A Complete Guide To Organizing An Effective Email Marketing Strategy

Managing email marketing is not an easy task, especially when you’ve got several email strategies ongoing at the same time.

Undeniably, email marketing is of great value. So it isn’t startling that multiple departments in your organization want to leverage this opportunity. This leaves you with lots of moving parts to consider and manage and numerous stakeholders to please. Moreover, with this, your chances of accidentally sending multiple emails to the same person in one day also increase. But the consequences of this are never pleasant.

So the first and foremost important thing is to have a strategy for successful email marketing. A plan that effectively defines your goals and lays out the roadmap to accomplish them. The one which can lead the way for your team towards success.

It is exactly what we will be discussing in detail in this blog.

Make Your Email Marketing Strategy In These 9 Steps

Making an effective email marketing strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be twisted. With these 9 steps, you’ll be able to plot your work and work your plot in less than no time.

1. Pick out your tools

The first step to building your strategy is finding the right tools. There are plenty of paid tools available online, and some of these are very powerful, which can help you organize and send your emails without any delay.

Find the right email marketing tool that suits your team and can help you achieve your goals. Make a list of the tools, compare them, and see which one works out the best for you.

However, you wouldn’t just want to proceed with an email marketing tool. Adding a marketing automation tool to your list can be of great help. This tool will help you to follow up with your customers easily and send your subscribers the right email at the right time, depending upon how they’re interacting with your site. Different tools have different features. It is worth spending some time to figure out which tool will serve you the best.

2. Know your target audience

Next, you need to focus on creating your email subscribers list, and to make this list you need to know your target audience first.

As someone who has just got onto this, your target audience will be the ideal customers you want to entice to your product/service via your marketing efforts.

To find your target audience, you need to find answers to these questions:

• Your best customers currently
• The qualities they all have in common
• Problems they are experiencing that made them search for a solution (like your product or service)
• The reason why they bought your product/service
• What are you providing to your customers that your competitors aren’t?

With these, you can prepare your target audience demographics.

3. Brainstorm tricks to inspire your target audience to join your email list

Once you know your target audience, you can start brainstorming tricks to attract and encourage them to sign up for your email list. You can do this by:

• Giving something valuable in return – one of the best ways to convince them to join your subscriber list is by giving them something useful in return, such as a free eBook.
• Ask directly – another method is to ask your audience directly to sign up by explaining to them why they should. Personalizing it will appeal to them more.
• Using your website’s header and footer – you can place your sign up button on the header and footer of your website. This way, you’ll be able to meet them halfway and remind them that they can get more information about your products or services by joining your email subscriber list.

Once you have the idea about how to get your audience to join your email list, you should move forward to the segment. Now you can either bombard your entire list with your emails, hoping that it would align with someone and persuade them to convert. Or you can segment your email list and make sure that you serve the right email to the right customers at the right time and thus, helping them to move through your marketing funnel.

Moreover, segmenting your email list can have a positive impact. They tend to increase your open rates, click rates, and decrease the unsubscribe rates. Segmenting your email list can be done on the basis of:

• Business size
• Location
• Activity on your website
• How long have they been on your email list

To segment your list using accurate data, you need to collect this information when they first subscribe to your list.

4. Decide the types of emails you’ll send

There are plenty of different types of emails that you can send to your list. But for the starters, you can begin with one and then change it with time or segments in your email list. Some most common types of emails are:

• Newsletter – one of the most popular email formats. Newsletters come to your subscriber’s inbox at the same time at recurring intervals. These are a great way to show your subscribers a variety of content and information that they may have missed in case they have not visited your site recently. However, a good newsletter should contain 90% informative content and only 10% promotional content. It should also have a single theme or concept.
• Automated drip email – these emails are sent to your subscribers based on their activities on your website or content, which is sent on schedule to help your prospects move further down your marketing funnel. When your subscriber takes action on your site, an email is swiftly dropped in their inbox to encourage them to convert. E.g., if a subscriber has added several products from your website to their cart but didn’t proceed with the purchase, an automated drip email will gently remind them to go back and learn more about these products.
• Seasonal/Promotional emails – every holiday season, emails are dropped in our inboxes throughout the year. They contain all the new seasonal collections and great deals. These are clocked emails that stimulate your customers to check out these products and make a purchase.

Once you know the type of emails you want to send, note them down.

5. Determine your email frequency

You’re sending emails every day, and your list is expanding. But your subscribers are receiving multiple emails in one day. So how are you going to ensure that your emails get opened and read?

Sending your emails during the most strategic times and days can be beneficial.

Now the best time to send these emails varies from business to business. Based on your target demographic, find out what times your audience is most engaged. But not just the time, you need to find out the best days too. Start experimenting by sending emails at different times on different days of the week. You’ll be able to identify when your audience is most attentive to your emails and write it down as the best time and day to send it.

6. Establish goals for your emails

Next, you need to establish goals for your email marketing strategy because it will give a purpose to every email you send out. Before laying the roadmap, you need to know where you are heading to. Establishing these goals will help you to demonstrate to your boss or stakeholders that your email marketing strategy is having the right impact on the overall profit.

To set some robust goals, you need to make sure they adhere to the S.M.A.R.T. rule, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic, and Timely.

Each goal you set should be specific to your campaign and measurable so that you can track the results. They should be aspirational but not irrelevant or impossible to reach with your campaign. This means they should be realistic. You must also determine some time limit to achieve those goals that will help you track your progress and motivate your team to work harder.

For instance, your goals can be:

• To increase the click-through rates
• Increase your return on investment (ROI)
• Increase your email opening rates
• Expand your email subscribers list

Once you have decided your goals, note them down.

7. Specify how you will craft your content

You have got everything sorted – your email type, target audience, tools, goals, everything. Now it’s time to specify your email copy that will encourage your subscribers to take action. You can use these factors to make sure your copywriter can create an excellent copy to help you stand out.

• Writing style – you can write emails in any style or format. But depending on the type of email you are making; you can have bigger blocks of texts or various links that subscribers can visit for additional information.
• Mobile-friendly emails – you need to ensure that the emails are optimized for viewing on different devices. More than half of the emails are read on phones, which means your email should be able to open easily on them.
• Personalizing your email content – creating a personalized email for your subscribers is a great way to make a compelling email copy. And this does not mean just adding their names in the beginning. You can include their name in your subject line, address them in your email directly or add their last purchase details or products they have looked at recently.
• Writing an appealing subject line – try out multiple subject lines and, as mentioned above, personalize them. If you’re unable to choose one, some amazing tools in the market can help you in picking one.

8. Carry out A/B tests

This is a crucial part of your email marketing strategy. So let’s talk about what it is.

 A/B tests are conducted in a series allowing the team to interchange various parts of their email to find out what types of copy works best with their audience. Here are the different components you can A/B test:

• Subject lines
• CTAs
• Images
• Testimonials
• Headlines
• Special offers

Decide what parts of your email you’ll be A/B testing and note them down.

9. Record your results and adjust accordingly

The last step in your email marketing strategy will be to record your results and make adjustments based on the feedback you have collected.

These are some aspects that you can look for and record results on:

• Email engagement – number of emails that were opened vs. the number of emails sent
• Emails delivered – number of emails that were delivered from your send list
• Unsubscribers – number of people that unsubscribed from your email list
• New subscribers – number of new subscribers you have obtained
• Click-through rates – number of people that clicked on the links in your email
• A/B test results – the version of your A/B test that won
• ROI – revenue your email generated compared to the revenue you spent
• The time they spent with the email open – the time your subscribers spent looking at your email
• Email bounces – number of emails that reached your subscribers’ inbox but got bounced back unopened

With this, you have your complete email marketing strategy in place. Now its time to execute it. Let us know how this email marketing strategy works out for you via the comments below.