An email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketing team identifies and follows to achieve marketing goals with email campaigns. This plan of action gives the businesses a direct channel of communication with prospects and customers.
WHY DO I NEED A STRATEGY?
SUCCESS REQUIRES A PLAN
Having an email marketing strategy in place allows you to outline an email advertising process ahead of time. This allows other business team members to know what they need to do at each given step, ensuring synchronization of workflow while implementing the email campaigns.
With an email marketing strategy, you can plan when to send time-based promotions or non-promotional emails. Time-based promotions are emails containing time-sensitive messages where customers need to take action, for example, purchasing a discounted product or service, seasonal promotions, or booking an appointment for repeat services. For these promotions, you should consider a short three-part email series containing an announcement email (two weeks in advance), a reminder (1 week to the end of the promotion), and the last chance email (1 or 2 days before the promotion concludes.)
Non-promotional emails are less time-oriented and are more sales-driven. These are for establishing connections and building value with customers. Unlike promotional emails that tend to boost sales, non-promotional emails determine the interests of your customers. This helps create mailing list segmentation. In other words, you can follow up with more personalized messages that focus on nurturing and strengthening connections with prospects and customers.
FOCUS ON RESULTS
Email marketing strategies outline the goals your business intends to achieve. You need to have marketing objectives beforehand to have a sense of direction when implementing an email campaign. Other than that, email marketing strategies enables you to evaluate the effectiveness of each email marketing campaign. Understanding the goals and means to achieve them is vital to a positive return on investment.
AVOID MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
Let’s be honest for a minute. Do you really know all your missed opportunities? For example, one of the most effective ways to increase lead generation is abandoned form/cart follow-up emails. If a potential customer fills out a form or adds things to the cart on your website but doesn’t hit send or checkout. A simple reminder email can convert that potential customer into an actual customer for your business.
Establishing the best tactics based on your businesses missed opportunities can skyrocket sales and booked appointments.
HOW TO CREATE AN EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY
- Set email marketing goals
- Select appropriate email marketing tools
- Determine the target audience
- Identify list building tactics
- Separate your email list into segments
- Define your email types
- Create a schedule for sending emails
- Format the email content
- Optimize your emails
- Monitor email performance
1. Set Email Marketing Goals
Start with understanding the purpose of your emails. Are you trying to:
- Increase customer engagement
- Raise brand awareness and loyalty
- Maximize your return on investment
- Maintain connections with your customers
Based on your marketing journey, emails need to be designed in a specific way to optimize open and click rates.
2. Select Appropriate Email Marketing Tools
You can hit a nail with a wrench but isn’t a hammer going to be more effective? Same principle applies with email marketing tools. Selecting the right tool is the first step to setting up an email marketing strategy. You will need to find an Email Service Provider (ESP) with automation tools, among other features to avoid unnecessary manual steps.
With TIBINT Email Marketing, you can create, organize, and send emails with pre-built templates based on your email marketing goals. With a dedicated marketing professional, we set up welcome emails for onboarding new customers, abandoned cart emails to get customers to take action about the items left in the cart, promotional emails, newsletters, transactional emails, and so many more.
3. Determine The Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is crucial. If a specific business deals with roof repairs, their target audience will be home owners. Knowing this avoids targeting people who rent, live in an apartment, and so on. It makes sense to only target home owners who live in a house vs. people who rent an apartment, saving you money and bringing back a much stronger ROI.
4. Identify List Building Tactics
Cold emails are one way to target customers. A more effective way through subscriptions. With TIBINT Email Marketing, you can add subscription forms to your website and collect quality subscribers who are ready to connect with your business. You can embed subscription forms on high-traffic sections of your website to achieve maximum results.
5. Separate Your Email List Into Segments
Segmenting your lists is one of the most effective tactics which allows you to send targeted email campaigns based on location, gender, occupation, age, behavior, and so on. Ensure your emails are delivering appropriate and customized content that appeals to customers.
6. Define Your Email Types
There are many great variations and types of emails you can send based on actions taken. For example, if someone signs up to your mailing list, send them a welcome email. It s a great opportunity to explain the benefits of working with you. If existing clients add something to the cart and didn’t buy them, send them an abandoned cart email to close the sale.
7. Create A Schedule For Sending Emails
To ensure that subscribers are reading your promotional emails, you need to understand the best time for sending emails. It is necessary to experiment and determine the time when subscribers are most engaged. This can be done using A/B Testing but here is a great insight:
- 6 am – Most people form a habit to check their phone in bed before the day starts.
- 10 am – People also check their emails at the beginning of the workday.
- 2 pm – People have lunch or a coffee break.
- 8 pm to Midnight – People are usually free and have a habit of reading emails before going to sleep
8. Format The Email Content
For email marketing to be a success, content in promotional emails should be perfect. You should choose formats, fonts, and text sizes depending on the type of emails that they are creating. With TIBINT Email Marketing, you can use a drag-and-drop editor to create beautiful email templates that are customized to match your brand.
9. Optimize Your Emails
With almost 84% of users reading emails on their mobile devices, you emails need to work with a smaller screen. Some of the best ways for email content to be mobile ready includes:
- Creating shorter subject lines.
- Limiting emails to a width of 600px.
- Using single column templates.
- Displaying smaller images.
- Having direct call to action’s.
- Testing on multiple mobile devices.
- Avoiding menu bars.
- Using a larger font size such as 13 to 14 pixels.
10. Monitor Email Performance
Being able to clearly see what’s working and what’s not, allows you to optimize and adjust in the correct direction. Modifying your email strategy based on reports and feedback is the last step for developing a successful email marketing strategy. TIBINT Email Marketing provides you with a set of reports to effectively optimize campaigns. You can track email open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, email deliveries, bounced emails, and more.
TIBINT EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is an advertising strategy that delivers a huge impact. Email marketing is the use of email to promote products and services. It can be much more than that too. You can use email to build relationships with potential and current customers. This strategy allows customers to be in the loop with what’s going on and you can customize messages accordingly.
This method has shown to work. For every dollar you spend on email marketing your average return is 42$. Emails with personalized content generate a 50% higher chance to be read. If your company adds media to the email the click rate skyrockets 300%.
When it comes to the services you provide you’re the expert. When it comes to marketing your company with digital media, that’s where TIBINT comes in! Email marketing does a great job of enhancing other campaigns that can be running such as Social Media, and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads.
