Follow These 3 Rules to Create an Effective Email Marketing Strategy
Reading Time: ~5 Mins | Written By: Juliana Bermudez
It’s simple enough to send out eNewsletters to your customers and clients to benefit your business, but without a proper email marketing strategy, your emails may fall short. Before you begin sending, it’s important you sit down and create a strategy you can follow to ensure you are making the most of each send. Follow the three rules below to ensure you are creating a successful email campaign:
Rule #1: Consider Your Objectives
First things first, consider what you want your eNewsletters to accomplish for you. Your objectives will determine what content you should focus on including in your email and what is of utmost importance to share to complete these objectives. A few examples of email objectives are: creating awareness about your business services or product, increasing webpage visits or social followers, generating leads, or boosting sales by promoting products via your emails. Depending on your objectives, you should focus on including content in your emails that will benefit these goals.
For example, let's say you just opened a new business and your objectives include: creating general awareness about your new business and what you offer, growing your social media following, and generating traffic to your website that would ideally lead to sales or inquiries.
Let's break down how we would go about accomplishing each of these objectives:
Creating General Awareness
First, ensure you have a popup and footer email newsletter signup form on your website, as well as verbally invite your customers, friends and family to sign up to receive news, sales, and other valuable information. This will help to generate an email list to send your eNewsletters to that will in turn educate these new subscribers about what you and your business are all about.
As far as content to include in your emails to help with this objective, it's best practice to introduce yourself, your mission statement, location(s), and bestselling products or services in the first email new subscribers receive. This can be done by creating an automated drip email that gets sent out after someone new subscribes.
Grow Social Following
This objective can easily be tackled by including a call to action inviting your subscribers to check out your social media channel to stay in the loop with you via their feed. Include links to your social channels and highlight what they may get to see there (such as project/product inspiration, behind-the-scenes videos, or helpful tips).
Generating Website Traffic
To boost traffic to your website, be sure all of the content within your email is linking back to your website. These could be links on the images you include, as well as buttons and calls to action to make it clear and easy for your subscribers to get to your site.
To entice subscribers to click these links, don't give away all of your secrets within the email body. Keep the information short and concise, ideally just showcasing the information that would boost curiosity; and then provide a link for the reader to learn more via your website. This way, they have been led back to your website and at which point they are more committed to learning more on their own, potentially leading them to complete an action (ie. make a purchase, or submit a contact form).
Rule #2: Consider Your Audience
Who are you sending your emails to and why? This is a big question to ask yourself when determining what content to share in your email sends, as you only want to share what will be relevant to your audience. When creating your email marketing strategy, ask yourself these questions:
Who is my audience?
What do they care about?
Why have they subscribed to my newsletter?
How do they benefit from my communications and what do they want to hear about?
Focus on sharing content in your email communications based on your answers to the above questions, to ensure you are sharing the most relevant content. This will help to ensure your objectives are being met and make the customer happy.
It is also paramount that you consider how often your audience will want to receive your emails, and when. Too many or too few emails in your audience's inbox can lead to unsatisfactory results. To avoid email fatigue, we recommend sending (at the most) one email a week to your subscribers. You want to find a sweet spot where you are kept at the top of the mind of your clients, but they aren't being bombarded by your communications so often that they unsubscribe. Read this article by Mailchimp about the best time to send your emails.
Rule #3: Lean On Your Branding and Website Content
Lastly, lean on your website's content to build your emails to benefit your outlined objectives and audience needs. Making use of every page on your website makes it easy for you to quickly generate informative emails using content you already have, as well as providing you with backlinks right back to your website. We always recommend making use of the content on your home, about, services/shop, blog posts, events, and contact pages (as well as any others that you may have on your own site).
Taking stock of the available content on your website when creating your strategy gives you an idea of what you have available to share without having to write your own copy. This allows you to create an outline months in advance that will make it easier for you to manage your emails without taking too much time out of your busy day-to-day business tasks.
This also gives you an idea of what types of sections and areas of interest will be continuous topics in your emails, and how you should lay out your email template for consistency with each send - keeping in mind your brand's style of course (which should match your site for consistency).
Follow these three rules and you’re well on your way to a successful email marketing strategy. Remember to measure your email performance and use that data to determine if you're on the right track with your objectives, or if you need to make adjustments.
Interested in becoming an email marketing pro and learning more about email marketing strategies? Check out the Email Marketing Module as part of our Digital Marketing Bootcamp.
