We’re tired of lazy email marketing.

Marketers are humans, too. Their personal inboxes aren’t immune to an onslaught of daily, automated emails. They also spend their mornings combing through the irksome pack, deleting, unsubscribing and bemoaning the voluminous load over coffee. In our culture, this daily waste of time has become a ritual. Yet we continue to enlist in the process: subscribe, purge, repeat. Why? Because sometimes these emails are actually good. So how can marketers rise above the pack of digital gadflies and avoid the evil unsubscribe button?

Understand your goals and your target customer. If you speak directly and honestly to those most interested in your business, conversions will follow. Intrusive, clickbaity emails are overdone and lazy—realistically, they don’t yield results. Enticing subject lines might produce more clicks, but email marketing should always value conversions over clicks. Opens alone don’t increase sales.

Remember: email campaigns are merely a facet of your overarching sales strategy. Therefore, each email should pursue sales goals and match the tone of your branded content. Clear copywriting and clean design are of tantamount importance to the design and copy on your business’ website. This doesn’t mean your emails should be sterile and salesy. There’s always room for creativity. Dare we suggest you throw a GIF in there? A cartoon tortilla chip chasséing on top of a corn stalk never hurt anyone—as long as that cartoon tortilla chip is relevant to your content.

Crafting an effective email campaign is half headwork, half review. When it comes to email marketing, success is incredibly measurable. Pay attention to your campaign’s results. Measure the ratio of conversions to clicks. Take note of the content to which your target customer base best responds. Adjust and optimize the send time of your emails. Like most marketing practices, creating a successful email campaign depends upon adaptation and execution.

Don’t write off email marketing. Approach your next email campaign with intention, not indolence. Some extra gusto will produce fewer conversions to the potential customer’s trash bin and more interaction with your business’ content.