An effective email marketing campaign strategy can often drive more results for modern businesses than even the most impactful print and outdoor ads of years past. A big reason is the factor of engagement. An amazing magazine ad or billboard could undoubtedly leave an impression on people, but in most cases, they were literally miles away from a conversion. Even if they craved the product shown in the ad, they’d need to drive in their vehicle to a physical location to make a purchase.
Not so with emails, which provide a remarkable connection and empower recipients to learn more about your brand or complete a transaction within a matter of seconds. Rather than requiring a customer to pick up a phone, start up their car, or lace up their shoes for a walk, an email message simply invites them to click a button. This reduction of effort and expediency of delivery can help your bottom line as much as it does customers’ daily lives.
This guide will examine the role of email within marketing and share actionable advice for creating winning strategies for your brand.
Since emerging in the 1970s as a computer-based version of hand-delivered mail, emails have grown into a crucial element of our lives. Many of us probably can’t remember the last time we wrote a letter and placed it in a stamped envelope. But you probably sent an email right before reading this article, and you might have already received at least one or two new emails in the brief minutes that followed.
Humans have integrated email into their lives on a scale that has rarely been seen, with 4.6 billion of us possessing an email account. Estimates put the number of emails sent each day at about 333 billion, and the tally is expected to rise to 392 billion daily by 2026.
This frequency and familiarity combine to make email an essential asset for any modern business. Is there another marketing channel that can match the efficiency, reliability, and ROI of email marketing? Perhaps. But they’re few and far between.
Email marketing brings in about $10 billion in annual revenue
More than 80% of marketers use email newsletters as part of their marketing strategies
Email unsubscribe rates are often below one percent
Email enjoys higher engagement than social media content
Most marketers report that their email open rates are improving year-over-year
Even with the immense reach and connection email marketing offers, you won’t get far without an email marketing strategy. As the numbers suggest, just about anyone on earth can send an email. So it takes work to stand out from the billions of messages flying around on a daily basis.
Your first objective is to create an email marketing plan to guide your strategies and help track success.
Your email marketing strategy is the skeleton that gives structure to every campaign. While the tactics evolve and the audience may diversify, consistency remains because you’ll know where you started and where you’re headed. With your entire team referring to the same document, you’ll always know what good looks like, even when it sometimes takes more effort than anticipated to attain it. And all this hard work can be put into effect for future campaigns as you use it as a marketing campaign plan template.
Let’s look closer at the four-step process of creating an effective plan for your email strategies:
With billions of possible recipients, relevance takes on a whole new level of importance with email marketing. Who will you be targeting with your campaign? And where will these contacts be coming from?
Defining these details from the onset empowers you to use segmentation to personalize your messages. A giant collection of contacts, while impressive, is a surefire way to dilute your message. Break out the list into collections of people who share demographic identifiers, interests, motivations, occupations, or pain points, and your email strategy will be more potent in smaller doses delivered to the right individuals.
For your campaign to be cohesive and relevant, you’ll need to get the content dialed in. You already know your audience, so ponder on what will speak to them in the most powerful way. Are you going to wow them with aspirational imagery? Delight them with witty headlines? Educate them with detail-rich content?
It's true that individual elements of a campaign can highlight different sides of your brand, but there needs to be a unifying theme to the content. Think of your emails as chapters of one big story. So, you’ll need to identify a compelling story that will justify the messages you send.
The good news is that campaigns are multichannel affairs, and you can reuse top-performing content from your website, social media platforms, blog, webinars, and other channels. When done right, it won’t look redundant to readers. Rather, it’ll provide another touchpoint for the content that impacted them so much on the original channel. And for those who missed it the first time around, this can provide a much-appreciated chance to see it.
Knowing the “who” and “what” of a campaign leads to the consideration of “when.” The frequency of your emails depends on your audience's habits and preferences. Some people enjoy daily touchpoints, while others will respond better to a monthly or bi-monthly approach.
These types of decisions must be based on data and insights, rather than hunches. If you’ve already tested various send frequencies, draw from those results. If you haven’t done that yet, you can test two different frequencies for the first round of your campaign. Additionally, consider sending out a quick survey to ask your audience how often they’d like to hear from you.
An email marketing campaign strategy simply can’t be considered a success unless you know what success means. Talk with your team to outline a series of attainable goals that will substantially impact your brand and help you deliver the best customer experience.
Once you’ve outlined your campaign’s goals, the next step is to put metrics in place to track the progress. Common metrics include:
Open rates
Click-through rates (CTR)
Conversion rates
Unsubscribes
Forwards
These metrics will serve as the pulse for your campaign. When certain aspects of your emails lag, you’ll immediately know where to focus your testing and refinement efforts. And when other metrics soar to previously unseen highs, you’ll have valuable insights to include in your business’s marketing campaign plan template moving forward.
Now that we’ve covered the creation process for your email strategy plan, let’s look at a handful of best practices to keep your campaigns firing on all cylinders. You are probably already doing some of these things, but there’s always room for improvement in our marketing efforts.
Each email you send should support your overall campaign goals. But if it doesn’t also provide legitimate value to the recipient, you risk looking like a major narcissist. Making sure that every email has worth the reader can quickly see is the perfect way to build a trusting relationship with them and provide the types of positive interactions that build loyalty.
Email lists begin to degrade from the moment they’re formed because people do things like input erroneous or duplicate information, change their email addresses, or mark your messages as spam. Safeguard your send reputation and deliverability stats by continually weeding out dead weight from your lists and keeping them in top form.
In a classic case of misaligned priorities, many marketers labor over the headlines and body copy of an email, and then quickly crank out the subject lines before sending. Your subject lines are the doorway to the email, so anything less than greatness could render all your other work obsolete. There are numerous AI tools that can provide suggestions in a matter of seconds, so don’t feel like you’re on the hook for all the idea generation.
Throughout your emails, you should strive to communicate so clearly that it’s impossible to be misunderstood. This is particularly true with your calls to action. Use strong words that can be quickly scanned by those who don’t take the time to read the whole message. Examples could include wording like “Download my guide,” “Start my free trial,” or “Launch webinar.”
Your emails will always perform better when they connect with the recipient on a more intimate level. By segmenting your lists, you’ll be able to talk specifically about geographical locations, buying preferences, age, birthdate, occupation, marital status, and other elements. Rather than just being a virtual version of a parlor trick, personalizing the messages enhances the relevance and sparks a more emotional response. Conversions will likely follow.
Our team at Twilio SendGrid understands all the work that goes into email campaigns, and we’re dedicated to helping you get the maximum results. We help marketers send more than 100 billion emails every month and offer unmatched deliverability, which is why major brands like Yelp, Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb trust us for their campaigns.
Ready to see how our user-friendly platform can improve your marketing? Create a free account today and begin experiencing the email results you’ve been looking for.
