9-Step Email Marketing Strategy
Nailing the right email marketing strategy for your business can take a bit of work, experience, and experimentation—but once you do get it set up and running, you can enjoy the benefits of a marketing channel that provides an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 per every $1 spent!
At Reach Interactive, it’s our business to drive results for yours. We use email marketing and other digital channels to help drive traffic, generate leads, and grow your business. Here is our signature 9-step process for developing an effective email marketing strategy.
1. Sign up Incentives
The foundation of any email strategy is a robust list of subscribers. Offering compelling sign-up incentives can entice potential subscribers to join your mailing list. These incentives can include discounts, exclusive content, free resources, or access to special events. The goal is to provide value to your audience in exchange for their email addresses, setting the stage for a positive email relationship.
2. Compliance & Consent
Respecting privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM, is non-negotiable in email marketing. Ensure you have the necessary consent to send emails to your subscribers and provide easy options for unsubscribing. Compliance builds trust and helps you avoid legal issues that can harm your reputation, email deliverability, and bottom line.
3. Segmentation
Before your subscribers come in, you’ll want to consider how you will categorize and organize them. You can ask them for specific information at sign-up, like what type of information they’re interested in receiving, or use cookies to track their behaviors and interaction with your brand, like if they’ve visited a particular product more than once. Segmentation lets you learn more about your subscribers and send them content that keeps them engaged.
4. Personalization
Generic emails are one of the quickest routes to the “unsubscribe” list. Instead, use the information you gather from your segmentation strategy to group users and send them only the information they’ll likely be interested in and will engage with. Personalizing your emails will help boost engagement, conversion rates, and overall satisfaction.
5. Automation
As your list grows, it can be hard to keep up with each user individually. That’s where automation tools come in. Choose different “triggers” to send automatic messages to subscribers. For example, you may set up an email with a discount code for a particular product. Whenever subscribers visit that product on your website, they receive that discount email, letting you send them the right message at the right time—automatically.
6. Value-Centric Content
Not every email should be a push to buy. You should also include content that readers will find valuable, such as educational content, helpful tips, industry insights, or even fun and silly messaging that brightens their day. What type of content you create will depend heavily on your business and the customer persona you are speaking to.
7. Testing & Optimization
While email is a fairly passive marketing tool (after the initial set-up), it is important to continue tweaking and pivoting your strategy to maximize your results. Regularly reviewing your analytics and testing different strategies is the best way to make that happen. Most email tools come with A/B testing features, so you can try out different subject lines, call-to-actions, send times, or even content to see what performs best with your users.
8. Consistency
Email marketing is all about staying top of mind and keeping the conversation going with your customers, which means you should be consistently sending out relevant and value-packed content. Whether it’s a mid-week touch base, a weekly newsletter, or a monthly round-up, creating and sticking to a consistent publishing schedule helps keep readers engaged and prevents them from unsubscribing or, worse, hitting spam because they haven’t heard from you and forgot they signed up.
9. List Cleansing
Just as you segment users based on behaviors, you should also regularly check in and cleanse your list to remove users who are no longer engaged or are spam accounts. List cleansing helps you direct your focus and efforts on relevant leads who are more likely to convert. It also helps to improve metrics, like engagement scores and click-through rates, so you can get a clearer picture of what’s working and what’s not.
Need Help With Your Email Marketing Strategy?
We’ve got you covered! Marketing is hard, especially when you’re busy running an entire business. Schedule a call with our team at Reach Interactive and let us help you build an email marketing strategy that works!