The world of marketing is changing fast. And like the industry itself, it’s important to always be adapting, or you could be left in the dust.

Email marketing requires that you step up your game every now and then to keep things interesting and ensure that you’re putting your best foot forward. Recipients who see the same messaging and formatting every time they open your emails aren’t going to stay engaged for long. Being complacent in your practices for too long will lead to a loss of interest and negatively affect your conversion rates.

It’s easy to get into a routine with your email marketing. What takes a little more work is putting into place a strategy that ensures you’re always tweaking your efforts to promote sustainable success. Below, we’ll go over some of the things that you should be doing to step up your email game both now and moving forward.

1. Create Benchmarks

Your emails are only as valuable as the conversions that they lead to. After all, is a great email really so great if nobody even sees it?

To ensure that you’re meeting and exceeding your conversion goals, you’re going to want to create email marketing benchmarks that you can check against — and compete against. Knowing where you stand in terms of key email metrics provides you with a baseline for where you need to go and a foundation for determining how you’re going to get there. It also forces you to keep a close eye on your most telling KPIs and to recognize early on if something just isn’t working.

Your exact email marketing KPIs will depend on your unique business objectives, but the two metrics you should always be benchmarking with your emails are open rate and click-through-rate (CTR). If either of these metrics isn’t performing up to par, you’ll know it’s time to make a change.

2. Routinely Check In With Your Benchmarks

In addition to striving to meet your benchmark goals, you should also be working on specific strategies to help you blow them out of the water. And to do it, you’ll need to keep a close eye on KPI performance, making your benchmarks a central part of your strategy so that they’re always front and center in your plans.

Checking up on your benchmarks should be as set a part of your schedule as any other sort of check-in meeting. Whether it’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly, devise (and stick to) a schedule for evaluating and discussing your benchmarks. This way, if you’re not meeting your goals, you’ll know sooner rather than later and be able to react with a plan of action instead of letting ineffective practices continue unabated.

3. Survey Your Recipients

If you want to know what your emails are missing, sometimes you just need to ask. The advantages of surveys and polls are that they can help you discover content gaps and create more useful emails for your audience. It can also help get more insight into what your recipients care about and illuminate some of the issues that you might not even be aware exist.

In your survey, ask your recipients what resources they want out of your emails. Are they looking for information? Community? Recommendations? All of the above? To get to the root of their needs, use the survey to ask your recipients questions about your product or service, why they subscribed to your emails in the first place, and what they hope to get out of them. Once you’ve got your answers, look for trends and patterns, and then go back to the drawing board to address the common requests that your survey clued you in on.

4. Look Into New Strategies

It can be overwhelming to learn new email marketing techniques and tools constantly, but it can also be invigorating. There is so much potential right now for kicking your emails up a notch, and so many tools that can help you do it.

Always keep a close eye on what’s available so that you can implement new strategies as you see fit. This includes things like conversational marketing techniques, personalized drip campaigns, the rise of video and visuals, and a push toward more interactive content. All of these strategies are evidence of more general rising tides in the ways that brands and their audience interact, and both on their own and together can help you craft emails that make a stronger impact.

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all email. It’s only natural that you’ll need to adapt and grow as your audience does, and that you’ll need to regularly modify your messages to keep up with the fast pace of industry change. Follow the tips above to make stepping up your email game as rote of a process as sending those emails in the first place.