Creating an Email Marketing Strategy Plan It Right to Get the Best Results

Email is one of the most accessible channels between you and your customers. It remains one of the most critical elements in supporting various goals in B2C and B2B marketing, brand communications, content marketing, and customer service. It can maintain people’s brand awareness, help your business engage with its customers, generate website traffic, nurture your leads, and convert these leads into customers.

However, if you have used email marketing before, you have probably found out there is more to email marketing. Effective use of email marketing requires you to set a strategy that determines what you want to achieve from it and how you plan to go about pursuing this objective. This is where an email marketing strategy plan can help you and, with this short article, you can get started creating one for your business.

What is an Email Marketing Strategy and Why Do You Need One?

An email marketing strategy is a long-term plan that defines your business’s goals related to its email campaigns and provides the procedures to be followed by your team to achieve said goals. It defines the priorities, audience, tactics, email types, messaging, and schedule for your email marketing campaigns. It also specifies the tools used for your email campaigns and the metrics by which your campaigns are evaluated.

It lays out the entire process for your email campaigns

This gives everyone involved a clear picture of what they need to accomplish and when they need to get it done.

It identifies opportunities for promotional emails ahead of time

Promotional emails are often time-sensitive. Discounts, free trials, events, and other limited-time offers get better results when you promote them through email ahead of time. The only way to do this effectively is by planning and testing audience response a few months before the actual event.

It makes it easier to nurture and strengthen your relationship with your leads and customers

Email marketing tools let you sort through your mailing list and categorize subscribers according to their level of interest in your email content. With a strategy in place, you can create campaigns specific to their level of interest in your email content and their status as a lead or customer.

It helps you determine the best tactics for your email campaigns

Creating a strategy involves finding out the most efficient methods to reach your objectives. An email marketing strategy is not any different. It uses data from past email campaigns and tests new ones to ensure future campaigns get the best response from the mailing list.

It is crucial for improving your email campaigns

An email strategy plans what you aim to achieve from your email campaigns. These goals specify which performance metrics are used to measure its results. Since you can measure the results of your campaign, you can evaluate how effective your plans were and can take action on how to improve it in the future or how to replicate its results in other areas of your business.

How to Create Your Email Marketing Strategy Template

1. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/email-marketing/

2.https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-strategy/

3. https://calendarhero.com/blog/ultimate-guide-on-the-customer-journey-in-email-marketing#:~:text=The%20Purchase,-As%20a%20business&text=However%2C%20in%20the%20world%20of,lasting%20impression%20on%20the%20buyer.

1. Define your purpose for using email marketing

Identifying the reason behind your use of email marketing is the first step in creating an email marketing strategy. Here are the most common objectives or results businesses want to get from email marketing strategies:

Keep your brand on top of your audience’s minds

Keeping your brand on top of people’s minds can increase the chances of them choosing you over your competitors when they are ready to buy or hire you for the solutions you offer. The goal here is for your subscribers to hear more from you than competing brands so they will rely on you for information. Examples include newsletters, email articles, informative content promotion, and other educational content relevant to their interests.

Maintaining top-of-the-mind awareness goes beyond making the initial sale. It also helps you maintain customer awareness and increases the chances of them buying from you again. You can use email-exclusive promotions and offers to keep them coming back to you for your product or service.

Generate traffic for your website

Promoting your website’s content is one of the oldest ways to use email marketing. You are not only providing value to your subscribers through relevant content but it also leads traffic to your new page and increases the chances of people sharing it with their contacts. This helps your content get a good search ranking even if it is only a new page. You can also promote your older content in this way and help it regain relevance for its targeted keywords.

Increase sales for your products or services

Not everyone will buy at the first chance of encountering your brand. Email marketing can help you keep in contact with them and promote your products or services to them in the future. In this way, you maintain contact with those who are still thinking about it and maximize your opportunities to make a sale.

You can also use email marketing to take advantage of any upsell or cross-sell opportunities you might have with your existing customers. Since they already bought from you, they are more receptive to products or services that may enhance the experience of their initial purchase.

Moreover, email marketing tools can identify those who have a high interest in your offer. You can send conversion-focused email to them that guides them toward making a buying decision. This approach is crucial if you are selling high-ticket items since it takes longer for potential customers to make a purchase. This helps you avoid alienating those who are casual recipients and newer subscribers while converting qualified leads as soon as they are ready.

Reduce the incidence of abandoned carts

If you are in eCommerce, an email marketing strategy is an essential part of your general marketing mix. It can send reminders to your shoppers about any items they have left in their digital shopping carts. You can use a simple email to remind them of their items or you can offer a limited-time discount to increase the chances of them finishing the purchase for the items they have in their carts.

Get to know your audience

You can gain a better understanding of your audience by sending surveys to your email subscribers. Some examples include welcome surveys, pre-launch surveys, post-purchase questionnaires, customer satisfaction surveys, email footer surveys, content feedback surveys, and data surveys. Whatever you use, it can give you an accurate image of your audience that you can use to improve various areas of your marketing and business.

Based on the goals above, you will have to assign a variety of metrics that can help you measure how well you are hitting your goals. These metrics include email open rate, unsubscribes, forwards, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

2. Identify your audience

Once you are clear with your objective, the next you need to consider is the audience for your email marketing strategy. You can get a good image of your audience by building buyer personas based on the dominant characteristics among your customers. Applying this will increase the chances of subscribers opening your email, decrease instances of them unsubscribing, and respond positively to its content and call to action.

Keep in mind that different types of personas will react differently to the same tactic. Therefore, it is best to anticipate how they may react and apply the best approach accordingly.

3. Plan how you will build your mailing list

Some will say that a mailing list is not part of an email marketing strategy plan. But, you can’t achieve much with email marketing without a list of qualified recipients.

Your email list must consist of people who gave their permission for you to send them relevant content. Building this list requires you to implement digital marketing strategies beyond email. Here are some tried-and-tested methods for building your list of email subscribers:

Lead magnets

These are content that your audience can only access in exchange for signing up for your mailing list. Examples of lead magnets include ebooks, white papers, reports, checklists, and infographics. If you are an eCommerce business, you can also use discount offers as a lead magnet to build your mailing list.

Sign-up forms

This collects information on the number of visitors each page gets, their behavior on these pages, and the channels they used to visit that particular page. It also provides information on the contribution of each page and channel to your website’s conversion.

Waiting lists

You can build up a mailing list by having your audience sign up for a waiting list for product launches, professional consulting, and courses. Aside from attracting subscribers to your email campaigns, this will also build up interest in your offer, which can lead to a more successful launch date.

Sign-up link in your email signatures

Placing a link in your email signature is the simplest way to build your mailing list. But, it works since you are sending several emails per day to your customers when you are answering their inquiries, updating them about their orders, and confirming their payment or order.

4. Optimize your email content, format, and schedule

Marketing automation tools can monitor your subscriber’s response to your email campaigns. You can use the data you collected to optimize the contents, schedule, and call to action of your emails. You can also test what you have decided on your email marketing strategy template on a smaller portion of your audience before implementing the optimized version to everyone in your mailing list.

5. Create emails for your target audience

You have all the necessary information for creating emails to meet your objectives. Now, it is time to decide on what kind of emails you will send. Your business will send out three types of emails meant to market your business to your audience – promotional, informational, and re-engagement.

Informational emails will make up the majority of your emails sent to your audience while promotional ones are only sent occasionally. Transactional emails confirm their orders and interactions with your brand. Lastly, re-engagement emails are sent when their interest in opening your emails is waning.

You will have to choose from these options according to what is most suitable for your goals. You can have a series of emails that combine these types. For example, the most common combination is a series of informational emails that end with a promotional email. Another example is a re-engagement series that starts with a re-engagement email and then follows with a series of informational emails to bring back their interest.

Get Started With Your Email Marketing Strategy Template

The only thing left to do is to get started with your business’s email marketing strategy plan. If you need help, we will be glad to answer your questions about email marketing and, even, digital marketing in general. Contact us today for a free marketing consultation with one of our experts. =

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