How to Create an Effective Email Marketing Strategy
With social media marketing on the rise, some business owners may come to think that email marketing has become old school or even obsolete. Nevertheless, the statistics indicate that there’s no school like the old school.
According to the Radicati Group, the number of sent emails is likely to reach 246 billion in the last quarter of 2019. In addition, further studies show that email marketing’s average return on investment (ROI) has seen a steady rise in the past few years.
If you aren’t already, it’s time for you to jump on the bandwagon and create a killer campaign to boost sales and attract a large pool of loyal customers. For this, you need an email marketing strategy.
This write-up provides you with some of the proven tips and tricks to plan and execute email marketing campaigns.
How to Define an Effective Email Marketing Strategy
An email marketing strategy is there to help you reach business goals, be it more sales, more customers, or greater engagement.
It’s great because of its low risk, relatively low investment, and scalability. The effort is almost the same if you send one or 100,000 emails. Plus, email marketing strategies offer a lot of flexibility to target your customers and make performance-based adjustments.
A good strategy starts with a plan. Think about the tactics that will help you reach your goals and determine a series of actions to put it all in practice. It includes email design and copywriting, promotions, discounts, etc.
You should also find a good email marketing service to help you execute the email campaign and analyze results.
Once you have everything ready, it’s time to carry out the strategy.
Key Elements
Each successful email campaign has a few common features and the following guidelines apply for all businesses.
Content is King
The emails you create need to provide value to the customer. This holds true for welcome, follow-up, promotional, and any other email blast. There are a few simple content tweaks that can help you get there.
Compelling content starts with an enticing subject line. It mustn’t sound like spam and the subject should address a customer’s need or problem. Try to spice it up with some humor and you are bound to get their attention.
Marketing emails that begin with ‘Dear Valued Customer’ are truly a thing of the past. Personalize each email you send so that the recipients feel they are starting a conversation with you. An attention-grabbing beginning should follow the captivating subject line and personalized address.
The opening sentence in your email needs to have a hook – a striking line that will make the recipients read the body. Otherwise, they might quickly search for the unsubscribe button.
And don’t forget to create a professional email signature to earn the trust of your subscribers.
Meaningful Relationships
A great email marketing strategy is not only about more sales. It needs to develop customer loyalty, respect, and again, provide value. As a result, you need to avoid aiming for the customers' credit cards with each email you send. Why not ask for the customers’ opinion and provide an email address they can reply to?
This helps your brand to appear more authentic and easily reachable. In addition, it shows you display genuine care for the customer. Freebies and special promotions are excellent tools for building meaningful relationships as well.
You can send a freebie to honor a customer’s birthday. Offering free gift cards for your loyal customers during the holiday season is another good way to build rapport. And it wouldn’t hurt to apply similar principles for subscribers that are still not your customers.
Don’t Take No for an Answer
Business owners and marketers usually dread the unsubscribe request. Customers are bombarded with emails left and right, which makes these requests almost inevitable. But there is a way to turn the disadvantage into a new opportunity.
Each unsubscribe request should be followed by a thanks-for-canceling email. It might make the recipient change their mind and allow you to mend whatever that prompted the rift.
A good example is Hulu’s “Thanks for Canceling” email that won the 2016 Webby Award. The email contains witty remarks about the things Hulu learned from cancelations and offers a limited free trial.
Optimization Tricks
An effective email tactic needs to be automated and involves customer segmentation. The time you send out emails also plays an important role.
HubSpot reports that email segmentation yields greater open rates, more leads, and higher revenue. As for timing, a study indicates that Tuesdays and Fridays are the top days for email blasts. On top of that, it shows that automated emails have a 47% higher click-through rate on those days.
Mobile devices play an important role in your strategy as well. More than half of all emails are read on mobile devices, meaning they need to fit a smaller screen. This translates to clean and simple design with powerful copywriting that won’t bore your recipients.
Take a look at The Drake Hotel’s strategy and carefully crafted emails that translate to more subscribers, more sales, and greater engagement.
The Final Word
We’ve used The Drake Hotel and Hulu as top examples of an effective email marketing strategy. Feel free to use their emails as inspiration and create a campaign that will resonate with your customers.