A Real-World Guide to HighLevel Email Marketing: Beyond the Benchmarks
A Real-World Guide to HighLevel Email Marketing: Beyond the Benchmarks
In the world of email marketing, it's easy to get obsessed with benchmarks. We're told to aim for 35-50% open rates and a 2% click rate, and when our numbers don't measure up, it's easy to feel like we're failing. But what if those benchmarks are telling only half the story? The truth is, context is everything, and what matters most isn't hitting an arbitrary number, but driving real results for your business.
This guide will take you on a practical, no-nonsense tour of the HighLevel email marketing suite. We'll move beyond the benchmarks to focus on what truly matters: understanding your data, leveraging powerful automation tools, and building a strategy that drives sales. This is your complete walkthrough of the Email Marketing tab, from deciphering your stats to building automated campaigns that work for your business.
The Truth About Email Marketing Benchmarks
Are you chasing the wrong numbers? While industry benchmarks can be a useful starting point, they can also be incredibly misleading. As the video transcript for this article highlights, a high sending frequency (e.g., six emails a week) or a focus on community notifications will naturally lead to lower open rates than a once-a-week promotional email. This doesn't mean your email strategy is failing; it means your context is different.
Furthermore, the email marketing landscape has been fundamentally altered by Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which now accounts for a significant portion of email clients. This feature automatically preloads email content, artificially inflating open rates and making them an unreliable metric for true engagement 1.
The Real Metric of Success: The ultimate goal of your email marketing efforts should be sales. A lower open rate with a high conversion rate is infinitely more valuable than a high open rate with no sales. Use benchmarks as a health check, not a report card. Pay closer attention to trends in your unsubscribes and spam complaints, as these are more reliable indicators of your list's health and the value of your content.
Decoding Your HighLevel Email Dashboard
Your HighLevel email dashboard is your command center for analytics. Here's a quick guide to what you should be looking at:
Campaign Types:Understand the difference betweenEmail Campaigns(sent directly from the marketing tab),Workflow Campaigns(sent via automations), andBulk Actions(sent from the contacts tab).
Core Metrics:Track yourDelivered,Opened,Clicked, andProducts Orderedto get a high-level view of your performance.
List Health Indicators:Keep a close eye on yourBounced,Unsubscribed, andSpam Complaints. A low unsubscribe rate, even with a high sending frequency, is a strong signal that your list is healthy and your content is valued.
Building Your Email Arsenal: Mastering HighLevel Templates
Templates are the foundation of an efficient and scalable email marketing strategy. HighLevel offers three powerful ways to create them:
AI-Powered Generation:Use the new AI feature to generate a fully designed template, complete with content and branding, from a simple text prompt.
The Visual Editor:The drag-and-drop builder (the "pretty email editor") allows you to create beautifully branded emails with custom images, buttons, social links, and more.
Importing from Other Platforms:This is a crucial feature for onboarding new clients. You can easily import existing email templates from platforms like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and Kajabi, saving you hours of work.
Pro-Tip: Create a branded footer with your logo, social links, and unsubscribe information, and save it as a custom element. You can then drag this saved element into every new email, ensuring brand consistency and saving you time.
Launching Your Campaigns: From Manual Blasts to Smart Automation
HighLevel provides a suite of advanced tools for sending the right message at the right time.
Smart Send:This intelligent feature automatically sends your email at the optimal time for each individual contact based on their past engagement behavior.
RSS Campaigns:This is a powerful "set it and forget it" feature that allows you to automatically send out your latest blog posts or YouTube videos. Simply set up the RSS feed, create a template, andHighLevelwill handle the rest.
Targeting and Segmentation:The key to effective email marketing is sending to the right audience. Use Smart Lists to create dynamic segments of your audience, such as contacts who have opened an email in the last 30 days. This will improve your deliverability, boost your engagement, and ensure you're only sending to your most active subscribers.
The Automation Engine: Building Email Sequences in Workflows
This is where the true power of HighLevel is unleashed. By connecting your email templates to the workflow builder, you can create sophisticated, automated nurture sequences that run on autopilot.
Here's a simple example:
The Trigger:Start your workflow with a common trigger, such as a contact submitting a form for a lead magnet.
The First Email:Add a "Send Email" action and select the first email template in your sequence.
The Wait Step:Add a "Wait" action to pause the workflow for a set amount of time (e.g., one day).
The Second Email:Copy the first email action and simply swap out the template for the next one in your sequence.
By following this simple process, you can build out a multi-day email sequence that nurtures your leads and moves them closer to a sale, all without any manual intervention.
The My Vision Agency Advantage
Mastering the powerful tools within HighLevel is the key to building a successful, automated online business, but it can be a complex and overwhelming process. You don't have to do it alone.
Ready to build an email marketing machine that actually drives sales? Join our free community at My Vision Agency for live coaching, proven automation templates, and the support you need to master HighLevel.
Your Data, Your Strategy, Your Success
Email marketing success isn't about hitting arbitrary benchmarks; it's about understanding your audience, using your data to make informed decisions, and leveraging powerful tools like HighLevel to automate your strategy. It's time to move beyond the benchmarks, dive into your own email stats with a fresh perspective, and start building smarter, more profitable campaigns today.
