Digital Marketing itself is a growing market with people investing billions of dollars every year to see how they can leverage it into putting across their products to potential customers and prospects. It is very important that you understand that emails are still a very important form of communication even today. This is the reason why every digital marketing course has e-mail strategy techniques included as an important component.
We will be taking a look at the steps that are involved in the creation of successful email marketing strategies:
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Let’s begin!
13 Steps to Create Best Email Marketing Strategy
It does not matter if you’re marketing your brand new product or working on an already established pipeline; a good strategy will always help in getting your emails to the right customers and making sure that you get great responses from them.
Following are some of the steps that are essential when you want to create good email marketing strategies:
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1. Identification of Goals
Just like any other marketing methodology, you must always begin with an email marketing goal in mind and then put your time and effort into working toward that goal.
Your goal could be any one of the following:
- Giving a good boost to sales
- Generating good leads
- Strengthening existing customer relationships
- Driving organic traffic to your website
- Creating and maintaining buzzes and trends
- Helping massively with brand exposure
These are some of the common goals that you might have. One thing we would suggest is that you put in a considerable amount of time to first understand which of these goals you want to pursue and then stick to it till the end. A mixture of goals for a single email marketing campaign might not work effectively, especially if you are starting with email marketing.
An observation of a good email marketing strategy is that when you move from one brand to another, there is a fair chance that you receive an email from the brand saying they miss you, and to make up for it, they would provide exclusive deals just for you! We are sure that you’ve seen this many times, haven’t you?
This adds to brand loyalty and makes customers want to come back to the original brand. Even though it sounds very simple, it is very powerful in driving a good amount of sales quickly!
One important thing you must work on is listening to what people have to say about your brand. With the latest social media marketing tracking tools, you will have the ability to track and analyze what your target audience has to say about your brand as well.
Using this, you can further work on the development of the product, thereby, strengthening your ties with the customers and their feedback.
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One important thing you must understand when you start building your email contact list is the fact that the quality of the list matters more than the quantity, always.
And this is one of the primary reasons why buying an already existing email contact list can prove inefficient. Because, the contacts here might not be interested in your product, brand, or service. If it doesn’t align with them, they will choose to unsubscribe, or sometimes, it can look a little spammy as well.
So, it is extremely important that you build an organic email list for your email marketing strategy and not buy one.
A lot of email marketing methodologies can be put into place if you want to build a subscribers’ list. Just by adding a subscribe button on all the pages of your website. This way, those who are interested will be able to opt-in, and you can use a form to get their names, email IDs, and other details as well.
This method of organically building your email list is very important, and it is also vital that you work on other methods through which you can create this list. Next up, to create a good email marketing strategy plan you have to understand email lists.
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3. Understanding the Email List
The important step in your email marketing strategy after generating a good organic email list is to understand the people on the list. In most cases, sending out generic emails will not add any value to the business motive. So, making sure that your mail feels customized for the target audience is key.
There are many ways you can work on segregating the email list. These are some of them:
- Buying frequency and past trades
- Sales funnel tracking and analysis
- Target customer location
- Age, gender, and other particulars
After understanding this, you have to make sure that you customize the emails you send out based on the above factors to add the personal touch, and this attention to detail will help immensely boost the number of people opening the emails and landing on the product page.
Another important factor to think about is the activeness of the subscribers on the list. You have to clean up the email list regularly to remove the inactive subscribers as they will have a negative effect when you are tracking the campaign engagement rate later.
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4. Personalize your email – But Mind Your Limits
Personalized emails are definitely a great Email Marketing Strategy. Personalized emails help customers feel valued by the company. Research has stated that 80% of users tend to purchase from a brand that gives them a personalized experience.
But, while personalized experiences are important, you need to mind your limits as well. If you keep repeating their name in the email, it will just come off as weird. In another research, about 32% of the customers said they don’t like personalized emails as they feel like an invasion of privacy. It’s important to have the appropriate dataset so that you can personalize your Email Campaigns appropriately.
Birthday Emails, for example, are an excellent Email Marketing Strategy. Research conducted by Experian states that birthday emails generate 342% more revenue than promotional emails.
It is important to remember that mentioning names isn’t the only way to personalize emails. There are a lot of other ways to do it and you should be willing to explore them.
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5. Writing Attractive Email Titles
E-mail marketing does wonders. One effective email marketing technique that is not looked at is attractive titles. Nothing beats the classic way of keeping things attractive and catchy, especially the subject line. You already read at the start of this blog that there are billions of emails sent, so if you are not being catchy, your email, which might be of the highest quality, can still get lost in an inbox filled with other emails.
One pro tip is to keep the subject line as personalized as possible, as this has shown in past analytics that it can add a lot to the metric called the ‘email open rate’ that tracks when the emails get opened by the customers.
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There are many ways you can write an attractive title or a subject line:
- Do not use clickbait: It is very important to avoid clickbait titles that might disappoint the reader and make him/her want to unsubscribe from the list.
- Time-limited deals: Make sure to offer deals that come with an expiry or a sense of urgency. Deals that can include a big discount if a customer picks up the product in a day or two are a good example of this.
- Ask questions: Asking questions in the email subject line creates a lot of curiosity quickly among readers, and people would be interested to see if you have the answer to the question you asked. This curiosity helps a lot to drive the click-through rate.
- Customization: Instead of just starting with a ‘Hi,’ you can always add a bit of dynamism and use actual customer names there to create a sense of tailor-fit that helps in engaging with the customers.
There are many tools that can analyze headlines while working with a good email campaign strategy. You can use such tools to check if your email title is okay, good, or in case it needs any changes. Next up, to create the best email marketing strategy plan you have to understand the value of good content.
A/B Testing Titles can improve your click-through and open rate. Performing A/B Testing with email titles means sending one title to a subset of your subscribers and sending a different one to another subset of subscribers. The goal is to figure out which one gets the best results.
Once you know which email was opened the most, you can send it to the rest of your subscribers.
7. Creating High-quality Content
Yes, you read that correctly! Not only does the title and the subject line matter a lot, but the quality of the overall email will have a bigger impact as soon as a customer opens your email.
People tend to be impatient with emails, so you have to use an arsenal of skills to hold their attention and to make sure that they feel engaged.
There are many things you can do when working with the creation of an email with good content:
- Make sure to include your social media links at the end of the email
- Avoid adding too many links in the mail
- Use a vertical layout to structure the mail
- Experiment with how formal you want the mail to be
- Make sure to use high-quality images and videos if applicable
Keeping the content marketing strategy concise and making your readers go through the email completely and click on the links that you provide there should be the primary goal here.
Also Read: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
8. Make Sure your Content is Short and Easy to Understand
People don’t want to open emails that seem like they will take a lot of time to read or understand. According to statistics, 47% of people open emails if the subject line is appealing to them. If the subject line doesn’t appeal to them, 69% of them report it as spam or junk. If your subject line is personalized, it has 22% more chances of being opened.
While keeping your content short is important, it is equally important that it isn’t hard to understand. Nobody has time to spend trying to decipher what an email says. Keep your content easy to understand and engaging at the same time.
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9. Sending Emails at the Right Time
We are sure that you are wondering about what the best time will be to write these emails and send them across to your target audience. Precisely, there is no particular answer to this that works for all.
It completely depends on your audience and the product that you are marketing through the campaign.
Experimentation is what helps here. You can send emails at any time during the day and analyze when customers open the emails. You can also track conversations that will help you better understand the right time you have to pick to send these emails across in the future.
As mentioned, this is something that depends on the nature of your business a lot. If you are trying to market something to people who are office-goers, then it would add more value if you could send it across early in the morning, during lunchtime, or late in the evening to make sure that it is on the top of their inbox.
One more thing that you must consider is the fact that you should not send across a lot of emails at a time. This can be seen as spammy, or it may even tire the customers, making them want to unsubscribe. So, make sure that you work on this!
Again, next up you have to check out one of the aspects of best email marketing strategies that involve giving provision for unsubscription.
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10. Providing Unsubscription Options
Yes, it is always a good practice to make sure that you provide your customers with the choice to unsubscribe from the mailing list if they choose to.
You might be wondering about how this works?
Well, if the customer does not align with your product or brand, he/she would not be interested to go through. So, giving them the ability to opt-out will easily add a lot of positives to your brand such as credibility and trust.
This can go a long way into the future and help you there, too!
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11. Mobile User Optimization
We are sure that you are already aware of the fact that there are over 3.5 billion smartphone users across the globe. This means, literally, around half of the world’s population has a mobile device that they use for a variety of purposes.
Now, the email marketing aspect of things involves making sure to keep your emails optimized for mobile viewers as well.
Your email could be very attractive and look amazing when viewed on a computer screen, but if it does not provide the same user experience when viewed through a mobile, then it does not add any value to the campaign.
Following are some of the tips you can use to optimize your content for mobile viewing:
- Test the mails on a variety of devices while working on building content
- Work on the image quality and the load time to make sure the mails load quickly
- Keep a medium-large font size to make sure that it is readable on a mobile screen
- Keep the subject line short to ensure that it does not get cut off at the end
- Avoid horizontally stacking columns to portray any data
12. Testing the Emails
The final step in creating a successful email marketing strategy for b2b is to make sure that you do a lot of testing and experimentation to see what works and what does not.
You can test for a variety of things:
- Number of links
- Quality of images
- User experience
- Visual design
- Subject line quality
- Email delivery time
And more! You can spend a considerable amount of time and effort here to first see what works best for your product. It can be done manually, but it might take a good amount of time.
Nowadays, there are many automation tools for email marketing that will make sure that your emails are tested easily and provide you with insights into how you can better your product.
One thing you must remember in this last step is that the time that you spend here is invaluable and that it helps in adding a lot of value to drive your business to success.
So, as a learner, enthusiast, or marketing professional, it always helps you if you work on testing your emails before sending them across to potential customers.
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13. Engage Again with Inactive Customers
If your content isn’t engaging or appealing enough, you stand to lose about a quarter of your subscribers every year. There are win-back or re-engagement campaigns put in place especially aimed at inactive customers, to engage them again. There are some very popular campaigns that go under this category, like the we-miss-you campaigns, or discounts and promos.
Even though these aren’t so easy, they tend to be more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. In case you aren’t able to re-engage some of these customers, you can ask them their email preferences or just give them an option to unsubscribe. It is a better idea to clean up your mailing list than to spend resources on customers that won’t come back no matter what strategy you use.
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Conclusion
With an understanding of how to create a successful email marketing strategy, we are sure that you now see the value it can add to growing your business.
To reiterate, email marketing has been proven to give the highest return on investment, and it is worthwhile to create a good strategy for this and use it to bring out the best campaign performance.
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