LinkedIn Post Ideas for Email Marketers

One subject line change lifted opens 31%. The winning version was three words shorter. The original: "Here Are the 5 Things You Need to Know About Our New Feature Update." Clear, complete, and completely skippable in a crowded inbox. The winner: "5 things you'll actually use." Shorter, lowercase, curiosity over completeness. Here is why it worked. On mobile, where most opens happen, long subject lines get truncated mid-thought. The short one showed in full and left a gap the reader wanted to close. I used to write subject lines to describe the email. Now I write them to earn the open, and let the email do the describing. The lesson that keeps proving itself: in subject lines, clarity about the value beats completeness about the contents. Say less, make them curious, deliver inside.

Open rates are a lie, and Apple Mail Privacy Protection made them worse. If you are still optimizing to open rate, you are optimizing to noise. Apple pre-fetches images for Mail users, which fires your open pixel whether or not anyone actually opened the email. A big chunk of your "opens" are a machine, not a human. So the metric got inflated and unreliable, exactly for the audience segment that is often your largest. What I optimize to now: clicks, replies, and conversions — things a human has to actually do. I still glance at opens as a rough trend, never as truth, and never for automated send-time or re-engagement logic that Apple opens now poison. The uncomfortable shift: the metric email marketers reported for 20 years quietly became decorative. Build your reporting and your automations on actions, not opens.

How I cleaned a 100k list without nuking deliverability, because doing it wrong can tank your sender reputation overnight. The wrong way: mass-delete everyone who has not opened in a year. Except Apple broke open tracking, so "non-openers" now includes plenty of engaged humans. You would cut real subscribers. What I did instead, over six weeks: 1. Segmented by clicks and conversions, not opens — real actions. 2. Built a sunset flow: a short re-engagement series to the genuinely inactive, giving them a reason to click. 3. Suppressed, not deleted, the ones who still did not respond — kept for a final win-back. 4. Verified addresses to catch spam traps and hard bounces before they hurt me. Deliverability actually improved because I was sending to people who wanted it. Slow and segmented beats fast and brutal. Your reputation is the asset — protect it.

We sent the identical campaign at 6am and 6pm to matched halves of the list. The result surprised all of us. Everyone "knows" the best send times — the blog posts all cite the same 10am Tuesday gospel. We wanted our own data, so we split the list and controlled for everything but time. 6am opens looked higher. But 6pm won on the thing that mattered: clicks and conversions were meaningfully higher in the evening send. The reason, we think: morning is triage time. People clear inboxes fast and open without acting. Evening is slower — they actually read and click. The lesson is not "send at 6pm." It is that your list is not the blog post's list. Best-practice send times are someone else's data. Test your own, optimize to conversions not opens, and ignore the generic advice.

A client's automated welcome flow made more revenue than their entire weekly newsletter program. They were spending all their energy on the wrong one. They sent a heavily produced newsletter every week — hours of work, big team effort. The welcome flow was three emails set up years ago and never touched. When I pulled revenue by email, the neglected welcome series quietly out-earned the whole newsletter, because it hit people at peak intent: right after they subscribed, when interest was highest. We flipped the effort. Expanded the welcome flow from three emails to seven, added segmentation by signup source, and put real offers in it. Welcome-flow revenue more than doubled, on automation that runs itself. Broadcast campaigns feel like the work because you send them constantly. But lifecycle automation, hitting people at the right moment, is usually where the money quietly lives.

Three deliverability mistakes that landed a client in the spam folder, and how we climbed back out. One: they bought a list. Nothing tanks a sender reputation faster than blasting people who never opted in and marking you as spam. We suppressed the entire purchased segment immediately. Two: no authentication. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC were half-configured, so mailbox providers could not verify them. We fixed all three properly — non-negotiable now under Gmail and Yahoo's sender rules. Three: they sent to the whole list every time, including years-dead addresses, hitting spam traps and racking up bounces. Recovery took about eight weeks: authenticate, warm back up slowly by sending only to the most engaged, then gradually widen. Deliverability is not a setting you fix once. It is a reputation you maintain every send. One lazy blast can undo months of good behavior.

Gmail's sender requirements culled the lazy senders, and honestly, good. When Gmail and Yahoo started enforcing real rules — required authentication, easy one-click unsubscribe, and a hard spam-complaint threshold — a lot of senders panicked. The senders who panicked were mostly the ones who had it coming: buying lists, hiding the unsubscribe, blasting unengaged contacts, skipping DMARC. For those of us who already authenticated properly, honored unsubscribes, and kept complaint rates low, nothing changed except that our competitors got quieter in the inbox. The complaint-rate threshold is the real teeth. Stay under it by only mailing people who want to hear from you, and you are fine. Cross it and even legitimate mail starts landing in spam. Email's dirty secret is that the rules were always this. Gmail just finally started enforcing them.

My pre-send checklist exists because of the merge tag disaster of 2024. Let me tell you why I never send without it. We sent to 60,000 people with a broken merge tag. Every email opened with "Hi FIRSTNAME," literally. The unsubscribes and the replies were brutal, and entirely preventable. Now nothing goes out without this checklist: 1. Send a live test to myself AND a colleague — fresh eyes catch what I gloss over. 2. Test every merge tag with a record that has missing fields, to see the fallback. 3. Click every link. Every one. Broken links are the most common defect. 4. Preview on mobile, since that is where most opens happen. 5. Re-read the subject line and preview text together, as the inbox shows them. 6. Confirm the audience and suppressions before hitting send. Six minutes. It has saved me from a dozen would-be disasters. The checklist is boring. So is not embarrassing yourself in front of 60,000 people.

Eight emails live permanently in my swipe file. Here is what each one teaches, in one line: 1. A DTC brand's welcome email — how to set expectations for what is coming next. 2. A SaaS onboarding email — one clear action, zero distractions. 3. A newsletter with a plain-text feel — proof that design is not what earns the click. 4. A win-back email — how to ask "still interested?" without begging. 5. A cart-abandon email — urgency without manipulation. 6. A founder's personal note — how a real voice outperforms a polished template. 7. A re-engagement subject line — curiosity in five words. 8. A post-purchase email — turning one sale into the next one. I do not copy them. I study why each works, then adapt the principle. The best email education is not a course — it is the inbox you already have, if you actually study what makes you click.

Plain text or heavily designed templates — which actually earns more clicks for you? I will share my data, then I want yours. Across most of my B2B and creator clients, plain-text-style emails win on clicks and replies. They feel personal, they land in the primary tab more reliably, and they read like a message from a human, not a billboard. But it is not universal. For ecommerce and visual products, designed templates win — people want to see the product, and image-led emails drive the browse. My rule of thumb: the more the email is about a relationship or an idea, the more plain text wins. The more it is about a product you can see, the more design earns its keep. So the honest answer is "it depends on your audience," which is unsatisfying. That is why I want your data. Plain text or designed — which wins for your list, and why? Drop it below.