An email marketing strategy is like a compass that guides marketers in effectively reaching their desired audience. If well-executed, you can maintain relationships with existing customers, build new relationships, and achieve your campaign goals – affordably with this marketing channel.
In this guide, we concentrate on how to create an email marketing strategy that drives revenue and which metrics you should concentrate on.
What is an email marketing strategy?
An email marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan or approach that businesses use to leverage the power of email communication for marketing purposes. It involves creating and implementing a series of tactics and techniques to effectively reach and engage a target audience.
Benefits of creating an email marketing strategy
Creating an effective email marketing strategy offers the best results for businesses and organizations. Here are some key advantages:
1. Targeted communication
An email marketing strategy allows you to segment your audience and send tailored messages based on their interests, behavior, or demographics. This leads to more relevant and effective communication.
2. Cost optimization
Compared to traditional marketing channels, email marketing is relatively inexpensive. With a solid strategy, you can achieve high returns on investment (ROI) with minimal costs.
3. Increased engagement
By delivering personalized and valuable content, you can increase engagement rates. Emails can be designed to encourage readers to take specific actions, such as clicking through to your website or making a purchase.
4. Measurable results
Email marketing provides detailed analytics and metrics. You can track open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more, allowing you to measure the success of your campaigns and adjust strategies at the right time.
You, as an email marketer, can leverage these benefits to organize successful email marketing campaigns and drive growth.
How to create an effective email marketing strategy?
A smart and fruitful email marketing strategy focuses on:
- Defining the goals and objectives of your campaigns.
- Targeting audiences for your effective email marketing campaigns.
- Implementing a SWOT analysis of your past email campaigns.
- Identifying the types of emails and the email cadence.
- Leveraging automation for better behavioral targeting and customer segmentation.
What does a good email marketing strategy look like?
A good email marketing strategy covers most of the steps shared above and all of these steps that are relevant to their business model. As every business owner has a different set of offerings, services, and target audiences, his email marketing needs are also different. Hence, every business has different goals, targets, and deliverables in its strategy.
However, there are some key elements of every right email marketing strategy, as shown in the image above.
A good email marketing strategy:
Helps you diversify your messaging for a 360-degree reach with better brand awareness.
Offers list monetization.
Increases email ROI.
Makes your campaigns agile, dynamic, and appealing to the audience.
Allows you to leverage email marketing automation.
Keeps email optimization and sending frequency in mind.
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Optimize the right email metrics for higher ROI
15 Brilliant Email Marketing Strategies For Winning Campaign
Here are the 15 key email marketing strategies with expert advice from fellow marketers to create an email campaign that gets you revenue whether you are using it for enterprise, small business, or online stores.
1. Understand your ideal customer profile
One effective approach is to engage with your existing customers through various means such as email communication, conducting Zoom interviews, or distributing surveys. By doing so, you can gain a deeper understanding of the motivations of your ICP(Ideal Customer Profile) behind purchasing your product and customer loyalty.
With Mailmodo, you can create and send interactive market research surveys inside emails to collect valuable information about them. Read how you can get ~2X more revenue using market research forms inside AMP emails.
What stood out for us with Mailmodo is that we could drive the communication to the candidate. They didn’t have to leave the comfort of their email to fill out a survey or schedule an interview.
- Aashish Mittal, Co-Founder and CTO, Interviewvector
2. Know your campaign goals
This stage can be divided into two steps:
1. What and Why: Aims and Objectives
During this stage, you thoroughly explore your campaign’s ultimate goal because targeted emails convert better, build credibility, and boost your sales.
Some of the common email marketing best practices or objectives include:
Sharing information about a newly launched product.
Getting your customers to sign up for your services.
Getting your customers to buy your product or renew their subscriptions.
Informing your customers about a new feature or service.
2. How: How to implement STP (Segment, Target, and Position)?
The next part is to identify and establish the ground rules for measuring the progress and success of your email marketing campaign. To ensure that your CTAs get clicks and good responses, you must:
Segment your customers and target audiences based on various parameters, such as behavior, preferences, purchase capacities, and previous data, for better results.
Target your campaigns for each customer segment and offer them personalized offers, information, and deliverables.
Position your campaigns to stay aligned with your email marketing goals.
Set specific metrics to measure the progress and success of your email campaigns.
3. Optimize your email campaigns by segmentation
Sending the email campaign to your entire list will hurt your email strategy and marketing efforts. Not everyone will like your email and might unsubscribe or mark it as spam. It will also hurt your reputation and business revenue in digital marketing efforts.
Email segmentation helps you send highly targeted and relevant messages to each contact segment, ensuring a personalized experience for your audience.
Segment your email list by:
Demographics
Previous campaign data
Preferences and interests
Purchase history
Behavior and engagement
Lifecycle stage
Geographic location
Job role
Email engagement history
4. Personalize your emails
Personalization in emails is more than mentioning email subscribers’ names in the subject lines and the body.
Personalizing helps in:
Improving relationship with the audience
Standing apart from other competitors
Increasing email engagement
Use the existing data about your subscribers to segment them based on various parameters and send them targeted emails they love.
Email marketing platforms like Mailmodo help create dynamic emails with personalized subject lines, email content, and images based on the user segment.
So in short email personalization is a sure way to get the most out of your email marketing tactics.
5. Always deliver value
As every marketer says "content is king". And investing in content marketing is worth every penny. Creating valuable and relevant content is hard but possible.
After segmenting your contact list based on their preferences, you might now know their wants, needs, and characteristics. Just make sure to share content that resonates with the right people and solves their problems.
Never shy away from asking for feedback from your new subscribers or loyal customers. It is always a good idea to send out an email survey to find out what works and what does not.
Provide value with every email. We include sample marketing insights from our email newsletter even in our subscription confirmation message. It'll increase brand affinity, open rates, conversion rates, and decrease unsubscribe rates.
- Neal O'Grady, Co-Founder, Demand Curve
6. Nail your subject lines
Email subject lines help improve your email open rate. Without improving your open rate, it is hard to see any ROI for your efforts. Personalized email subject lines are a great way to make people want to open your emails.
Here are some best email marketing tips to improve your subject lines:
Keep your subject lines to less than 90 characters.
Use CTA-based subject lines.
Test your email subject lines.
💡 Pro-tip: Mailmodo lets you A/B test your email subject lines to find what works and improve it on further campaigns.
We recently did a subject line testing for our ebook, and here is what one of our survey participants shared about why he opened a specific type of subject line.
I believe it was the call-to-action and the question mark combo. I wanted to click on the email to get more information and see what I could do.
- David Sides, Director of Outreach, Second Eclipse
7. Provide a clear call to action
A clear and actionable CTA will encourage your subscribers to take the action you want from your email campaign and improve user experience.
It could be anything from product demo CTA, ebook download CTA, to product purchase CTA.
Few email CTA strategies for creating a better email CTA:
Use proper color contrast to make it accessible.
Use actionable words in your CTA.
Create a sense of urgency.
8. Build an email design system
An email design system serves as a framework that includes design guidelines, modules/blocks, and templates. It empowers brands to create consistent emails by adhering to predefined rules and instructions.
Developing your unique email design system enables you to establish guidelines for your email templates, ensuring a cohesive appearance throughout. This fosters a trustworthy brand image.
By incorporating your brand's colors and fonts, you reinforce your brand identity and enhance brand recall. This, in turn, helps your audience remember your brand when they encounter it in various contexts.
Check out Mailmodo's email design system playbook to get inspired from successful email design systems across different industries and verticals and build one for your brand.
9. Gamify your emails
Using gamified email experiences can significantly increase revenue and drive high levels of engagement. Here are six interactive widgets that you can incorporate to gamify your emails:
Spin the wheel
Word games embedded in emails
Quizzes
Calculators
Scratch cards
Scavenger hunts
Let's check out a case study on BluSmart's goal to boost quiz participation through emails. They used AMP quizzes in their email campaigns, resulting in an impressive 35% submission rate, all without requiring recipients to leave their inboxes.
The submission rate on the mail was surprisingly higher than we expected. The customers interacted with the email actively and got to learn insights about BluSmart through the questions asked.
- Shobhit Mehrotra, Growth Marketing, BluSmart
10. Re-engage inactive contacts
First, you must segment your audience based on campaign activity or contact rating to identify inactive subscribers. Here are effective re-engagement tactics for attracting this segment of inactive subscribers:
- Automate re-engagement email series
Set up a series of re-engagement email series to be sent automatically over a period of time. You can set whatever delay time you prefer for the emails you send out. Additionally, you can implement post-send actions such as unsubscribing individuals or moving them to different groups after they complete the series. There are a few automation platforms like SureTriggers and Zapier that can easily help you set up email automation with ease.
- Add polls and surveys inside emails
Encourage subscribers to participate in a poll or survey and offer them a complimentary gift or promo code upon completion. By asking relevant questions, the poll results can provide insights into the interests of your inactive subscribers. You can use this information to target them with tailored campaigns and compelling calls to action.
- Give tailored product recommendations
Integrate your Shopify store with Mailmodo to gather data on your contacts' purchasing behavior. Using this data, Mailmodo can generate personalized product recommendations for each contact. You can then send captivating campaigns that automatically suggest products aligned with their preferences, increasing the likelihood of re-engagement.
11. Provide exclusive discounts and offers
Discount offer emails are an effective way to promote your business, increase sales, engage potential customers, and generate more revenue. The best part of these emails is that they are particularly valuable for re-engaging dormant or inactive users by presenting them with an irresistible offer they can't resist.
12. Host a contest with freebies
Contest invitation emails are an effective promotional tool to generate excitement and curiosity among your subscribers. A thoughtfully crafted contest invitation email with a freebie for contest winners can significantly increase your attendance rate.
13. Automate to send timely messages
Automating email campaigns helps you send triggered and targeted emails to customers based on their behavior, your website action, or the customer journey stage.
Automated campaigns are the best way to send transactional emails like cart recovery emails, password reset emails, invoice emails, etc. This functionality proves invaluable, particularly for sending invoice emails. While customized invoice templates are available for this purpose, integrating them into automated emails improves professionalism. Also, it meets the unique needs of your audience more effectively.
Understanding your audience is important. Once you know where they are in their customer journey, and what they are looking for, you can craft a better email marketing strategy. With personalization and automation, you can time it better.
-Mithun Jhawar, Associate Director of Marketing, SplashLearn
With Mailmodo’s email automation platform, you can use a visual customer journey builder to create automated emails with conditional logic and a wide range of triggers.
14. Test different variations of email
A/B testing allows you to test your email campaigns before you send them to the target audience and gauge the effectiveness of your campaign. You send one version of an email to one set of specific audiences and the other one to another.
The purpose is to find what works better and double down on it to get better ROI from your email campaigns.
15. Monitor and analyze email metrics
By tracking email marketing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates, you gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Open rates provide an indication of how engaging your subject lines and preheader texts are, while click-through rates reveal the level of interest in your email content and call-to-action.
Conversion rates help measure the ultimate goal of your campaign, whether it's making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a service.
Keeping an eye on unsubscribe rates allows you to identify potential issues or content mismatches that may be driving subscribers away.
A high engagement rate indicates that your subscribers find your content valuable and relevant, while a low rate suggests room for improvement in terms of personalization and targeting.
It's equally important to assess email deliverability, which measures the percentage of emails successfully reaching your subscribers' inboxes.
Regularly checking subscriber list hygiene, which involves removing inactive or disengaged subscribers and verifying existing email addresses or new customers' emails, helps maintain a healthy and engaged audience.
Monitoring your sender reputation, which is influenced by factors like spam complaints and bounce rates, ensures that your emails avoid being flagged as spam.
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Wrap up
Email marketing continues to be a better medium to communicate with your customers. You can get the most out of every campaign by developing a robust and fool-proof strategy driven by data and actionable insights.
As it is impossible manually, investing in a smart, intuitive, and versatile email service provider like Mailmodo can be a good decision for marketers and business owners.
