Understanding how to create email marketing strategy could be all you need to drive sales conversion and consistently hit or even exceed revenue targets.
But the question is, how do you create an email marketing strategy that brings results?
Give me a few minutes of your time, and I’ll show you how you can do that. But first, let’s get to understand what an email marketing strategy is all about.
What Is Email Marketing Strategy?
An email marketing strategy refers to those email marketing steps and plans a marketer follows to achieve a certain marketing goal or objectives.
Now, you have to understand that there are no laid down steps or strategies in email marketing. Your end goal determines the procedures.
If your goal is to increase the traffic on your website, you will adopt a slightly different strategy from someone who wants to increase sales.
Why Email Marketing Is Effective
There are a lot of reasons why email marketing is very effective. The most important one is that it still remains the most used communication channel between brands and their customers.
According to Statista, in 2020, the number of email users in the world rose to four billion. And it is projected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025.
In that same report, Statista stated that approximately 306 billion were sent and received every day.
That is a massive figure. If the world population is slightly above seven billion, and over four billion people are using emails. That should give you an insight into why email marketing is and will remain effective in the nearest future.
Another reason why email marketing is effective is that it makes it easy for brands to build solid relationships with their customers.
I mean, with email marketing, you can send personalized messages to a group of people at the same time. No other marketing channel does that.
It is important you know that most big companies invest heavily in email marketing. Most of them set aside 10% – 20% of their annual revenue for email marketing alone. That should give you an idea of how effective email marketing is.
How To Develop An Email Marketing Strategy
Now let’s discuss those email marketing strategies that can bring you the best results in your business.
Set Your Goals
The first step in creating a successful email marketing strategy is to set goals. What do you intend to achieve with your email marketing campaign?
Is it to increase your sales conversion, build brand visibility, get massive views on your website or just acquire new customers?
You have to be specific about what you want. For better results, you can use the SMART approach to goal setting.
Your goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based.
Let’s take sales conversion as an instance. You can decide that at the end of the year, you want to have a 10% sales conversion from the total leads generated.
You can see that this goal meets the SMART approach to setting goals. That is the only way you determine if you had a successful campaign.
Build An Email List
Once you’ve set your goals, the next step is to build your email list. There are several ways to do this. But the most effective way is to give out value to your audience in exchange for their email address.
Let’s assume you run a stock investment company. To generate leads, you can prepare a document or video explaining a particular aspect of stock investing. This document or video is called a lead magnet.
Now you can offer this lead magnet to anyone who visits your site in exchange for their email address.
Another way of doing this is to build a strong audience on social media. Give out quality content and information on your product.
If you do this consistently, you’ll gather a list of loyal followers. Then you can channel these followers to your website, where you have a subscribe button for your newsletters.
Knowing the kind of information you dish out consistently will prompt your prospects to join your email list, hoping to get more.
There’s also another way to go about this. You can buy already generated email lists from someone. However, this is not advisable, as it is preferable to build a list from an audience that knows what you offer and are interested in it.
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Segment Your Email List
Once you’ve built your list, go ahead and segment it. You can do this by sending welcome emails to your general list. You can offer another incentive for more information about them in this email.
This extra information will help you separate them into different lists. Your new lists can be based on gender, age, location, and interests. This will help you understand your prospects more so that when creating campaigns, you’d tailor them based on their preferences.
Create An Email Marketing Calendar
After segmenting your list, the next step is to create an email marketing calendar. In this calendar, you will map out the days and dates you’ll send emails to your lists.
If you want to send out daily newsletters, you note them down. If you intend to send out an email weekly, you write down the exact day you’d be doing that.
You can also note down important dates like holidays, product launches, your prospects’ birthdays etc. these days would require special emails from you. Depending on your email software, you can schedule emails for such special days.
Create Your Campaigns
Now, this is the fun part. Once your segmented list is ready and you’ve prepared a calendar to enable you to know the dates and time to send out emails. The next thing is to create your campaigns.
You have to structure your campaigns according to the interests and needs of the prospects in your segmented list.
Unlike paid advertising, where you sell right away, here you build a relationship first. This is called lead nurturing.
So your campaign should contain lead nurturing emails first before sales emails.
In creating your campaigns, you should ensure to use:
- Clear and compelling subject lines
- The right tone in your messages
- A very appealing email design
- Clear and attractive images and infographics etc.
Once everything is set, go ahead and launch your campaign. You can schedule and automate the ones you don’t intend to send out immediately.
A/B Test Your Emails
It doesn’t end there. This is the time to study your campaigns and know if they meet your targets. If you feel anything isn’t going according to plans, run a test and optimize accordingly.
However, this depends on the results from your email metrics. If, for instance, your email open rate is below your expectations, it means you have to run an A/B test on your subject line and preheader texts.
The same applies to the results from other metrics like clickthrough rates, conversion rates etc.
Email Marketing Strategy Examples
Here are email marketing strategies that are guaranteed to bring you results when you do them right:
- You’d never go wrong with a well-crafted welcome email
- Make your emails engaging and interactive
- Ensure you send out personalized emails to your audience
- Always follow up. There is a possibility they didn’t see it the first time.
- Write educational emails
- Send abandoned cart emails at least three times.
- Reward your subscribers for carrying out instructions from your CTAs.
How to Create Email Marketing Strategy -Conclusion
A well-planned email marketing strategy will give your business returns in folds. Follow the guide in this article on how to create email marketing strategy, and you’d be sure to always generate quality leads, build good relationships with your leads and exceed your sales targets.