When you’re ready to include email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy, you need a plan. That plan is your email marketing strategy, how you intend to achieve email marketing success.
An email marketing strategy is your roadmap to planning and executing email marketing campaigns. It’s a step-by-step guide to what you want to accomplish and how you expect to accomplish it.
While every email marketing strategy is unique, they all tend to include five distinct steps, as follows.
1. Determine objectives
The first part of any strategy is to determine what it is you want to achieve. Why are you engaging in email marketing? What are your goals? Are they measurable and achievable? How does email marketing fit in with the rest of your marketing strategy?
2. Identify the target audience
Emails that are sent to a general audience are less successful than those that target a specific type of customer.
For example, if your company sells toddler clothing, you want to target young parents; if you sell hearing aids, you may want to target older consumers.
You may also want to identify your audience by various demographic factors, such as age, gender, income, or education level. The more targeted your audience, the more you can personalize the mailing and generate a higher response.
3. Identify the mailing list
With the target audience identified, it’s time to identify one or more mailing lists that match that audience.
You may even want to further segment the mailing list so you can personalize your mailings for different types of targeted customers.
4. Determine the types of emails to send
It’s also essential to determine the type of emails you’d like to send.
Depending on your objectives, you may want to send a welcome email (to new customers or subscribers), a promotional or sale email, an abandoned cart email, or a new product announcement email.
5. Determine the content and offer
Finally, you need to determine the content to include in the mailing. You also want to determine what type of offer you want to make to recipients. Is this a general sale or do you want to offer a specific dollars-off or percentage discount?
Moreover, don’t forget the call to action and ordering mechanism, as well as images, countdown timers, and other key elements.
How to measure the success of your email marketing strategy
An email marketing strategy isn’t complete without some way to evaluate your results. That means measuring customer response and comparing that to your objectives. Did you meet your goals? If so, your strategy was successful.
One of the nice things about email marketing is how relatively easy it is to track results. You can measure a variety of critical metrics, including deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, revenue generated, and more.
Ultimately you’ll use these measurements to determine a campaign’s ROI and then compare that to the ROI goals you set in the planning stage.
Does it really matter?
According to the Direct Marketing Association, 64% of companies say email marketing is the most effective marketing channel. The only sure-fire way to conduct an effective email marketing program is to create and follow a detailed email marketing strategy.
64% of companies rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel.
An email marketing strategy is your step-by-step guide to conducting effective email campaigns. Your strategy helps in planning your campaigns, setting goals, executing mailings, and measuring results. Without a detailed email marketing strategy, success is more a matter of luck.
What now?
Now that you know the basic components of a successful email marketing strategy, it’s time to devise your own strategy. You can use Campaign Monitor to help you create and execute a strategy for your business and translate that strategy into email marketing success.
For more information, check out how to plan an email marketing strategy.