How To Design A Successful E-mail Marketing Strategy?

Would you know how to design an email marketing strategy from scratch ?

Almost all marketers are clear that email marketing is essential within a digital marketing plan , since it is one of the most effective and profitable channels and can help us achieve multiple objectives. But when it comes to defining how exactly we are going to achieve those goals, things get complicated.

In order not to start the house on the roof and end up wasting valuable time and resources, it is necessary to have an email marketing strategy that can cover all this complexity. Don’t you know very well where to start? In this article I tell you the 5 essential elements of a success strategy, 4 examples of brands and what we can learn from them and 7 tricks to optimize your campaigns . Go for it!

The 5 İngredients Of A Good Email Marketing Strategy

1)Email Marketing Strategy: Clearly Define Your Goals

The concept of target audience (marketing). Standing people

Before planning any action, there is a question you need to ask yourself: what exactly do you want to achieve with your email marketing strategy ?

The marketing email can help achieve many goals, but can not do everything at once. If you want to get good results, you need to be focused. Therefore, the first step is to sit down and think about what you want to use email marketing for:

Create a new loyalty channel?
Increase sales of a specific range of products through your newsletter ?
Get more subscribers to your promotional emails?

Remember that for a goal to be truly functional, it must clearly specify a quantifiable value and establish a time frame to achieve it: “increase sales of cosmetic products by 20% in the next six months.”

Along with the definition of objectives, it is also important to clearly consider what our target is . Here we can rely on tools such as the buyer persona , a semi-fictional description of our ideal client that helps us better target recruitment initiatives.

2) Think About How You Are Going To Get Subscribers

And speaking of recruitment, any email marketing strategy must be supported by a good database. Therefore, attracting subscribers is a fundamental ingredient to succeed with your email marketing.

To synthesize your recruitment strategy properly, my recommendation is that you try to answer these three questions:

Who are you addressing? As we saw in the previous section, the buyer persona can help us guide our marketing. But the reality can be much more complex: many times we will find that we need to have databases segmented by objectives (first conversion versus loyalty, for example) or by types of consumer (parents with children from X to X age). Based on that, we will structure our database so that the right messages reach the right people.
What are you going to offer them? To become part of your database, users have to voluntarily share their personal information (at a minimum, they should leave you their email address). In exchange for this valuable data, the brand must offer them some kind of incentive. Sometimes, it may be enough to explain the benefits they are going to get thanks to your newsletter, but it may also be necessary to reinforce this incentive through exclusive discounts or content that is of value to them (such as the typical “leave us your information and download free our ebook “).
How are you going to capture them? Here we will pay attention to topics such as form design and calls to action. The idea is to design a smooth, engaging user experience with as few obstacles as possible.

3) Design A Step-By-Step Plan

A businessman progressing step by step

With all the bases clear, the time has come to get down to work and think about what exactly we are going to do to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves.

To start, we need to think about short, medium and long term email marketing strategies . For example:

Offer free trials of a new product in exchange for sharing the launch on social media and using the newsletter to communicate it.
Design special offers only for subscribers.
Regularly send exclusive content that reinforces the link with the brand.
Inform of the events that occur near the place where the user lives and give him the opportunity to sign up for them from his email.

The chosen strategy will determine the type of content that our newsletter should include, from the latest news to discount coupons. Obviously this content will be updated depending on what’s new, but it is always useful to have predesigned templates that are consistent with the brand’s image in the other channels. We must not forget the importance of interactive elements, animations, GIFs and others, but always maintaining visibility on different devices.

Within this planning of our email marketing strategy, we also need to define the frequency with which we will send content to users, seeking a balance between being present on a regular basis and not being annoying.

Finally, we will design a medium term email marketing calendar . For this, we have to make the decision about when to send the emails , that is, the most appropriate day of the week and time. There are different studies that guide us about the moments with the highest opening and conversion ratios, but above all we must consider that it makes sense for our brand and for the content of the email. For example, we may be interested in reaching users when they are planning their activities for the weekend or, conversely, offering them help to start their work week.

4) Choose An Email Marketing Tool

Email marketing campaign, newsletter marketing, drop marketing, email marketing flat banner concept with icons.

Today, to carry out an email marketing strategy it is essential to have a tool that helps us manage the entire process. Email marketing solutions have multiple benefits, such as:

Systematize the measurement of campaigns . You will know at all times how many emails have been sent, the opening rate, the conversion rate and other useful information to evaluate the success of your strategy.
Facilitate the design of emails . These types of tools often have plenty of predesigned templates and even image libraries, so even small businesses can easily design professional-looking emails.
Keep our database organized , for example, with different lists depending on the segmentation we have decided.
Automate and personalize email marketing. It is possible to schedule shipments to be made automatically at a specific day and time (even while you are on vacation!), Customize the content based on the information we have about the user and a long etcetera.
Easily scale our marketing . Many email marketing tools have free versions, which have basic but sufficient functionalities and allow sending emails to a few thousand subscribers. From there, the sky is the limit: it is very easy to change plans and extend our email marketing to infinity and beyond.

From small free solutions to very complex tools for large companies, there are all kinds of programs on the market that can be tailored to your needs. These are my favorites:

HubSpot . More than an exclusive email marketing tool, HubSpot is an integrated marketing solution that allows us to obtain a great deal of information about what is happening with our campaigns.
MailChimp . One of the email marketing classics, with a free version that allows you to create lists of up to 2,000 subscribers and make up to 12,000 mailings a month.
Sendlane . Although much less known than the previous ones, I find it very interesting for sales-focused email marketing strategies, since its analytics allow you to track each conversion and link it to a specific email. In this way, you will be able to know exactly how much you have earned with each campaign.

5) Define Your Metrics

Last but not least, you have to know at all times how you are going to measure the success of your email marketing strategy. Only then will you be able to see what is working and what is not, and make the appropriate changes to correct the course.

The selected metrics will depend on the objective that we have initially selected. The idea is that the objective and the variable to be measured are clearly related, so that it works as a key performance indicator or KPI. Secondarily, we can also rely on other metrics that help us know what is happening.

For example, if we are focusing on the recruitment phase, we will have goals such as the increase in subscribers or the drop rate. In the shipping phase we will take a look at the opening and click rates, and if we have goals related to sales and lead generation, the most important will be the conversion rates.

4 Examples Of Successful Email Marketing Strategies

1) Argos

Over the years, Argos, a British distribution company, has experienced all kinds of changes . But one thing has remained constant: their commitment to send nothing less than a daily email to millions of subscribers .