Email is the best way to connect with your potential customers. An effective email marketing strategy aims to provide valuable content to the user and increase revenue for the business. Email marketing was started by Gary Thuerk, promoting DEC machines to 400 users resulting in $13 million worth of sales in 1978. Since then, marketers have been using email marketing in their direct marketing approach. As per the Direct & Marketing Association (UK), the ROI is $35 for every $1 spent on email marketing, which means 35X returns. To achieve this result and beat the competitors, it is necessary to have a highly reliable successful email marketing strategy.
A long-term strategy involves more than just sending emails. It must have a SMART (scalable, measurable, attainable, reliable, and targetable) goal. And hence, here are five steps to building a valuable email marketing strategy that fits any industry and size.
- Define the goal of the Email Marketing Campaign
- Target the right audience using customer segmentation
- Choose a relevant type for Marketing Emails
- Create a suitable Email Outline
- Know when to stop
Let’s explore our email marketing strategy step by step.
SMART Goal for SMART Email Marketing Strategy –
Defining the goal of email marketing is the fundamental part of an effective email marketing strategy. It helps give direction & tone to the campaign and avoids confusion while decision-making. Here are seven common objectives that organizations prefer in their email marketing.
- Revenue Generation – The ultimate goal is to generate revenue from marketing. But, there can be a possibility that the company wants to open a new channel (email marketing) to increase revenue, which means they have recently opted for email marketing. An example of a revenue generation goal is, targeting 10 million dollars of revenue through email marketing this year.
- Brand awareness – The magnitude to which customers can identify or recall a brand under various circumstances is brand awareness. For example, an iPhone advertisement is easily identifiable as an Apple product. Brand awareness is crucial for customer retention. All new and old companies have to spread their brand awareness constantly.
- New Leads – Businesses need a constant cash inflow to survive in the market. Here, new leads are the surviving factor. According to the research by Ascend2, email marketing is the most effective technique used for new lead generation. Having a lead generation goal in email marketing can definitely improvise the quality of leads.
- Building relationships & trust – When a company and a customer build trust and a relationship, customer loyalty grows. It significantly improves customer retention and helps in retargeting & upselling.
- Engagement – In a world of digitization, customer engagement is necessary. Understanding the customer preferences and providing a personalized experience are aided by customer engagement. An engagement plan in your email marketing strategy can significantly improve sales and word-of-mouth marketing.
- Customer service – The term customer service refers to the assistance and guidance provided to people who are willing to buy the product or have already bought it. Email is one of the best sources of answering customer queries. It is more personalized and interactive.
- Lead nurture – The process of understanding the customer’s problem and providing relevant solutions, leading towards sale, is known as lead nurturing. With the help of customer segmentation and behavioral marketing, lead nurturing has become very effective. According to Marketo, the companies that implement lead-nurturing generate 50% more revenue at a 33% lower cost. It helps in boosting the overall revenue performance of the company.
Firms can have multiple goals in the marketing strategy, which is absolutely fine. Also, there is a low probability that some organizations might have other objectives for email marketing. Once the aims are final, move to the second step, targeting the right audience.
Target the right audience using customer segmentation –
The right audience is the pivot of a successful email marketing strategy. Use Customer segmentation to target the audience. It will save cost, time & effort. If the firm doesn’t have an audience or email list, here are a few ways to build an email list.
- Reviews and guides download via emails
- Consultancy, information, or tutorials
- E-books
- Signup bonuses
- Discounts & Offers
- Free-trials
- Blogs
- Freebies
- Newsletters
- Quizzes
Organizations can use one or multiple of these techniques for collecting customer emails. Once customers sign up for your email notification, start building a personalized conversation and gain customer faith. It is possible with a relevant type of marketing email.
Choose a relevant type for Marketing Emails –
A marketing email plays a crucial role in delivering the email in an accurate context. The email recipient must understand the context of the email just by looking at it. For example, a discount offer email should clearly reflect the amount, percentage, or surprise coupon. It is a great way to improve customer experience by making it easy and readable. There are six types of marketing emails businesses use as per their goal.
- Newsletters – An email periodically sent that gives a summarized report of the new updates that have occurred recently are newsletters. Usually, the period is once per week or month. Businesses can send a summary of relevant blogs published, active incentives on various products, recent customer testimonials, industry-related news updates, et cetera. Newsletters are the marketing emails that build brand awareness and build customer relationships & trust. Businesses with the same goals can apply it in the email marketing approach.
- Solution Based – A customer journey in which businesses educate the audience about the solution of a problem by sending personalized emails. The goal here is to prepare the customer for purchasing a product. Solution-based emails aim to nurture leads, generate revenue, and improve customer service. Lead nurturing is highly personalized, and it works best with customer segmentation.
- Informative – The goal of sending information email is to spread brand awareness and generate new leads. The information can be about the business products or industry-relevant information that build curiosity among the audience. For example, sending a blog’s highlighting in the email and encouraging the audience to read the entire blog on the website.
- Transactional Email – Those emails that remind customers of their decisions are transactional. A signup email, product confirmation, appointment reminder, and welcome emails are some examples of transactional emails. The objective of a transactional email is engagement, brand retention, and building faith & relationship. These emails are traditional in every successful email marketing strategy.
- Announcement emails – The difference between a newsletter and an announcement email is the time of sending. Newsletters are periodic, whereas announcement emails are instant. As soon as the event takes place, announcement emails are sent to the audience. There can be multiple purposes, like revenue generation, brand awareness, and new leads. Announcement emails are also traditional in every email marketing strategy.
- Product update – As the name suggests, emails are specifically relevant to new product updates used for email marketing. The core agenda behind these emails is revenue generation and new leads. Also, the business can upsell using product update emails.
- Event or Promotional emails – All the offers and discounts-related emails fall under this category. As per Data & Marketing Association report, 75% of businesses use emails for offers and discount-related messages. And 31% have a primary objective of making sales or revenue while sending emails.
The goal, the target, and the suitable marketing email type are clear for building a successful email marketing strategy. Now, the fourth step is to create an email outline.
Create a suitable Email Outline
The email outline consists of all the elements from the subject to the footer in the email. Each type of email has its own email outline, and it is also crucial to make it consistent. All emails, whether advertisement or informative, must reflect the brand consistently. That is why creating an email outline is significant. Two essential factors will keep the business emails consistent and simple.
- Email CopyWriting – From writing a catchy subject line that opens the email to achieving the goal of the business, everything depends on email copywriting. This is where the customer would actually read the email and take action accordingly. Write an optimized email that is relevant and delivers value to the customer. Try to be more human and make it conversational. Add a call-to-action to guide the customer on what they do next.
- Email Design – The second important factor of an email outline is the design of the email. The design should be neat and clean. Avoid using fancy & contrasted email templates. Most of all, it should support your copywriting and increase readability. All emails must follow a consistent design. A customer should be able to look at an email and recall the brand instantly. According to the Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report, 83% of people regularly read emails on their smartphones. Hence, it is essential to have a mobile-responsive email design for email marketing.
Creating an email outline is about making the audience recall the brand. For example, customers can comfortably identify Amazon emails on receiving an order update via mail.
Know when to stop
The last step that every business should follow is knowing when to stop emailing a client. When a person unsubscribes for future emails or doesn’t show any interest, organizations must accept it and stop emailing them. Chasing a client isn’t a healthy approach. Instead, try building relationships with clients through email marketing campaigns.
It was a step-by-step guide to building a successful email marketing strategy. Businesses can leverage these steps and improvise their existing tactics. Also, startups can build their email marketing plan from scratch and soon increase the customer base and revenue.