Email remains the greatest way to connect with a customer directly and convert contacts into sales.
At the heart of it, email marketing is a coordinated campaign designed to deliver timely automated emails or an email newsletter inspiring a customer to act — whether that’s buy, sign up, download, or whatever else your business needs.
Effective email marketing takes effort. Here are a few strategies for making the most of your email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing is the use of email to promote a company's products and services or to connect with the customers. When it's done well, email marketing is an effective sales driver.
When it's done wrong, email marketing can come across as spam that annoys customers.
The best marketing emails are optimized for mobile devices, respect the customers, and follow a regular schedule while mixing up the messaging.
An email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer identifies and follows to achieve desired marketing goals with email advertising. This plan of action gives the businesses a direct channel of communication with prospects and customers for brand promotion.
Why is it essential to have an email marketing strategy?
A strategy is vital for several reasons. The most important and significant of them are as follows.
A business plan
Having an email marketing strategy in place allows marketers to layout their email advertising process ahead of time. In turn, other business stakeholders can know what they need to do at each given time, thus ensuring synchronicity while implementing an email campaign.
With an email marketing strategy, a company can plan when to send time-based promotions or non-promotional emails. Time-based promotions are emails containing time-sensitive messages which prompt recipients to take action, for example, purchasing a discounted product, registering for a new class, or booking an appointment.
For these promotions, marketers should consider planning a short three-part marketing email series comprising of an announcement (preferably two weeks in advance), a reminder (1 week to the event), and the last chance (1 or 2 days before the event.)
Non-promotional emails are less timely and sales-driven. They are more for establishing relationships and giving value to customers. Contrary to promotional emails that tend to boost sales, non-promotional emails enable marketers to determine the interests of their subscribers, thus helping with mailing list segmentation.
In turn, they can follow up with more personalized messages that aid in nurturing and strengthening relationships with prospects and customers, respectively.
Gauge your results
Email marketing strategies spell out all the goals businesses intend to achieve. A company needs to have marketing objectives beforehand to give it a sense of direction when implementing an email campaign.
Other than that, email marketing strategies enable marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns.
Pick the best tactics
In this context, tactics refer to the tips and tricks that a marketer uses to push their strategy and thus achieve the set goals. An example of a tactic could be “to start a cart-abandonment program to cut down on the number of lost sales.”
How to Create an Email Marketing Strategy
We will now look at the essential steps that marketers should follow to develop excellent marketing strategies.
Set email marketing goals
Marketing emails serve to fulfill the following purposes:
increase customer engagement
raise loyalty
maximize ROI
maintain relationships with your clients
Marketers thus need to create emails that are in line with any of these or other desired goals.
Pick the necessary email marketing tools
Finding the right tools is the first step to setting up an email marketing strategy. A marketer needs an Email Service Provider (ESP) with an automation tool, among other useful features.
Getresponse allows you to create, organize, and send emails in a breeze.
With Automation 360, marketers can follow up on their customers and send the right emails at the right time. For instance, you can set up welcome emails for onboarding new customers, abandoned cart emails to get customers to take action about the items they have left in the cart, and so forth.
Determine the target audience
Next, the marketer needs to build their email subscriber list. To do this, you have to identify the target audience your company serves.
Case in point, if a specific business deals with baby clothes, then its target audience primarily comprises mothers-to-be. Thus, it makes sense to use conventional means to get the email addresses of this demographic.
Identify the appropriate list building tactics
An excellent way of building mailing lists is through subscriptions. With Getresponse, you can add subscription forms to your site and collect quality subscribers who are ready to hear from your brand. You can embed subscription forms on high-traffic sections of your website.
To increase your online presence, create multichannel subscription forms with Getresponse. They allow users to subscribe to emails, SMS campaigns, and chatbots in Facebook Messenger and Telegram. All you need is to add the link to your chatbot. Look below.
Divide your mailing list into segments
Segmenting is an effective tactic that allows you to send highly targeted email campaigns. With Getresponse, marketers can segment their mailing lists based on location, gender, occupation, age, behavior, etc.
In turn, you can be sure that you are delivering appropriate and customized messages that appeal to customers.
Identify the types of emails to send
There’s a great variety of different emails that marketers send. The choice of email style depends on the aim of each specific campaign. For example, if a user has just joined your mailing list, send them a welcome email.
This is a great chance to explain the benefits of working with you. If clients have added some items to their shopping cart and didn’t buy them, send them an abandoned cart email to increase sales. Discover more about email campaign types.
Create a schedule for sending emails
To ensure that subscribers read your promotional emails, find out the best time for sending emails. It is, therefore, necessary to experiment and determine the time when subscribers are most engaged. A/B testing proves useful.
Format the email content
For email marketing to be a success, messages in promotional emails should be presented perfectly. Marketers should choose formats, fonts, and text sizes depending on the type of emails that they are creating. With Getresponse, you can use a drag-and-drop editor to create beautiful email templates that are customized to match your brand.
Optimize your emails
A 2017 study by Adestra concluded that 83.8 percent of mobile device owners open emails with these devices. It, therefore, makes sense to optimize email content for mobile to reach this audience. Some of the ways for assuring that email content is mobile-friendly include:
Creating short subject lines.
Limiting emails to a width of 600px.
Using single-column templates.
Displaying small images.
Writing distinct CTAs.
Testing on multiple mobile devices.
Avoiding menu bars.
Using a large font size (ideally 13-14 pixels).
Conduct split-testing
With A/B testing, marketers can determine what copy of their email works best by swapping out different aspects of their email, such as subject lines (the most popular option), images, CTAs, headlines, offers, and so forth.
Monitor email performance reports
Adjusting your email strategy based on reports and feedback that you have gathered is the last step for developing an email marketing strategy. Getresponse provides users with a set of analytics that aids in gauging the effectiveness of email campaigns.
Track email open rate, unsubscribe rate, click-through rates, email deliveries, email bounces, spam complaints, and more.
Tips for Creating an Effective Email Marketing Strategy
Here are essential tips for an excellent email marketing strategy:
Provide incentives via email that encourage customers to review the products they’ve purchased.
Run A/B testing to optimize click-through and open rates.
Offer rewards to loyal customers.
Re-engage dormant customers.
Be ready for holidays and product seasonality with a newsletter calendar.
Conclusion
Email marketing continues to deliver results. But email marketing has evolved. It's no longer as simple as sending the same email to all.
It's time to update your email marketing strategy. Now, you need to send targeted messages. Messages that are personalized, and optimized for multiple devices.
You also need test new elements. Trends change quickly, and what worked 12 months ago may not be successful today. Be open to testing. And when you understand what works, find ways to automate it through triggered emails.
If you implement these new changes into your email marketing strategy your customers will be more responsive, your campaign performance will improve and your business will continue grow.