When it comes to business, there are fundamental steps or strategies that are essential to ensure success. To cite a solid example, a successful email marketing campaign starts with a strategy.
A strategy provides any campaign with structure, coherence, and a definition. An email strategy keeps your messaging on target and helps you achieve your marketing goals.
A winning strategy entails creating and following simple steps and constantly evaluating how your strategy can improve.
What is an Email Strategy?
A winning email strategy involves a lot of moving parts, processes, and workflows. To ensure success of your campaigns, there must be an assurance that each piece or stage is managed well and that all of them fit together seamlessly with the help of an email marketing strategy template.
To define, an email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer employs and follows to accomplish desired marketing targets with the use of email advertising or marketing.
This plan of action provides businesses a clear line of communication with leads, prospects, and customers for brand promotion. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to communicate something about your brand, sell products, or your services.
Building an Email Strategy
Before we delve deeper to clarify what an email strategy is, it is beneficial to commence what it is not. An email marketing strategy is not just a random collection of steps or tactics employed with the hope of accomplishing a specific goal. A solid strategy is more than that.
An email strategy is an overarching plan for your campaign. An email strategy includes more than just your methods, objectives, and analysis, but it also encompasses what your end goal or aim for, why you’re aiming for it, and how you will measure success.
The first thing that you should do is define what factors constitute success for you. It could be the number of clicks, opens, or the amount of money earned.
Below are some tips to get you started.
1. Devise or create a marketing plan.
Identify your audience
Regardless of what products you sell or services you offer, you need to have a clear idea of who your target audience is to communicate with them effectively. A way to do this is to segment your audience, so you may be able to send them personalised and targeted emails that helps in increasing engagement, builds relationships, and ultimately generate increased ROI.
Define Signup Sources
The most valuable data in your signup can offer is in knowing where and how your subscribers sign up for your list. Knowing this can provide you a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to focus your efforts going forward.
Segment Your Subscribers
Once you have identified a specific number of people within your larger audience, you will be able to create segments or groups of subscribers, you will be able to send out personalised emails to your recipients. We need not stress that the more relevant the campaign is to your target audience, the better your results.
Fine Tune Your Content
Now that you have some writing to do, it’s time to think about its content. What do you want to impart? Do you have a content strategy? Your emails shouldn’t be just shooting blanks, but each one must have a specific purpose that will resonate with your subscribers. Keep this in mind when composing to make sure they align to what they signed up for.
Set Up Your Sending Goals and Frequency
Though there is not a set number of emails you can send your customers, however, if you send emails too often, you are most likely to be tuned out or be unsubscribed altogether. Choose to send your email at a controlled pace. Check your unsubscribe and click-through rates, and adjust the frequency, if need be.
Create a Schedule
Create a content calendar to make sure you are staying on track. Schedule your content, campaigns and more. Your email marketing schedule will highly depend on the type of industry you are in. Also, the types of content you send, and your frequency of sending.
2. Email Design Matters
Intently focus on your messaging when it comes to designing your email campaign. It is also beneficial to keep your design straightforward.
To make it even more simple, arrange your design in a hierarchy, putting the most important information or the most important details at the top, so people can quickly scan your email, especially if they value their time.
3. Test Your Email
Not all email clients are the same. What this means is that the campaign you designed might look different in your subscribers’ inboxes. Make sure to check how your emails look on mobile devices.
Have friends or co-workers check your email for typos and ask for feedback on the layout. Send test emails, so they can preview the campaign directly from their inboxes.
Running an A/B test will let you experiment with different versions of your emails to view how changes you implement can impact your results.
4. Use Marketing Automation
Unlike any regular campaigns, with automation, a targeted or series of emails is one that you can set and forget. Once properly set up, automation helps in streamlining your communications with customers, so you have more time to focus in creating relevant content and increasing your return on investment.
This entails the welcome email series to follow-up emails, and even rewarding or giving incentives. Additionally, you would be able to send and track order notifications and provide updates to customers on purchases they made from your business.
5. Measure Your Performance Analytics
By measuring your marketing analytics, the data that you collect will help refine your marketing strategy. This involves your opens and clicks, E-Commerce Data, and your Website Traffic.
As you can see, email marketing is a process with lots of pieces and moving parts. Without a solid strategy, you’ll have a much harder time measuring your progress and success.
If you are contemplating on starting an email campaign or need to beef up your existing email marketing strategy, The Growth Manager can provide you with tools and support that you need with our Guide to Email Marketing. This guide is included in our Digital Marketing Mentoring Pack. Get in touch with us today and let’s smash that email marketing strategy together.
