Have you heard about the benefits of a great email marketing strategy? It’s like a growth engine for your business!
The process of developing a strategy may seem complicated. After all, there’s a lot to learn about planning emails, copywriting, and the technical details of sending emails.
Fortunately, there are some straightforward steps you can take.
Whether you already have an email marketing campaign or you’re starting from scratch, this post will help you create an effective email marketing strategy that grows your business.
Let’s get started!
Make No Mistake — Email Marketing Is Still Relevant
Due to the popularity of TikTok and similar platforms, you might believe that email marketing is outdated.
That couldn’t be further from the truth…
Many People Use Email
Guess what? People still obsessively check their email. And the number of email users continues to grow.
Statisa has a mind-blowing fact: in 2020, there were 4 billion email users. And by 2025, that number will grow to an estimated 4.6 billion.
Crazy, right?
Statista also projects the number of emails sent daily to increase from 269 billion in 2017 to 376 billion by 2025.
While people don’t open every single email, MailChimp found that people open emails over 22% of the time.
If that isn’t enough to convince you…
Email Provides a Great Return
Email marketing is not just effective — it can also help you rake in money. That’s a win-win! Specifically, the average return on investment (ROI) per dollar spent on email marketing is $36.
And this ROI could explain why email marketing campaigns continue to grow. Total revenue from email marketing is estimated to increase from $7.5 billion in 2020 to $17 billion in 2027.
While social media is shiny and exciting, email marketing is still the quiet achiever with some tricks up its sleeve.
Benefits of Email Marketing Over Social Media
One advantage of an email marketing campaign is that you own your email list. Social media platforms, like Facebook, may limit the distribution of your posts — or even block you from the platform.
With an email strategy, you control what your target audience sees.
You also have the flexibility to send targeted emails to different customers. For example, you can show introductory brand messaging to new subscribers while running customized sales offers to established customers.
And you don’t need to pay much for these advantages.
Email Marketing Is Relatively Inexpensive
There are many things that make email marketing campaigns affordable:
- You can create and send an email efficiently — especially if they’re mostly text and you use email automation software.
- You can save time by writing emails with ChatGPT.
- You start with just an email marketing service. And there are many affordable options.
Compare that with the time you’d spend managing your social media — or the cost of paying someone to do it for you. Add on the advertising expense, plus the uncertainty of customer conversion and email marketing clearly comes out on top.
But while it’s affordable and profitable, you need to do it right. We have an in-depth email marketing guide if you want to dive deep or you can head right into…
11 Tips for an Effective Email Marketing Strategy
Like any skill, email marketing takes time to master. It’s best to choose one area to improve before you move on to the next one.
If you’re not sure where to start, try working your way through these email marketing best practices:
1. Provide Value With Every Email
Give people a reason to read your emails. Make it worth their time.
Providing value is critical because many businesses and personal interest groups compete for your readers’ limited attention. They will unsubscribe if they don’t find your emails worthwhile.
So study and fully understand your target audience’s perspectives, values, and problems. Use that information to create a great solution — as well as valuable emails.
Some examples of useful marketing email topics are:
- Inspiring stories and quotes that reflect their experiences and values.
- Announcements of free workshops or specific strategies to solve a small problem they commonly face.
- Promotional emails for your products and services.
What works for some readers won’t work for others. Play around and see what happens.
2. Personalize Your Email Content
Personalization doesn’t just mean using a person’s name in the email. In fact, some people find that creepy.
Rather, personalization involves connecting with the reader’s desires and emotions. As Harvard Business Review says, the pay-off potential is huge.
Try these tips:
- Use customer relations management (CRM) software and AI tools to provide personalized product recommendations based on past purchases.
- Send emails from your personal email address with your signature instead of a noreply address.
- Tailor your content marketing for a specific niche (based on demographics, interests, etc.) and only send those emails to people in that niche.
The third tip is its own cool category. Check it out!
3. Segment Your Subscribers
Segmentation involves separating your readers into groups and sending targeted emails to each.
Group together people who share common characteristics — like dog owners or people in the same age range — and send email content that appeals to their similarities. Encourage them to take the action you want them to take.
This differentiation can improve both conversion rates and revenue.
Some types of audience segmentation are:
- Whether they are likely to make a purchase or simply want free information.
- Their sales funnel position. For example, are they a potential customer or inactive subscriber?
- Demographics, such as geographic location, industry, etc.
But you don’t have to do all this work yourself.
4. Befriend Email Automation
Automation involves setting your email software to send emails automatically. It improves your email marketing strategy by:
- Leading to timely and consistent completion of tasks that support the customer journey.
- Allowing you to provide additional features for customers with minimal resources invested.
- Saving you time and money.
The easiest way to start is by using triggered campaigns, which automatically send emails to an audience member when a specific event happens. Some events include holidays, birthdays, purchases, or an item left in the cart.
You can also create email reminders for repeating purchases such as oil changes, makeup, or groceries.
5. Strategically Design Your Emails
Email design encompasses everything from use of color to location of buttons to the text formatting.
One of the major benefits to strategic email design is brand consistency: a look and feel that is replicated in every email. When readers know what to expect, they’re more likely to open future emails.
It also allows you to create an email template, which in turn increases your efficiency. That can lead to improved customer engagement and conversion rates.
Here are some unique design tips:
- Focus your emails on one action for the reader to do and a reason to do it.
- Make your emails mobile-friendly. Over 65% of online traffic is on a mobile device.
- Use visuals sparingly. They decrease loading time and cause some email services to mark the email as spam.
While design is important, your readers won’t see the email if the subject line doesn’t entice them to open it.
6. Shorten Subject Lines
According to research by GetResponse, subject lines between 61 and 70 characters had better open and click-through rates compared to longer subject lines.
If your subject lines are longer than 70 characters, shortening them will likely increase both customer engagement and revenue.
This post has more information about crafting great subject lines, but here are some tips to get you started:
- Keep the subject concise and focused on something the reader cares about.
- Induce curiosity by making an incomplete statement that withholds key information. For example:
- This student earned $10,000/month in their first year.
- A movie star’s shocking confession is making waves!
- Use emotional trigger words, such as “you” and “how to.”
Pro tip: run your subject lines through Coschedule’s subject line tester and confidently avoid spam filters.
7. Leverage Social Media
It’s another way to communicate so why not use it?
A social media presence will increase your brand awareness. You will reach new audiences through people’s natural inclination to share content. You can also partner with influencers to really grow your following.
Tips for incorporating social media into your email marketing strategy:
- Post offers on social media — people give you their email in return for a lead magnet or as part of a contest.
- Use social media to collect user-generated content (testimonials, photos, etc.) and use it in your emails.
- Test your audience’s interest in a product or service by measuring engagement with a related post.
Try it for yourself and see how social media can boost audience interaction and ROI.
8. Optimize Your CTAs
Each email should have one specific call to action (CTA). An optimized CTA increases the likelihood of readers taking the desired action, such as attending a webinar, making a purchase, or leaving a review.
Helpful tips to optimize your CTAs:
- Keep it clear and simple. Your audience needs to want it and see the value in it.
- Create one that involves a small step by your readers, rather than a big leap.
- Use a copywriting formula or creative email design to subconsciously guide readers towards your CTA.
It’s hard to know what will work. That’s why it’s critical to…
9. Track and Analyze Your Metrics
Email marketing strategies are about playing the long game. Not only do you need to track your metrics, you need to analyze them and know what the information is telling you.
Campaign Monitor has an extensive list of metrics to track but here are some of the most important ones:
- Open rate.
- Click-through rate (CTR).
- Unsubscribe rate.
- Revenue per subscriber.
- List growth rate.
Tracking these is easy — all you need is a good email marketing platform. And analyzing these metrics will help you highlight where your small business needs better execution or doesn’t fit market demand.
10. Conduct a Split Test
Split testing (also known as A/B testing) involves trying two different options and collecting the resulting data. The goal is to improve your various metrics from the previous tip.
Split testing involves a straightforward process:
- Pick the characteristic you want to evaluate. It could be subject lines, send times, button colors, copywriting formulas, etc.
- Write two identical emails, changing only what you’re testing.
- Send one email to part of your target audience and the other to a different group.
- Compare the results for each email.
- Send the best-performing email to the rest of your audience.
This method produces clear evidence to help you make informed decisions for increasing subscribers, revenue, and overall business success.
Of course, even the best email is useless if it doesn’t land in the reader’s inbox.
11. Improve Email Deliverability
Deliverability involves managing technical details so your emails have the best chance of reaching the reader’s inbox — instead of their spam or promotions folders.
If you have poor email deliverability, you could waste hard work (and money).
Consider these actions:
- Only add subscribers who consent to receive emails.
- Ask readers to add your email to their contacts.
- Segment your lists so readers only get information that interests them. You can discover their interests with surveys or sign-up forms.
- Keep your email service provider happy by using DomainKeys Identified Mail, having an option to unsubscribe, and making sure all links work.
- Remove any subscribers from your list if they haven’t opened your emails in a while. You can also send reactivation emails with special offers.
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything? Don’t sweat it.
Digital marketing is a vast field, and it’s okay to take it one step at a time. After all, slow and steady wins the race!
How To Elevate Your Email Marketing Strategy
Whether you’re a newbie just deploying your email marketing strategy or a seasoned pro, these practical tips can help your business grow.
Remember, you don’t have to be an overnight guru. Each small step you take, starting today, nudges you closer to a rockstar email marketing strategy.
Now go conquer those inboxes!
