So you’ve decided to start email marketing for your business (smart decision!) or perhaps you’ve been sending email campaigns but want to be a bit more organized in your email marketing strategy (equally good decision).
Wherever you are in your email marketing journey, an email marketing plan will give you the goals, direction, and strategies you need to succeed. In this 7-step plan, we’ll have you:
Defining your goals
Learning about your target audience (and segmenting them)
Goals are the foundation of any good marketing plan, providing direction and narrowing the scope to help you focus on what is truly important. Take a look at your current email marketing efforts and see where your program could be optimized. If you’re just starting out, the goal could be to get up and running, and send an email weekly. If you’ve been sending emails for a while, the goal may be to increase open rates by 10% and to grow your subscriber list by 15% by the end of the year.
Consider using the SMART goal framework to set your email marketing KPIs. It’s really easy to say, “Our goal is to increase email engagement,” but what does that actually mean? What metric is that tied to? Over what period of time do you want to increase engagement? How much do you want to increase engagement by?
By leveraging SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound), you set yourself up for success by providing the concrete details you need to reach your goals. In this scenario a good alternative to “increase email engagement” would be “increase click-through rates by 10% within Q3.”
With your goals in hand, it’s time to flesh out your target audience. Gather as much information as possible about your ideal customer. You want to know what problems they’re trying to solve with your products or services, where they live, how they like to spend their time, and their preferred communications.
To find this information, you could track how they interact with your website, review past email campaign engagement, analyze purchase patterns, and send out surveys to collect data first-hand.
Once you’ve identified your customer personas, start looking at the common characteristics across your audience. For example, do they live across different time zones? What are their different demographics? Is some of your audience only interested in specific product offerings?
Use this information to segment your audience. Segmentation allows you to personalize email content, making the content hyper-relevant for your contact-base. Check out The Essential Guide to Segmentation for more details.
You could have the best email campaign on the planet, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a list of contacts to send the email to. While you could purchase contact lists, it is a much safer and healthier option to organically grow your email lists. Purchasing contact lists can lead to spam traps and contacts who are not engaged or interested in your emails.
To grow your email list organically, consider the following opt-in strategies:
Adding an email subscription form on your website: You could request emails in exchange for a coupon code, add pop-up subscription options on your blog content, or include it in the footer of your website
Creating helpful resources: Offering useful information through lead magnets such as webinars or downloadable e-books, templates, and checklists can be a great way to grow your contact list organically.
Before you outline your email content strategy, take a look at your company’s overall marketing goals and revisit your email marketing goals. With the email marketing goals, you can determine what types of emails make the most sense to focus on. (While a healthy email program typically leverages all types of marketing emails, we recognize that’s not always realistic, especially if you’re just starting out with email as a channel.)
If your goal focuses on growing your contact list, then perhaps an email newsletter with informational content is where you should focus your time. Or, if your goal is to increase conversions, then promotional emails may be in order.
Common email marketing types, include:
Welcome emails: Introducing a new contact to your email list.
Promotional emails: Sharing discounts or sales for promotional purposes.
Newsletters: An email that is informational in nature with the goal of providing helpful tips, articles, or resources.
Re-engagement: An email that contacts a subscriber that has not opened emails in a while in an attempt to re-engage them.
From there, use your team’s overall marketing strategy to identify the main focus areas, and KPIs and big ticket items for the year. These themes will help build out your email marketing strategy and calendar.
For example, let’s say your company has a big event every March. You’re going to want to send event invites and promotional emails leading up to the event, so you know the main theme for the first quarter of the year will be the event.
You can outline the rest of a year in a similar fashion, using events, data report releases, or seasonal sales to help you create email themes.
Take the outline you created in step four and start mapping it out on a calendar. Email marketing calendars keep your campaigns on track so you don’t miss important dates and avoid last-minute scrambles to get emails out the door.
Start with the projects that you know will require an email campaign and fill in the gaps from there. Work with your other marketing teammates to collaborate across marketing channels and sharing information in a timely manner.
When it comes to actually creating the email, there are a few key elements of email anatomy to keep in mind.
Sender name: This the sender name that shows up in the contact’s inbox. Choose either your brand’s name for recognizability or the name of someone who works at your business for a more personal touch.
Subject lines: Keep subject lines short and sweet. We’ve found that shorter subject lines typically perform better.
Preview text: Never skip the preview text! Preview text provides additional context and can help sway a contact’s decision to open your email.
Email design: Most of us aren’t designers, so it can be helpful to leverage an email service provider with a drag and drop tool or pre-created templates for ease-of-use. A good rule of thumb is to avoid large blocks of text and break up text with bullets or images.
Call-to-actions (CTAs): CTAs are the action you’d like your contacts to take after opening your email. This could be reading an article, RSVPing to an event, or purchasing a product. Try to limit the number of CTAs within an email to one or two.
Last, but certainly not least, spend some time at the end of each month and quarter tracking and analyzing your email campaigns. By studying open rates, click-through rates, and conversion metrics, you can learn what topics are resonating.
Take a look at the overall trends of your email marketing program. Are you gaining subscribers? Are open rates increasing? What about click-through rates?
From there, dig into the outliers. If an email performed incredibly well, what was different about it compared to your standard sends? If an email performed poorly, what do you attribute the poor performance to? This will help you identify how you can best optimize your email marketing campaigns moving forward.
An email marketing plan helps marketers stay organized, align initiatives to marketing KPIs, and ultimately, have a more successful email program. So don’t wait! Start mapping out your email marketing goals today, and if you need support, know that Twilio SendGrid has your back.
Twilio SendGrid helps you focus on your business without the cost and complexity of owning and maintaining an email infrastructure. And with a full-featured suite of email marketing tools, you can design, send, and track your emails with ease.
Explore Twilio SendGrid’s email offerings today with a free account.
