Since the beginning of the digital marketing era, emails have been part of the marketing strategy for nearly every business. This could be probably because emails allow businesses to target customers without spending much. Your email subscribers can help you achieve:
- Higher click-through rate for your emails
- Multiplied sales through email marketing
- Much higher traffic to your business blog
- Better response to your discount campaigns
To improve email open rates, consider using a clear and concise subject line that accurately reflects the content of the email. Having said that, one thing that piques interest is whether you need an effective email marketing strategy? The answer to this is yes. Allow us to let you why and how.
Why do you need an effective email marketing strategy?
An effective email marketing strategy is one where you are aware of who your customers are, what is the best time to send an email, etc. In short, you have sufficient information on the buying behavior of your potential customers. A well-designed email newsletter can also increase open rates by making the email visually appealing and easy to read.
This helps you target your customers better. Also, with the right strategies, the probability of converting readers to customers is high. Imagine a situation, when you know nothing about your customers and you market your products. The odds of conversion here are less as you might be pitching baby products to someone in the ’60s.
Irrelevant, right?
That’s why having an effective email marketing strategy is extremely important.
Now the next question is how!
How can you design and integrate the right email marketing strategy?
This article will walk you through a detailed guide to creating an email marketing strategy. Without much ado, let’s get started with the hacks for the creation of a successful email marketing strategy.
Define your goals
Before you start building your email list and targeting customers, you must have a clear picture of your end goals.
What we mean to say is what you want to achieve through email marketing. Whether you wish to acquire a new customer or promote your brand, pitch a product, or increase sales, everything must be known beforehand.
One way to achieve a good email open rate is to segment your email list and send targeted, personalized messages to specific groups of subscribers.
Running a successful open rate email campaign requires testing different subject lines, send times, and email formats to determine what works best for your audience.
For instance, if you wish to acquire new customers, the email content would be designed accordingly and pitched to the list of users who aren’t yet subscribed to your mailing list.
Build an organic email list
Sure, you can go ahead and buy an e-mail list but does that help? Apparently not! Most of the time you would find your emails swiftly moving to the spam box. Neither the users click through the mails and nor do they convert.
Building an email list might consume a considerable amount of time. However, the list would be genuine having customers who are more likely to click on the mail and visit your website. The best way to build such a list is to have a subscribe option within your website. This way, only interested customers would be part of your mailing list.
Icegram plugin helps you show beautiful and unannoying optins for email subscription.
Segment your email lists
Once you have the email list, the next thing to do is segmentation. It is by far the most important step as it helps you narrow down your approach, targeting the right customer with the right product.
Segmentation can be done based on a lot of parameters:
- Demographics – location, age, gender, job title, etc.
- Lifecycle stages of users
- Buying patterns
- User behaviour and engagement
Clean your email list
Having an email list isn’t the end. In fact, this is an ongoing process where you keep adding new ones and at the same time, remove inactive or irrelevant ones.
For example, if a customer has unsubscribed, having their name in the email list does no good. While doing this manually would consume time, WordPress plugins like Icegram Express automate the process helping you clean your email list without any hassle.
Also learn about best email list management practices.
Craft compelling subject lines
Email subject line is an important aspect when strategizing your email campaign. Subject lines that are interesting and appealing will gather the interest of the user, increasing the clickthrough rate. Significant strategies include adding the name of the recipient, using numbers, highlighting offers and new deals, etc. Try to avoid clickbait techniques.
Get the tone and timing right
The next thing to do is create a compelling structure and email content. No matter how effective the subject line is, if the content isn’t relevant, you might lose a potential customer. In addition to the above, you must time your emails right.
Have you ever thought about what the right time is?
To tell you, no time is the right time. Try and test sending emails at different times to find what time frame works best for you.
Use an attractive design
Besides content, the email appearance has to be appealing. Use a vertical layout, induce white spaces, avoid multiple images, keep paragraphs short, and sentences shorter.
Do not forget to add a CTA in the end. You can also leverage the features and functionalities offered by email marketing tools such as Icegram Express for designing your campaigns.
Schedule your emails
Create a pattern and align them with a strategy as to when will you send the emails. For example, certain companies send emails every day. This turns off the customer, turning out to be detrimental. Hence, schedule your emails keeping a sufficient gap between the two emails.
It’s better to run an autoresponder series and again, Icegram Express will help you do this job with ease.
Optimize your emails for mobile devices
The majority of the customers read emails on their mobile devices. This is because they can read them as and when feasible. Hence, your emails must be optimized for mobile devices. Failing the above, your customers might end up seeing overly large images or distorted emails, disrupting the user experience.
Make it easy for people to unsubscribe
While you wouldn’t like someone unsubscribing from the mailing list, yet doing the same will only help you clean your email list and improve the overall performance. Having subscribers that are less likely to open the email lowers the performance.
Record your results and adjust according to performance
Keep track of your email list, the percentage of emails opened, read, and abandoned. Having in-depth information on the same helps redesign the strategies and target customers better to improve the end to end performance.
Conclusion
Decades ago, the idea of email marketing saw the light of the day when Gary Thuerk, the Marketing Manager of Digital Equipment Corp, sent a commercial email to multiple email addresses at the same. Even though sending emails has become a norm by then, using the method to market products or services was entirely different. It is revolutionized already now.
Having said all of the above, it’s time to act. True that having an email marketing strategy is important. However manually executing each of the above, adds to manpower hours. Invest in Icegram Express, one of the best WordPress email marketing tools.
Download and install the tool today to get started with your first email marketing campaign.