We all know the benefits of including Email Marketing in our marketing plan. A strategy for your Email Marketing is vital as it is the backbone to your email messaging. It creates a clear pathway on how you go about achieving your email marketing goals and objectives. Having this plan of action in place from the beginning will ensure that your communication and every message you send has purpose – and if a message doesn’t fit that strategy then it shouldn’t get sent!
Steps to create your Email Marketing Strategy:
- Define Your Audience:
You need to have a clear understanding of who your audience is. You can only achieve your own goals through fulfilling what they want from you. As soon as a subscriber gets added to your database, you need to start trying to collect as much information about them. This can be done through your sign-up form, engagements through your website, social media, and past newsletters etc. This will allow you to ensure that you send the right message to the right group of people. - Looking at your Sign-up Sources:
Knowing the source, or where your subscribers were when they signed up for your list can be an important piece of information that will help guide you on where you need to focus your marketing efforts as well as how to communicate with them. If you generated a lot of subscribers via a sign-up form that you shared on social media, then you might want to create a segment with those subscribers and target them with specific information. - Segment and Group:
By defining your audience, you will then be able to create segments and groups within your overall audience. It’s important to note that you should seldomly be sending an email to your ENTIRE database. By sending more relevant campaigns to smaller segments of your overall audience, you can expect better results, higher open rate and higher click-through. There are endless options of how you can segment your audience! Some examples include segmenting by demographics; based on their buying behaviour; or based on their past email activity. - Decide what to write:
You need to ensure that you are always sending emails with a specific purpose or goal in mind – and if you don’t know what that goal is, then you can’t expect your reader to know either. Always remember why your subscribers signed up in the first place, because if you aren’t fulfilling that promise made from your initial ‘Welcome Email’, then you can be sure that they will be unsubscribing very soon! Remember to always keep your content useful and relevant to that specific segment that you are talking to. (For content ideas, click here >>) You also want to spend some time crafting the perfect Subject Line! If your subject line is not convincing your reader why they would want to read your email, then you could face a low Open rate. Keep your subject lines short, straightforward and be creative! - Establish your sending frequency:
This will depend on your audience and what expectation you create with them upfront. Sending too many emails in a month could cause frustration and cause them to unsubscribe or send your emails straight to the trash; but sending too seldom could cause your audience to forget why they subscribed in the first place. - Create a calendar:
Creating a content calendar will help you stay on top of the month and lay out exactly what content, be it email newsletters, blog posts or social media posts, goes out on what days. This will ensure that every piece of communication that comes from you is consistent throughout the month – subscribers very seldomly read JUST your email newsletters and will most probably be reading other pieces of content that you are posting that month. - Design your emails:
Be sure to keep your design straightforward as you want the focus to be on the copy of the email. Keep font size around 14px and use headings and bullet points so that it’s easy to read. Use the concept of AIDA when laying out your elements and copy. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action and is presented in an inverted triangle. The aim is to direct your reader’s attention down your email to then finally land on a desired action and goal of the email.
You want to grab your reader’s Attention and encourage them to read further. Next you want hold their attention by creating Interest. This is done by making your email personal and relevant to the reader. The third step is to show value and explain how your product/ service will help solve their problem (for example). By showing value, you create Desire. Lastly, your reader needs to know what Action you want them to take at the end of your email. Is it to download an ebook? Register for an event? Read your latest blog? Keep your language clear and provide a strong Call to Action. - Test your campaigns:
Be sure to test what your email will look like on different devices – especially if your analytics show that a lot of your subscribers view your emails via their mobile devices. You also want to consider A/B testing your campaign in order to determine the best Subject line, time of day to send the email, ‘From name and email’ variation, as well as overall email layout. - Consider automation:
Once your emails have been created and are ready to send, you might also want to consider adding automation to your campaign. Email campaign automation is when you set up a series of emails to send based on a specific trigger, and then they will automatically get sent once your subscriber sets off that trigger. Examples of triggers could include sending a ‘Welcome Email’ when someone first subscribes to your database, to sending a ‘Reminder Email’ when a subscriber abandons their cart on your e-commerce website. - Measure your performance:
Once your emails have been sent, you need to start looking at your analytics and send results so that you can refine your strategy and fix anything that may not be working. Looking at your Open rate and clicks is the most obvious place to start (Low open rate? You may want to revise your subject line and the time of day that you send your email); but then also looking at the website traffic and overall conversion rate will help you to see what is and isn’t working.
An Email Marketing Strategy will ensure that you are always sending the right message to the right people at the right time. This will help ensure that your email campaigns are successful and have a high Return on Investment.
Simon Sinek said that “People don’t buy what you do, but why you do it“, so always ensure that your overall Strategy speaks to your ‘why’, is relevant and valuable to your subscribers and you will see a good Return on Investment.
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