16 Email Marketing Tips to Boost Conversions & Make $10,000+/Month!

Email marketing converts higher than YouTube videos, higher than blog posts, higher than paid ads, and higher than SEO. If you are doing any type of marketing at all and you are not building an email list, you are handing revenue to somebody else who is. That is not an opinion. That is the reality of where return on investment still lives in 2024 and beyond.

In this video, Alston walks through 16 email marketing tips, plus a bonus 17th, that apply whether you are an affiliate marketer, a small business owner, a large business, or someone working inside a corporation as an email marketing professional. Every single one of these tips is actionable today. There is no theory here. Just what works.

What You Will Walk Out With

Why email still delivers higher return on investment than every other marketing channel
The daily sending habit that keeps you in front of your audience while competitors go quiet
Subject line and first-line principles that get emails opened before anyone reads a word
The grandma test that tells you instantly if your email format is working against you
A story-first framework that sells without ever feeling like a sales pitch
List pruning tactics that lower your monthly autoresponder bill and boost deliverability
A free quiz at finder.platformproof.com that shows you the best way to monetize based on your actual skills and situation

Why Email Still Outperforms Every Other Channel

Every platform you market on has a gatekeeper. YouTube decides who sees your video. Google decides who ranks for your keyword. Meta decides who sees your ad. Your email list has no gatekeeper. When someone is on your list and you send a message, it goes straight to their inbox. They gave you that permission directly. That is why the return on investment for email marketing consistently beats every other channel, including paid traffic that you are actively spending money on.

The business owner who ignores email marketing is the business owner who is constantly fighting for attention on somebody else’s platform. The business owner who builds and mails a list owns the relationship. Those are two completely different businesses, even if they sell the same product.

Tip 1: Send an Email Every Single Day

The most important habit in email marketing is consistency. Alston’s rule is simple: send something every day. The reason is just as simple: if you are not in front of your customer, somebody else is. And if somebody else is in front of your customer, that somebody else is making a sale or at minimum building the relationship that leads to a sale later.

Daily does not mean daily promotions. It means daily presence. A short story, a useful tip, a quick update, a funny situation that happened this week. The goal is to be the person in the inbox every morning so that when your subscriber is ready to buy, your name is the one they trust. You cannot build that trust by emailing once a month.

Tip 2: The Subject Line Is Critical

Getting someone to open your email is roughly 25 percent of the battle. Everything else, the story, the call to action, the link, none of it matters if the email never gets opened. Your subject line is what determines whether it gets opened or deleted.

You have seen a boring subject line that you clicked anyway because you had nothing better to do, and the content was actually good. You have also seen an exciting subject line that pulled you in and delivered nothing. Both are failures in different directions. You want a subject line that is engaging enough to earn the open and content strong enough to justify it. Write your subject line with the same care you put into writing the email itself.

Tip 3: Keep It Short

The common phrase is “keep it simple stupid.” Alston adapts it for email: keep it short. Nobody has time for long, drawn-out emails about topics they may or may not care about. A short, focused email that arrives every day performs better than a newsletter-length essay that arrives once a month and gets skimmed.

Keep your email on one subject. Make one point. Ask for one action. The shorter and more focused the email, the more likely your reader is to actually take the action you want. Long emails give people too many reasons to put it down and forget to come back.

Tip 4: Your First Line Is Almost as Important as Your Subject Line

Most people read emails on their phones. The phone preview shows two things: the subject line and the first line of the email. That first line alone can determine whether the email gets opened or swiped away without ever being read. Alston is explicit about this: your first line needs to be almost as engaging as your subject line.

Think about what your subscriber sees in that preview. If the subject line is strong but the first line is generic, “Hey, hope you’re having a great day,” the email is already competing against every other generic email in the inbox. Write a first line that continues the momentum the subject line started and gives the reader a reason to tap and keep reading.

Tip 5: Send From a Person, Not a Company

Alston makes this concrete with a direct comparison. How likely are you to open an email from walmart.com? Not very, because you already know they are trying to sell you something. How likely are you to open an email from Alston Godbolt? More likely, because there is a person behind that name. People open emails from people.

Apply that same logic to your own email list. Send from your name, not your company name or brand name. The sender name is the first thing people see before the subject line even registers. A recognizable person’s name earns more opens than the most creative brand name you can come up with. People make connections with people, not logos.

Tip 6: Skip the Fancy Templates

People can immediately recognize a designed email template. The banner image, the organized columns, the multiple links, the unsubscribe footer that looks like it was built by a marketing team. When they see it, they treat it the same way they treat the Sunday newspaper ads: something to flip through quickly and discard.

The email that gets read is the one that looks like your grandma sent it. Plain text. Conversational. No images forcing themselves into the flow. No obvious template structure. Just someone talking directly to the person reading it. That plain-looking email feels personal because it is. And personal emails get read. Designed email blasts get deleted.

Tip 7: Selling Is Not the Direct Goal

Your grandma is not emailing you to sell you a new printer. She is telling you something about a cousin you barely think about. You read it anyway. That is the energy your emails should carry. The goal of each email is not to close a sale. The goal is to make a connection, tell a story, and leave the door open for a sale to happen naturally.

Tell a story about something that happened to you. Make it funny or interesting or challenging. Then, almost as a footnote, mention a product or service you tried out and actually liked. That soft, story-first approach converts better than a direct pitch because the reader’s guard is down. They were reading a story. They were entertained. The product recommendation feels like a natural conclusion, not a sales tactic.

Tip 8: Use a Clear Call to Action

Every email you send should ask your subscriber to do one specific thing. That action can be clicking a link, filling out a survey, completing a poll, watching a video, or replying to the email. Whatever it is, name it clearly. Do not hint at what you want. Do not bury it at the bottom after five paragraphs of buildup. Tell your reader exactly what you want them to do and then give them the straightforward path to do it.

An email without a clear call to action is a missed opportunity. Your subscriber read all the way through and then had nothing to do with the energy the story built up. Give that energy somewhere to go. A clear, specific call to action is what turns an interesting email into a profitable one.

Tip 9: Go Easy on the Links

Your grandma does not send you an email with five links to five different websites. She tells you a long story, eventually circles back to the original point, and gives you one piece of information. Do the same. Build the story. Earn the reader’s attention. Then, at the very end, drop one link to the action you want them to take.

Multiple links in a single email split your reader’s attention and dilute your conversion. When there are three links, a reader might click one, skip one, and forget the third. When there is one link, placed after a story that earns it, the reader clicks or they do not. That clean, single-action structure is what produces higher conversion rates from people who actually read to the end.

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Tip 10: Use Relevant GIFs

Short GIFs can add real energy to an email when they are used with intention. Alston’s go-to example is a Michael Scott clip from The Office. Something topical, immediately funny, and recognizable to almost anyone who has seen the show. When a GIF lines up perfectly with the story you are already telling, it reinforces the point and keeps people scrolling.

The critical word here is relevant. A GIF that exists just because it made you laugh somewhere on the internet will derail your email. It pulls attention away from the story and breaks the thread your reader was following. Use GIFs sparingly, and only when they directly illustrate or add to what you are writing about. One well-placed GIF is a tool. A random GIF is noise.

Tip 11: Tell a Good Story

Storytelling is the oldest conversion tool in existence. People are far more likely to read an email from top to bottom when there is a story involved. The story can be compelling, funny, or something that challenges the usual way of thinking. What matters most is that it is engaging enough to keep the reader moving from one line to the next.

When a reader makes it all the way through your story, they arrive at your call to action in exactly the right state: engaged, trusting, and curious about what you are recommending. But the story and the call to action have to align. If your story goes in one direction and your recommendation goes in a completely different direction, the reader will feel the disconnect and not click. Build the story toward the action you want. Every detail in the story should make the call to action feel like the logical next step.

Tip 12: Add a Video When You Can

People are more likely to watch a video than read even a well-written short story. Video also lets your personality come through in ways that text alone cannot always capture. Your facial expressions, your tone, your energy, all of that communicates trust and connection in a way that words on a screen cannot replicate.

If you have time and relevant content for a short video, create it, embed it via YouTube or another video platform, and include it in the email. Plenty of tutorials exist online that show you exactly how to embed video in an email for every major email client. A video inside an email adds a dynamic layer that text-only emails simply cannot offer, and it gives subscribers another reason to engage with you as a person rather than just a name in their inbox.

Tip 13: Use an Email Autoresponder

Tip 1 says send an email every day. Tip 13 is what makes Tip 1 actually possible without burning yourself out. An email autoresponder system does all of the delivery work for you. You write the emails once, load them into the system, set the schedule, and the system sends them automatically to every subscriber at the right time. You are not sitting down every morning to write and manually send to your entire list.

Alston mentions ClickFunnels as his personal preference and notes it is an affiliate link in his video description. There are plenty of other autoresponder tools available too. The important thing is not which one you pick. The important thing is that you pick one and use it. Without an autoresponder, the daily email habit becomes unsustainable within weeks. With one set up properly, you can write a month of emails in a weekend and let the system do the rest.

Tip 14: Repurpose Content You Already Have

You do not need to come up with fresh ideas every day. You already have content. Blog posts, YouTube videos, social media threads, old newsletters. All of it can be cut up and used in your email campaign. Alston’s example is a blog post about wiring a house. That one post becomes multiple emails: one day about finding the right nails, another about choosing the right wood, another about the tools you need before you start.

Your subscribers will not know the content originally existed somewhere else. They are reading your email, not cross-referencing your archive. Repurposing saves you hours of writing time and gives your existing content a second life reaching people who may never have found it the first time around. Start with whatever content you already have the most of and work backward from there.

Tip 15: Only Send Emails Your Audience Signed Up For

This is about trust, and trust is the only currency that matters in email marketing. If you run a website building company and your subscribers came to you for website advice, they do not want emails about landscaping. Even if you have a great affiliate deal on a landscaping product. Even if it pays better. Sending off-topic emails breaks the implicit agreement you made when someone subscribed.

The moment subscribers feel like you have strayed from why they signed up, they unsubscribe. And they do not just leave quietly. They leave with less trust in email marketing generally, and they go to a competitor who stays on topic. Stay in your lane. Every email you send should be something your subscribers would expect from you given what they signed up to receive.

An Honest Look at What Makes Email Marketing Hard

These 17 tips are straightforward in concept and genuinely difficult in practice. Sending every single day sounds simple until you are on day 22 and you cannot think of anything to write. Staying on topic sounds simple until you have a great affiliate offer that does not quite fit your audience and the commission is too good to ignore. Pruning your list sounds simple until you are staring at a spreadsheet of people you spent months building a relationship with and deciding who to cut.

The biggest practical hurdle is consistency. Most people start strong, get busy, skip a few days, feel guilty, skip a few more, and eventually stop entirely. The autoresponder system in Tip 13 is the solution to that specific problem. Load your sequences in advance. Let the machine send while you focus on creating new content. Treat your email list like the business asset it actually is, not like a side task you get to when everything else is done.

The second biggest hurdle is growing the list in the first place. None of these tips matter if you have no subscribers. List building is its own discipline, but the short version is this: give people a real reason to hand over their email address, make it easy to sign up, and then deliver on the promise you made when they signed up. Everything else follows from there.

Tip 16: Prune Your List for Growth

This one surprises people every time. Removing subscribers feels like moving backward. It is actually one of the most important things you can do for the health of your list. Most email autoresponders charge based on the total number of subscribers you have. That means inactive subscribers, people who have not opened an email in months and have had no contact with you at all, are costing you money every single month for doing nothing.

Define your own timeframe. Maybe it is 90 days without an open. Maybe it is 6 months. Whatever you decide, stick to it and remove subscribers who have not crossed that threshold. Alston points out that pruning can remove 25 percent or more of a list. That is a direct cost reduction. A smaller, engaged list costs less to maintain, delivers better open rates, and creates a better sender reputation with email providers than a large list full of people who stopped caring a year ago.

Tip 17: Make One Last Attempt Before You Remove Anyone

Before you cut an inactive subscriber, send one re-engagement email. The subject line can be something direct and honest: “Hey, are you still interested?” Keep the email short. Be straightforward. Ask whether they still want to hear from you and give them a simple way to signal that they do.

If they respond or take any action, keep them on the list. If they do not respond, remove them manually. This step costs almost nothing and occasionally recovers a subscriber who just needed the right email to show up at the right moment. But it also gives you a clean conscience when you do remove people, because you gave everyone one last chance before making the call. That one extra step protects the list health and the relationship at the same time.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How often should I actually send emails?

Alston recommends every single day. That said, daily works best when you have a well-stocked autoresponder sequence running in the background. If you are starting completely fresh, the priority is consistency over frequency. Three times a week that you can actually maintain beats seven times a week that falls apart in month two. Build the habit first, then increase the frequency as your writing speed and content bank grow.

What autoresponder tool should I use?

Alston mentions ClickFunnels as his personal preference. Other commonly used tools include ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and Drip. The right one depends on your budget, list size, and how much automation you need. If you are brand new, most of these tools have free tiers that let you get started without committing to a monthly bill. Once your list grows past a few hundred subscribers, the features and deliverability differences between platforms start to matter more.

Does the plain-text rule apply even if I have a strong brand identity?

For most email marketers and small businesses, yes. The goal of email is to feel personal. Designed templates signal “brand communication,” which people treat like advertising. Plain text signals “person to person,” which people treat like correspondence. If you are a large retailer sending product updates, a designed template may fit better. But if you are building an audience around a personal brand, affiliate income, or any kind of teaching or coaching, plain text will almost always outperform a designed template.

What do I do when I have nothing interesting to tell a story about?

Repurpose content you already have. A blog post becomes a five-email series. A YouTube video becomes three separate tips. A customer question you answered last week becomes today’s story. You almost never need to invent new material from scratch. The ideas are in the content you have already created. The exercise is cutting that content into pieces and writing a short story around each one. Once you start thinking of your existing content as email fuel, the “nothing to write about” problem mostly disappears.

What is a good call to action for someone just starting out?

Start with the simplest possible action: reply to this email. Asking someone to reply is low friction, builds your sender reputation with email providers, and starts an actual conversation. Once you have a product or affiliate offer to promote, the call to action becomes clicking a link. Keep it specific. “Click here to see the tool I use” is more effective than “check out my resources.” Tell the reader exactly where they are going and why.

How many subscribers do I need before email marketing is worth doing?

Start the habit with your first subscriber. Waiting until you have a big list to take email seriously is one of the most common mistakes beginners make. Every good habit is built when the stakes are low. Writing to 50 people every day is how you get good at writing to 5,000 people every day. The mechanics are identical. The list size just changes the math. Start now, refine as you grow.

How do I decide which subscribers to remove when pruning?

Define your own threshold based on your business. A common starting point is anyone who has not opened a single email in the past 90 days. Before you cut anyone, send the re-engagement email Alston describes in Tip 17: a short, honest note asking if they are still interested. Give it a few days. Whoever responds or clicks stays. Whoever does not gets removed. Most autoresponder platforms have filters that make it easy to build a segment of unengaged subscribers so you are not doing this manually one person at a time.

Can email marketing realistically generate $10,000 a month?

The title of this video uses that number, and it is a real possibility, not a guarantee. What that income level actually requires is a list of meaningful size, an offer with real conversion rates, consistent daily sending, and enough time to let the compounding effect of a growing and engaged list do its work. Most people who make serious money from email marketing did not get there in 60 days. They built the habit, refined the writing, kept growing the list, and eventually crossed the threshold. The tips in this video describe the habits that get you there. They do not shortcut the time it takes.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof YouTube channel
Video transcript: “16 Email Marketing Tips to Boost Conversions and Make $10,000+ Per Month”
ClickFunnels referenced in transcript as an autoresponder and funnel tool example