How to Build a Kick-Ass Email Marketing Strategy in 2020

Marketing through email is a quick, versatile, and profitable way of getting your product or service noticed. It’s the best way to get new customers, retain the old ones, and create a space for word-of-mouth. It is also affordable and helps boost sales. The results of every campaign can be tracked and it adds prominence, brand recognition, and significant value to your brand. Within the digital spectrum, email marketing has consistently delivered the highest Return On Investment (ROI) through 2019. While it still continues to do so, more and more people are resorting to the medium leaving brands wondering how to stay more relevant and impactful each day.

The success of a great email marketing campaign depends on how a brand acquires the trust of its audience and builds an honest and enduring relationship with them. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a sole proprietorship, the following will help you create a strong, wholesome, and high return-oriented email marketing strategy.

The following 5 steps will help you develop an email marketing plan that is full proof and will engage, grow, and retain your email subscribers.

1. Creating a strategic inbound email marketing campaign
2. Audience list segmentation and management
3. Devising high-performance emails at every step
4. Make conversion your primary KPI
5. Determine the right email template and content

Creating a strategic inbound email marketing campaign

Email marketing is a promising and measurable practice of sending marketing messages to a person’s email inbox with the agenda of having them buy your product or subscribe to your service. It is a very personal way of creating and nourishing relationships with customers. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Your email strategy eventually determines your business growth and that can happen through human, customer-centric email strategies that are on the same tangent as your other inbound strategies.

For this, you need to know where email marketing comes in handy in the inbound methodology stages.

Email falls in the Close stage. This is the stage where potential leads get converted into customers. Marketing emails are also helpful in the delight stage where you can have customers further promote your product or re-purchase from you. These are the two stages where engagement with your email subscribers is of prime importance.

Here are the things you need to get right to create a good email campaign:

• Implement a good email service or software that connects easily to your database. That helps you save time and automates your campaigns for you.
• Make your entire inbound strategy cohesive. Depending on where you are in your conversation, you can make sure you are at a stage where your message would be best communicated through and email.
• Set the right objective as that helps you understand what exactly you want to achieve with an email campaign. It will be helpful in understanding and analyzing the outcome of the campaign.

Audience list segmentation and management

The majority of your email ROI depends on how well you segment, target, and trigger your customers. This is beneficial since you can reach the right person at the right time with the right message. If all of these are done correctly, you will be more likely to engage with your subscribers. Once the foundation is laid right, you can achieve great results. This also means that diving straight into segregation and manipulation of data might not be the best way. Here are some tips you should keep in mind before you start:

• A clean and organized database that contains information about the contact and all their relevant properties including their email address, business information, etc. is a good place to start.
• The information should be relevant and include the buyer’s persona and where they are in the buying journey. This helps you create contextual and personalized emails.
• Data should be compiled through explicit and implicit sources, i.e. what the users share with you and what you understand from their behavior. It is also important that you have permission to email them and your emails comply with all regulations.

Devising high-performance emails at every step

Your main agenda while drafting an email is to make sure your customers see value in what they read. The conversation should be genuine and trust should be built before you convert customers and before they purchase from you or further promote your product or service.

The key things to keep in mind while setting up a campaign includes:

• Setting up SMART goals – SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Each piece of information should follow these objectives. This will help you determine the success of your campaign.
• Avoid sending emails to the wrong person with the wrong content at the wrong time. This makes customers repulsive and might discourage them from buying or cause them to unsubscribe.

Make conversion your primary KPI

Once your goals are set and your audience is ready, you need to draft emails that attract customers and create genuine conversations. This will support your goal of increased conversions which can be measured by increased email open rate and increased click-through rate.

This can be ensured in the following way:

• Your call-to-action must feel compelling so that more people open your emails land on pages you want them to.
• Your subject line and email copy should be as personalized as possible and should catch the customer appropriately at the right stage of his journey.
• Your emails should be timed right and not too frequent in nature. That could push you away from the possibility of sealing the deal.

Determine the right email template and content

You would want to send different types of emails to fulfill different objectives. A promotional email would be very different from a re-purchase one. A lead to conversion email would be very different from a transactional email. Using the right template and content will nudge your customers in the direction you want.

You must work on the following to make your strategy work.

• Focus your efforts on nurturing leads. A lot of people mistaken a lead for conversion and then move on. If you don’t coax your lead, chances are, they won’t convert.
• Use emails that have valuable downloads and relatable content. You should also use break up emails in your campaign to let your lead know that this would be the last time you’re reaching out to them.
• Make sure your database is flawless so that your bounce rates are minimized and you can send automated emails easily.
• Analyze your emails so you know how to optimize your strategy to push for better results. Collect implicit data based on emails that are delivered, opened, and eventually interacted with.
• Track metrics and ensure you’re getting more than your money’s worth. Make sure your strategy evolves at the same pace as your customers.

Updating your practices and setting your strategy up consciously at every stage will set your business up for a successful campaign. Dive into the world of email marketing fearlessly and your business will thrive if you keep in mind the little details. You can reach out to us for more information and expertise about this.