Email Marketing Strategy: What You Need to Do in 2024
An email marketing strategy is a clearly defined procedure or path that a marketer puts together to achieve a measurable marketing goal. The success of an email marketing strategy not only promotes a brand but also allows you to drive communication with potential leads and consequently increase revenue.
It also allows business owners automatically carry out pre-planned responsibilities in synchrony with the activities of their marketers. Setting up an email marketing strategy will help you measure marketing progress and optimize marketing resources for growth. Here is what you should do to set up an effective email marketing strategy for 2024.
Put Down Clear Marketing Goals
Your email marketing goals should be clear and must be achieving one or all of the following expectations. Increasing brand awareness, understanding customer preferences, making sales, or increasing customer interaction.
Your goals should say
- How many people should be in your email list by a certain time in the year.
- How much your click-through should be.
- How much sales you should get from your email marketing.
Use Email Marketing Tools
It is important to take advantage of email marketing tools to help you measure and automate your email marketing process. Email marketing tools can help you collect leads, segment leads, send automated messages and monitor interaction of the leads with your emails.
Establish Your Target-Audience
Whether you establish the right target audience or not can determine the success or failure of your email marketing strategy. Your email list should be the email addresses of people who have shown interest in your product.
This makes them potential customers, and as such have the tendency of buying your product soon. Irrespective of what channel your leads might be coming from, they must share a common characteristic of either being part of your existing market or your potential market.
Maximize your Lead Generation Channels
Ensure that you are taking advantage of all the channels in which you can use to generate leads. These include: your social media handles, website pages, social groups, events and other avenues peculiar to your business. Also ensure that you collect details necessary for marketing your business. Depending on your business, you might need people to give you their emails, full names and product category they might be interested in or problems they might be trying to solve related to solutions you offer.
While it is important that you don’t ask for too much information because you don’t want to scare potential leads away, you should also not shy away from asking for relevant data that would help you provide better services to your potential customers or suggest better products to them.
Segment your emails list
Segmenting your email list helps you send emails to people that might actually have need for the service or offer you are providing at that point. You can segment your email list right from when you are collecting them by creating different offers peculiar to your lead generation channel or as you monitor your email interactions when sending out emails. You can choose to do one or both of these segmenting techniques.
Create a Schedule for Sending Emails
After spending time crafting the perfect email, you need to make sure you are sending your emails at the time when they will most likely be read. You should also ensure that the emails are sent consistently and in predictive schedules. Most people read emails during the mornings, noon times and evenings. However you should conduct an A/B test to understand the best times for your audience.
Craft a Compelling Email Copy
Your email copy is like a billboard that tells your leads who you are and what they should do with you. This means that there should be a different email copy for each segment of your audience.
The most important part of your email copy is your subject line. People are more likely to click open emails with compelling subject lines. You should also give attention to a simple email body that quickly points to a call-to-action. The call-to-action is the end game of every email.
If your click-through rate is not increasing then you would need to review your email copy, your marketing offers or the characteristics of your target audience.
Optimize your crafted emails
After spending so much time and creativity on your emails, you need it out there being read. One very important factor that marketers tend to ignore is that people will receive emails through different devices; it is then necessary to develop emails optimized for the best reading experience through those reading platforms. In 2017 Adestra concluded that 83.8% of emails are accessed through mobile phones. Here are some tips to optimise mobile emailing:
- Keep your subject line short
- Keep emails around 550 – 600 pixels
- Try using templates that have one column alone
- Reduce the size of shown images
- Create unique CTAs
- Conduct mailing experiments on other devices
- Use bold fonts ranging from 12 – 15 pixels
Conduct A/B tests on your emails
This involves testing variables like subject lines, CTAs, offers, images and headlines of your email copy to find the one that customers best interacts with. Typically, you can carry out an A/B test when sending out your first batch of emails. Your email performance report can tell you which of the emails had the best performance. That way, you know the best email copy or format to use.
Monitor Email Performance Reports
Monitoring your email marketing performance helps you know what is working and what isn’t. A scheduled checkup on your email marketing performance helps you see where to make changes and create a new strategy if necessary.
Your email marketing automation tool can keep track of the following:
- Email open rates
- Amount of users that unsubscribe
- Email click-through rates
- Email delivery rates
- Email rebound rates
- Spam issues
- Subscribers
Wrapping Up
With an effective email marketing strategy, you can rapidly generate traffic and revenue for your business. While there is no one size fits all strategy for any business, the tips above will help you define and create what is best needed for your kind of business. While laying emphasis on monitoring your progress and making changes according to the results you observe. With time, email marketing can become your most effective digital marketing channel.