Email marketing remains the №1 method for companies to communicate with customers. Its plus is that you can send letters to a large number of people at once with minimal spending. If you want email marketing to work for the business, you need to create a well-thought-out strategy. This article is right about this.
Step 1: Setting the goals right
Since mailing lists are a marketing channel that requires some investment, it is worth understanding what we want to achieve before investing money.
To evaluate the effectiveness of a promotion channel, clearly defined goals are necessary. Let’s take a simple example: audience reach is of great importance for a company. Then it is worth taking a guideline for the number of delivered and opened letters. In another case, for example, it is important for a company to increase sales. Then it is worth analyzing the transitions to the site and successful transactions that were made as a result of the mailing.
However, in addition to the immediate goals, it is also important to think about the implementation time. Set your goals right. For example: Increase sales through email marketing by 30% in six months. A clear statement helps to understand how realistic and feasible the goal itself is. This allows you to estimate the deadlines for implementation and have in front of you the criteria for evaluating the result.
Step 2: Analyze current situation and competitor activity
The second step in the work will be the analysis and audit of the current situation. You need to understand the current situation and the metrics. How mailing is currently implemented, how the subscriber base is built, what content is sent out.
At this step, it is important to analyze the work of competitors, their chips. This tactic is especially useful for companies that are just getting started with email marketing. Write answers to the following questions:
- What are competitors doing to build a subscriber base?
- How is the text in the mailing list formatted?
- How often is the email sent out?
- Are there mailings on certain days (holidays, weekends)?
- What options do subscribers have?
- What does the subscription management form look like?
By answering these questions, you can better understand what needs to be done at the current stage and how to build a work plan for the future. You should not immediately grab onto everything and try to adopt all the practices of competitors. First, they may have completely different goals and a different strategy. In addition, more experience and scale of the company. It would be more correct to move towards the goal step by step. Think of a copywriter or text provider services like essaywriter.today.
Step 3: Building a team and choosing tools
Once you’ve set clear goals and analyzed your competitors, it’s time to move on to the next step. At step 3, it is important to assign responsibilities and understand who in your company will manage email marketing. You have 2 options – to create a team yourself or hire employees for outsourcing. You need to weigh the pros and cons and pick the right tools for the job.
How do you know what tools to use? The answer to this question depends on the final result that you want to get in the end. Determine what features would be key for you. For example, work automation through templates, advanced analytics and testing capabilities.
Step 4: Creating the Strategy
When you have an email marketing team formed or an agreement has been established with a contractor, you should go directly to the development of the strategy itself. At this stage, the information you collected during the competitive analysis will be useful. It is important to first find answers to the following points:
- What and how to write newsletters?
- How will your letters be visually designed?
- How to build a subscriber base?
These data must be superimposed on the goals identified in the first stage.
For email marketing, the most important thing is the database of email addresses. The main rule here is: you can use only legal methods, no buying bases and other unscrupulous methods. If you have troubles – ask professionals. Everyone knows it’s ok to ask for help when you are learning, get cheap essay service help with your content.
Let’s take a look at the basic building blocks of an email marketing strategy.
- Gathering a subscriber base
- Working with an existing subscriber base
- A welcome email that introduces your audience to you
- Regular mailings
- Identification of “pains” and trigger mailing
Let’s take a closer look at these steps.
Working with contact base
Firstly, mailing to people who did not give you their permission violates Federal Law 152. Secondly, no one likes spam, and the effectiveness of such emails will be extremely low. Therefore, you need to collect the base yourself. There are some possible ways to do it:
– blog form: if you have an interesting blog, embed a subscription form on its pages;
– pop-up forms on the site: you can invite your site visitors to subscribe to the newsletter in order to receive useful materials
– give benefits in exchange for email: prepare various manuals, conduct webinars with registration – in general, give a person a reason to give you his email;
– collect addresses offline: you can receive email not only online, but also at various business breakfasts, conferences, etc.
It is likely that you already have some kind of database of addresses that were collected earlier, but subsequently these people did not receive regular mailings. Before resuming work with such a database, it must be validated, that is, cleared of non-existent, incorrect addresses and spam traps of mail services.
Using such a tool will allow you to leave only valid addresses in the database, mailings to which will not worsen the reputation of the sender. The effectiveness of such mailings will also be higher.
Welcome series
When users have already subscribed to your mailing list, it is worth telling them about yourself (about the company). That is, send him not just a welcome message, but immediately share useful content or what you promised to give in exchange for a subscription. In such messages, you can greet the subscriber, tell about important news, offer profitable promotions, etc. For creating such newsletters you might need best essay help, to grab the subscribers attention and make them wait till the next email.
Regular mailing
The frequency and content of regular mailings depend on the goal pursued. If we decide to stimulate sales, it is worth sending more letters about discounts and promotions, distinctive features of goods and services. If you want to build a loyal audience, infrequent mailings with useful tips will do.
Different types of emails will require different templates. The main goal here is to get a ready-made corporate template, into which you can then simply upload content for quick mailing lists.
Trigger mailings
We should not forget about trigger mailings – that is, letters that are sent in response to actions taken or not taken by the user. For example, if a visitor to an online store put an item in the cart, but later did not complete the order, you can send him a reminder about this. As you can see, this feature is very important for e-commerce companies.
Work to reactivate inactive subscribers
It is also extremely important to identify subscribers who do not open emails and highlight them in a separate segment. Emails that are not consistently read will lead to a reputation loss, and as a result, your emails will be marked as spam at some point.
For example, the deliverability optimization feature allows you to automatically allocate inactive subscribers to a separate segment: if a person has not opened the mailing list N times in a row or M days have passed since the last opening, he becomes inactive.
You can also set up automatic reactivation mailings to such “sleeping” subscribers. If there is no reaction to them, the address will be removed from the database.
Step 5: Analytics
An important part of effective email marketing strategies is a description of how performance evaluation will take place. After a certain stage of testing, you will understand which indicators for your newsletters can be called good, and which ones are not very good. This will allow you to determine the success criteria for each email sent and write down these KPIs.
It is also important to conduct a long-term analysis in order to track how the behavior of subscribers changes over time, which topics cause more or less response and so on.
The bottom line
An email marketing strategy will allow you to understand what you are doing at each stage of the work on mailing lists and what results can be considered good. At the same time, you should not take the strategy too seriously: it is a living document that will inevitably change when plans collide with real life. It is important to be prepared for this and make adjustments that reflect the real state of affairs.
