How to create an email marketing strategy

It’s said “if you fail to plan you plan to fail” and when it comes to email marketing this is true too. Creating an email marketing strategy is not complicated at all. We’ll guide you through the process to set up a simple email marketing strategy for your business.

What is it?

An email marketing strategy is a guiding force to help you reach your goals and objectives for email marketing by putting together certain rules or processes that you can follow when you send out campaigns.

Why should you create an email marketing strategy?

As mentioned before, planning is really important. Without a clear idea why you’re investing your time and hard earned money in a marketing channel, you may lose interest or forget to send out communication to your audience on a regular basis.

Other reasons to create an email strategy:

• It keeps your content focused.
• It takes away the pressure and stress of sending emails as you already know what you want to send.
• You can easily address your website visitors personally based on the information they’ve provided to you.
• It gives you a way to reach your audience at a time that is convenient for you.
• Email is uncomplicated and easy to measure.

Let’s get started and create your strategy:

What are your goals for email marketing?

The first thing you will want to do is define what your goals are for your email marketing efforts. You might say, “I just want to increase my sales” and that’s perfectly fine, but you need to think about what will help you to achieve that long term. Email marketing can help you build relationships which over time will increase your sales.

Some goals you can consider are:

• Acquiring new customers
• Building relationships with existing customers
• Increasing brand loyalty
• Get more website traffic
• Increase brand visibility
• Increase sales

You’ll want to make these measurable and use a baseline to see how you improve. Don’t worry, if you’ve never sent email campaigns before, you can send out a few campaigns first and establish a baseline from there.

Who’s buying your product?

No one knows your business better than you. To start figuring out your email strategy, you need to look at who your current audience or clients are. Looking at who your current audience is will help you grow your subscriber list by offering you more information about what this audience is interested in. This is where any demographic information is super helpful

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why should anyone subscribe?
• What’s in it for the subscriber?
• How do I engage them in the communication?

Asking these questions will help you identify areas which you can use to entice and retain subscribers on your list. This way you can make sure that you are always adding value to your audience.

Sign me up

You’ve now identified why you’re emailing subscribers and what they look like, now it’s time to make sure you build your list.

Setting up your form doesn’t have to be complicated, but you’ll want to ensure you add all the fields to your form that you want to use to segment your subscriber base in the future. Segmentation can help you ensure that you are sending the most relevant content to your subscribers, based on the information and preferences they’ve provided to you.

Simply build your form in our form builder and embed it on your website. You can use your other channels (like social media) to encourage users to subscribe to your list. If you have multiple services, you can even create different forms to specifically target different audiences in your business.

Copy: what do you want to write about?

You don’t have to write out all the content you want to create from the start, but you might want to create different content categories to help you keep things relevant.

Content ideas to get you started (you can put your own creative spin on this):

• Send a newsletter about new products
• Promote any sales or products
• Highlight a product or service
• Introduce your team
• Tips and tricks (about your product or service)
• Useful reviews (that your audience would find helpful)
• Business overview or history
• Message from your CEO/Founder
• Photos your audience have shared
• Thank you email (for donors or people who’ve supported your business)
• Invitations to exclusive events/launches

Don’t forget to pay special attention to your subject lines. A subject line is what will make your subscriber decide whether to open your mail or not.

1, 2, 3? Frequency

How often should you send? Part of creating your email strategy is to ensure that you decide on a specific frequency to your sends. You can increase or decrease the frequency based on your unique needs at a point of time. If you’re starting out, just start by sending an email once a week and then build up from there as you have more to say and find your groove.

You could also ask your subscribers to decide how frequently they want to be contacted as part of your subscription box by adding a simple checkbox they can tick (this is a great tip to help you segment)

Why you should have a regular sending schedule:

• Subscribers get used to checking their emails to read your emails
• If you don’t send frequently, subscribers might forget that they’ve subscribed, which means your unsubscribe rates might increase
• Frequency can be a big contributor to your engagement stats, if you send too many emails people might become frustrated and not find your content value, but if you also don’t reach out enough, you can’t build good relationships with your audience.

Use an email template:

It’s really useful to create an email template to help you easily create your campaigns. Email templates allow you to quickly update content and images to reduce the time and effort it takes to make beautiful campaigns. Mail Blaze offers a wide variety of free email templates that are built into our platform.

Email campaigns help you to:

• Create brand consistency
• Save time
• Save money

To find out more about why email templates are useful to you, read our article What’s so great about email templates?

Closing thoughts:

Email marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, in fact, it’s a cost-effective personal communication channel that can help you reach your sales and marketing goals.