campaign. [00:22:47] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:22:49] Speaker B: Well, I'm sure that we'll be talking a lot more about email marketing in 2026. [00:22:53] Speaker A: Yes, I imagine so. [00:22:54] Speaker B: But for now, if you haven't yet, be sure to like us on Facebook, subscribe to us on YouTube, and follow us on LinkedIn because we'll be sharing so much more marketing best practices tips and training that. [00:23:07] Speaker A: And go to the website and subscribe to the newsletter because we need the emails. Yeah.