Did you know that there were almost 320 billion emails sent every day in 2021?
And it’s expected to rise to 376 billion by 2025.
Email marketing isn’t dead.
In fact, it’s stronger and more competitive than ever.
You have to stand out in the crowd to make your prospective client open your email.
To make sure you build strong relationships with your customers and turn them into brand advocates.
That’s why you need to build successful email campaigns. In this blog, we’re going to explore how.
Define Your Goals
While designing a campaign, setting up goals is almost crucial to its success and helps you to navigate your campaign to the direction you want it to take.
Ask yourself:
What would you like to achieve?
Depending on your business objective, your email goal could be to increase sales, increase website traffic, or gather up attendees for an event.
What actions do you want your subscribers to perform?
Make sure you use action-oriented, attractive and catchy call-to-actions (CTA) for email campaigns.
Who is the target audience?
Segment your audience depending on your email context.
What’s in it for them?
If your prospective clients subscribe to your email, what value are they getting in return? If they sign up for your email list, will doing so increase their knowledge? If they register for an event, how is it helping them
Which metrics determine success?
You may measure email campaigns with open and click rates, but depending on your outcome of email marketing, these can vary.
Build an Organic, Healthy Email List
Growing an organic email list does not require a massive marketing budget. You just need to play the cards right and have the right strategies in place.
Word of Caution: Never buy an email list, no matter how “high quality” it may seem to claim (it’s not.) Avoid that at all costs!
So what should you do instead?
Host opt-in forms on your website
One of the most simple ways to gain an organic email list is to ask users to subscribe. Whether it’s on your blog post, main landing page, or your website footer, recommend you use a Mailchimp alternative.
Never underestimate the importance of a good quality opt-in form.
Offer a valuable resource for free in exchange for their email address
Hubspot plays this strategy so well! As an inbound marketing and sales platform, they offer relevant, valuable content like how-to guides and ebooks e.g. Email Signature Generators, Infographic Templates, Content Marketing Guides and more. (All completely for free!)
This is a compelling way to gain access to people’s email addresses. It’s like the Principle of Reciprocity. If you’re doing something nice for people, they’ll want to reciprocate that in return. They would also be tempted to sign up for similar valuable content in the future.
Your opt-in forms should be catchy enough to reel in readers and make them sign up. Get people interested in your emails. Whatever your incentive is, make sure it’s exciting (and clear!)
Want to know how you could make these even better? Get your pop-ups personalised and timed. Designed to show when a reader has spent a specific amount of time on the website. When they’re invested in your content, they’ll be more willing to click on your link!
Make your CTAs memorable
Shower some personality into your copywriting. Turn away from “yes/no”, and add in some humour or sarcasm. Simply writing “subscribe to our newsletter” isn’t going to help anyone!
Here is an example of a brand, ClickUp that uses witty copywriting in their CTA:
Instead of simply having “no”, they use “No, I want to waste 1 day per week.”
Now, that’s bound to make you chuckle!
Segment your Audience
After you have one big list of customers who have signed, it is essential to segment them.
Email segmentation is breaking down customers based on their demographics, purchase behaviour, lifestyle stages, user behavior, engagement, geographic location or their position in the sales funnel.
For example, emails going to a prospective client will be different than a loyal customer who has stayed with the brand for a few years.
Email sequences for brand-new customers can be general emails that are introducing the user to the brand, feature explanations, or highlighting brand successes.
If they’ve signed up for a while, you can track their user actions to evaluate what they’re interested in and you can send more targeted emails. Since they’re already interested in your brand, you can upsell them, promote new features or promotional deals.
Sephora has segmented their users based on the number of points they’ve gained from the amount they’ve spent. They also personalize their communications by wishing birthdays and giving them gifts based on their past purchases.
Exceed User Expectations
After you’ve segmented your email list, and set up expectations, it is important that you fulfil them.
If you’ve promised to not spam, and end up sending them daily newsletters, it’s going to get you unsubscribed fast!
It’s just that plain and simple.
So how can we make sure our clients are going to love our newsletters?
What Search Engine Journal does is that it sends out a confirmatory email.
You can create an automated welcome sequence so you can introduce yourself, what kind of content you’ll be sending, and then continue to provide great content.
Provide High-Quality Content
So, exactly how can you provide content that’s memorable?
Depending on your brand and what it offers, your newsletter design can either be text-based, graphics, or a combination.
The goal is to build stronger relationships with your clients with the help of your email strategy.
Make sure your emails are personalised.
Type of content you can post in your emails:
- Product updates
- Exclusive offers
- Announcements
- Invitations to events, podcasts, webinars
- Industry news
- How-to guide educational guides
- Behind-the-scenes content
- Contests and giveaways
- Limited-time discount codes
Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Backlinko keep their emails text-based and personal. They encourage conversation and building relationships.
At the year-end, Link-assistant posted their highly ranked blogs:
Either way, you have to make sure that the content you’re offering is:
- Memorable
- Instructive
- Educational
- Entertaining
- Provides value
A “good” newsletter is the one that contains all the attributes mentioned above. This also means the frequency of newsletter publishing should be as promised too!
Whether you’re posting once a week, or once a month, don’t let them forget you!
Conclusion
There you have it! How to grow your business with an effective email strategy, broken down into detailed steps.
In a nutshell, for email marketing strategy, it is essential to be consistent in the value you’re offering for customer acquisition, retention, conversion and engagement.
Craft your email subject lines with utmost care to make sure that they evoke interest and are click-worthy. Email body content needs to be packed with value.
Once your email marketing campaign is ready, ensure that all your links are functional, are redirecting properly and that tracking is in place.
After you segment your email list, schedule your email to match your audience’s optimal time zone to ensure highest open rates.
Gradually, you can polish your email list to make it as healthy as can be!
Let me know what you think about this blog, and what strategies you will be implementing to create the perfect email marketing strategy for your brand.
Author Bio
Mariya is an SEO consultant and she loves to write attention grabbing content, when not writing you can find her playing her guitar.
