How to create an email marketing strategy that’s effective and powerful takes thought, talent, effort and time.
Thought: things like how you’re going to start using email marketing, develop the roadmap to engage and acquire users, create personas and get users to become influencers of your brand.
Talent: how to execute your strategy in the form of finding talent to help turn your thought into action (which could be employees, agencies or even the technology you want to use), or to develop the necessary skills yourself to do so.
Effort: diving deeper into the strategy through execution: creating the content, designing the layout, developing the code and deploying what you created.
Time: how to take the results of your execution, learn from the data and findings, test and iterate, and strive getting better results.
While all of the above is fine and dandy, explaining these things in greater detail can be long, and depending on your tolerance for marketing-related jargon, a little painfully boring. [As a marketer, believe me I know it can be a “zzzzz” sometimes].
The fact that email marketing methods are used differently in various industries can also make explaining a wee bit more difficult. I’ll cover those methods in another discussion.
In this post, I’ll give you some quick tips on how to create an effective strategy for your email marketing, and in later posts, I’ll dive deeper into each tip. This way, you can get a good, sizeable chunks (bite-size, of course) of information to ponder and implement.
Note that the suggestions here are for non-industry specific.
Numero uno: Your end gooooooooooaall.
In sports, there’s only one end goal, and that is to win. In email marketing, that’s not always the case. While the goal of every marketing is to generate revenue, not all marketing channels do so directly. Email is one of them. At least not all the time. So let’s start with finding goals for your email.
For example, some email marketing goals are to generate leads and awareness. Consider the case of blog posts that’s being pushed out to users to get them to come and read the blog.
Some goals are to get people to purchase. Abandon cart emails, product emails or even Black Friday sales are just examples.
Others are information-based, but vital for gathering data. Customer surveys are such an email. Then there are others that use emails for all sorts of goals – at the same time.
The key is for you to find how you’re going to use email marketing to achieve your goals. Do you want to build leads? Generate interest? Get people to buy? Find out how you can serve them better? Or do you want to do it all?
Your customer persona
In order to get the most out of our email marketing, you have to know who you’re marketing to. If you don’t know your audience, you can’t effectively get them to do what you want them to do, and thus can’t complete goals and generate revenue.
Developing your customer persona is basically answering who, what, when, where, why and how of your target audience.
Understanding data such as behavior, purchasing power and purchasing mindset will help you position your product and services, messaging, and other marketing pieces (e.g. landing pages) for each person in your audience.
My name is Slim #LastName. I live on the 14th Floor.
Fill in the #hashtag blank.. What should have been inserted instead of #LastName? Take a guess… See anything else?
See what I did there? (No, not just the Eminem reference or the sad Suzanne Vega song reference, which I just totally combined to make an awful header title).
This is your personalization and segmentation at worst. Creating an effective strategy requires you to segment and target your audience well.
Look at your email list and categorize your customers into helpful subjects/buckets, which will be needed when you start crafting your awesome targeted messages to them.
I’m geeked and I’m fired up – Incentivizing your loyal customers
Kendrick Lamar’s Loyalty song should be the theme song of your engaged and loyal customers when they see your emails.
When you have loyal customers, you should reward them for their loyalty. Create ways to keep them engaged and loyal so that their loyalty doesn’t sway. This is where your customer persona, segmenting and targeting can be a huge help.
Gift cards are a great way to incentivize your users, and can result in making a dent in your short-term revenue. But to get that result, you’ll have to target them based on their activity level.
Revive and rejuvenate your dormant customers
You’ll most likely have users that will not be active or engaged with you once you get them in your funnel. That’s understandable, and sadly, that’s business.
The biggest challenge, and oftentimes the most rewarding, is reviving those who haven’t engaged with you in a long time. Being able to get them back into your funnel can take some incentives and other methods of engagement.
In my humble opinion, the best “how to create an email marketing strategy” advice is this: having a plan of attack to get your dormant customers to come back. Why? It’s most often profitable than incentivizing your already existing loyal customers.
Testing: Attention please…
Using A/B and Multivariate (MV) testing is a great way to learn about your customers. Through these tests, you can learn all sorts of data:
- What types of messages that helps emails get opened for each segment
- The kind of layout that helps the purchase decisions
- What CTA (call-to-action) verbiage is better for each goal you’re trying to achieve, and
- How they behave online after they clicked on your CTA
What the heck is an A/B and MV test anyway?
These tests are basically creating different variations of one or multiple elements of your email (like your subject line, CTA or positioning) so that you can analyze which version gets the highest ROI (which would be your engagement or conversion).
Partner with other methods of engagement
Email marketing isn’t just a silo method. It relies on other channels to make it more efficient and more powerful.
So, if you use email marketing, consider using retargeting ads to generate more awareness of your product, get users to purchase an upsell or cross-sell, and ultimately to generate more revenue.
Combining forces with other methods like retargeting or social ads is a great way to bring more users into your funnel, and bring more repeat customers into your pipeline.
Final Thoughts
These tips are meant to give you some quick ideas on how to create an email marketing strategy. In future posts, I will dive deeper into creating this strategy and what it takes to make it happen.
Got questions or comments? Want to see more advanced articles? Feel free to reach out to me or find me on LinkedIn.
