Email marketing strategy: 11 ways to create effective email campaigns

In the age of digital marketing and other communication channels, email still remains the most effective mode of communication.

In fact, statistics reveal that 332 billion emails will be sent and received every day in 2022 alone. 

This explains why every business, big or small, prioritizes email marketing despite various other platforms that are available these days. So, let’s first understand the definition of email marketing strategy.

What is an email marketing strategy? 

An email marketing strategy is a series of actions that every marketer follows to achieve marketing goals using emails to connect with relevant audiences.

The aim is to run effective email marketing campaigns that yields the highest results in terms of brand value, conversions, and ROI.

Why is email marketing important for your business?

Email marketing is one of the most crucial aspects of your marketing process. Here is how email marketing helps you strategize your business process.

1. It can efficiently execute campaigns

Since your email campaigns reach directly into your subscribers’ inboxes, informational and personalized message can create a lot of opportunities for conversion.

Emails are transactional and action-oriented, as customers can directly respond to them by clicking on a link. The CTA, therefore, becomes more powerful and prompts action in real-time. These factors help in the seamless execution of your email marketing strategies.

2. It can evaluate the performance

The effectiveness of your email campaign is easily measured by tracking metrics.

This convenience in evaluating performance makes it easy to optimize your email marketing strategies to bring better results.

You can track email opens, email clicks, etc to gain insight into your email campaign performance and create better strategies.

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3. You can compare different strategies

Which strategy works best? What did customers like most?

This can easily be determined by comparing the performance of your different email marketing strategies and using the most effective approach to plan future campaigns.

11 Email marketing strategies that you need to implement

If you want to level up and create a successful email marketing campaign, then it’s crucial to implement email marketing strategies in your marketing process. Here are 11 email marketing strategies that you can implement to improve your email campaigns.

1. Find your target audience

Do you decide on what to say, before you know who you’re talking to? 

Similarly, do you decide on your email marketing content, before knowing who your target audience is? No, right?

Having a target audience helps set the style of communication and flow for your email marketing campaign. This allows you to build your marketing campaign around a particular group of people who are the ideal prospects and potential new customers for your business. 

For example, if your business sells furniture, your email marketing content will target homeowners or people who have recently purchased a new property.

It becomes easy to select the visuals, formats, language, tone, and CTA best suited to connect with and convert your target audience.

2. Build a list of prospects

An email list contains the contact details of people interested in receiving marketing communication and regular updates from your business.

You can collect email contacts via sign-up forms on your website, promotional pop-ups on entry and exit, and using prompts on social media.

Modern email marketing tips use discount coupons, squeeze pages, contests and giveaways to gain subscribers directly by promising value. You can create different email marketing campaigns based on your prospect’s preferences and actions.

Email lets you reach out to your subscribers in real-time, and isn’t affected by any changes in algorithms or rankings, as with other media platforms. This makes your email list your most important marketing asset.

3. Clearly define your goals

Define what you want to achieve with your email marketing strategy, to plan what you need to do to get there. Setting goals for the long and short term help you come up with actionable plans and milestones to map your progress.

As an example, your email marketing strategy can be focused on nurturing leads, maximizing ROI, increasing engagement with prospects, and providing value.

Email marketing benchmarks are metrics that give quantifiable results of how the campaign has performed in different aspects. This includes open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, forward/share rate, and more email marketing KPIs.

Non-quantifiable goals are set to define what the business wants to achieve in the long run, in terms of impact and emotional value. These include maintaining customer relationships, improving customer loyalty, brand awareness, etc.

4. Segment your email subscribers

Segmenting your subscribers allows you to run highly-targeted email marketing campaigns.

Businesses that used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in their revenue. 

Parameters like demographics (age, gender, occupation, location, etc.), interests, behavior, etc. help create segments. You can then create campaigns for these segments for better engagement and ROI.

Divide users into segments right from when they first sign up, by asking relevant questions in the subscription form. Ask subscribers for information so that you can deliver content that is best suited for them.

5. Identify which types of emails to send 

The goals that you want to achieve with your email marketing strategy determine the types of emails you should send to your customers.

Is your goal to promote new services?

Did your business just hit a new milestone?

Do you want to educate your prospect on what products would be best for them?

Or are you following up for reviews after a purchase?

Based on these survey questions, you can craft compelling emails for your subscribers.

The types of emails used in an email strategy include newsletters, welcome email series, announcements and milestones, post-purchase follow-ups, abandoned cart campaigns, seasonal campaigns, standard promotional campaigns, curated content and triggered emails, etc.

6. Personalize your content

Personalized emails have 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates.  

Your email marketing strategy can yield better results and higher ROI by personalizing content based on your prospect’s and customers’ preferences.

By crafting emails exactly suited to the segment’s demography and interests, you can deliver higher value to your subscribers with more engaging content and strong CTAs, therefore improving your metrics.

7. Optimize your emails for mobile screens 

If your emails are not optimized for mobile screens, you may be losing out on potential leads. 

With increased digital awareness, people are now trying to restrict their social media time. However, emails are checked throughout the day. Statistics show that 61.9% of emails are opened through mobile applications.

To make sure that your email marketing campaigns can easily be viewed on mobile screens, use smaller email subject lines and appropriate text size.

Optimize image size for faster loading time, and make the CTA easily noticeable.

In fact, using a mobile-responsive email template can increase unique mobile clicks by up to 15%.

8. Automate your email marketing campaigns 

According to statistics, 64% of businesses use email automation.

Autoresponder tools are used to send emails automatically to the audience. The benefit of automation is that a series of messages can be scheduled to be sent on a large scale, making your email marketing efforts more effective.

Triggered-based automation is a good way to reach your subscribers’ inbox at exactly the right time. In this, emails are sent based on the user’s behavior or interaction with the business. 

Trigger-based emails have up to 95% higher open rates.

Examples of email automation include welcome email after sign-up, follow-up emails about transactions and abandoned carts, confirmation for shipping and delivery, etc. To know more about email automation, here’s our complete email automation guide.

9. A/B test your campaigns

A/B testing is mainly used to test two different versions of the same email campaign by sending them to two different user groups.

The goal is to understand how small changes can affect the performance of your email marketing campaign.

A/B testing is used in an email marketing strategy to test the effectiveness of your current marketing strategies. This can be subject lines, length of copy, content depth, the offer, the format and layout, visual elements used or the CTA.

Businesses that use the A/B test for their emails generate an ROI of 48:1.

The tests need to be performed continuously, as consumer preferences change over time. A/B testing allows you to be more precise with your email marketing strategy, and capitalize on any opportunities that may arise.

10. Enhance email deliverability

So, you’ve crafted the perfect email for your campaign. But what happens if it never lands in your prospect’s inbox? 

Email deliverability or inbox placement is when your email successfully reaches your subscribers’ inbox. If not, it ends up in spam or gets blocked by the ISP (internet service provider).

To improve email deliverability, make sure it doesn’t get blocked by the ISP.

Authenticate your email domain so that it matches your associated IP address. Use the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or DKIM (Domain Keys Identification Mail) for this.

Stick to a regular schedule for sending emails, so that your sender score doesn’t go low.

Clear your email list and remove inactive subscribers who have not opened any emails for a while and maintain email list hygiene.

11. Measure performance

Measuring the effectiveness of an email campaign based on performance reports is important to fully develop an email marketing strategy.

Email marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are monitored and recorded over long and short periods. The monitored metrics include open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, forward/share rate, campaign ROI and list growth rate.

Based on these metrics, you can compare and analyze your email marketing performance to create better strategies.

Conclusion

Email marketing continues to be the most effective marketing channel for every growing business. A well-planned email marketing strategy has the potential to generate huge ROI.

Define clear goals for your strategy, and chalk out a detailed plan on how to achieve them. This includes the target audience, relevancy of email content, smooth and scheduled delivery with automation. Finally, test and evaluate the performance of your email campaign to come up with a strategy that works best for your business.