EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY BEST PRACTICES | YOU SHOULD KNOW

EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY 

Billboards, cold calling, ads. technology is making these less effective and more expensive. The Core principles of email marketing strategy:

• Rise of mobile devices
• Significance of segmentation
• Power of personalization
• Importance of data-driven analysis and optimization. 

An email has to be mobile optimized to be effective. Sustained success with email: stakeholder buy-in and commitment, software, an understanding of email’s role in your business. 

Best Practices for Email Marketing Strategy

Strategic Planning: 

Set up a schedule for timing, frequency, and content to improve your emails, and the database. Work together to decide:

• When is the right time to send an email?
• How often should you send emails? 
• How many emails should a lead receive? 

Good Email Service Provider:

The email service provider should have the ability to send automated emails based on user activity and analyze the success, have a landing page, and form functionality for generating leads. Important decisions to make include how will lead nurturing be used in your business?, How many emails are too many? What role will email play in the way you communicate with existing customers? 

Integration of Email Marketing:

Integration is still so effective because it’s a channel that’s connected to your contact database. This allows you to create a personalized and contextual message. Having your contact database have all social media handles to send timing with social media marketing personalized and contextual messages. Lifecycle marketing is how you communicate with your contacts – from their first point of contact through their lifespan as a paying customer.

Questions to Ask About your Email Recipients: 

Are they a new subscriber to your blog researching a problem they have? 

Or are they currently evaluating your company with your competitors so they can determine who to buy from?

Are they a customer who just purchased, or have they been a customer for some time already?  

73% of leads are not sales-ready and email is one of the most effective ways to nurture leads. Marketing learns from sales: what messaging resonates with your ideal customer, the challenges, goals, and pain points of your prospects, which offers best generate these ideal customers, and what content to create.

U.S. email users unsubscribe from email subscriptions because the content is no longer relevant. Loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much of their first purchase. 8% of companies truly deliver a superior customer experience. Email is a flexible customer success tool that offers lightweight support, responds to inquiries and requests quickly and efficiently, and provides access to additional products and services.  

Lifecycle Marketing for Leads

Map the content in your emails to the buyer’s journey, identify touch-points in your marketing and sales process. The Buyer’s journey is the research process a buyer goes through leading up to making a purchase. Like subscribing to your blog, filling out a contact form, requesting a consultation, and downloading a key offer. 

Lifecycle marketing for customers captures the right data and maps out the important parts of the customer lifecycle. Three customer stages include new customers, ongoing customers, and evangelists.

Can You Answer These Questions?

• Why did your customers purchase?
• What does success look like to them?
• How will they measure success?
• How can you help them be successful quickly and sustainably?

Using Email with New Customers

Emails for new transactions, welcome, confirmation, and recap meetings. Three rules for ongoing customer success are providing value, listening for cues, and paying attention to context. Evangelists are customers who believe so strongly in a product or service that they freely try and convince others to buy or use it. 

Creating email evangelists to provide exclusive access, give customer discounts, and create a referral program. Customer evangelist programs are social communities, case studies, testimonials, and customer reviews. Asking the folks is the best way to determine the right channel to communicate an update.

Segmenting Your Contacts

Segmentation empowers marketers to do relationship-driven marketing that drives results. Segmented email campaigns should improve opens, unique opens, clicks, bounces, abuse reports, and unsubs. 

Your contact database is a place to keep track of all contacts. Make sure your database is accurate and up-to-date. For an effective email marketing strategy segment your contacts using implicit and explicit data.

• Keep your contact database up-to-date, track contacts as they move through the buyer’s journey, set up and maintain integrations with other software. 
• Who they are, where they are in the purchase are two key segmenting opportunities.
• Buyer personas segmentation is based on real data about customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals.
• Company-related segmentation: company size, type, industry. 
• Role-related segmentation by department, seniority, and function.
• Behaviour-related segmentation: conversion events, email opens, and page views.
• Marketing intelligence-related segmentation includes social media data, source, and web analytics. 
• Build separate lists for your subscribers, leads, and customers and ensure that you send the right person the right message at the right time. 
• Create lists based on engagement: everyone who has visited your blog, pricing, opened an email, and all leads who found out about you through a specific source. 
• Create lists that measure email health: contacts who have unsubscribed bounced, not opened an email in the last year, all ineligible contacts. 

Best Practices for High-Performing Emails

1. Determine a primary goal for your email.
2. Optimize your email for opens, compel your reader to action.
3. The 5 W’s for each email: who, what, when, where, and why. 
4. Clicks and opens are not appropriate primary goals for an email sent. Identify a clear action like registering for a webinar, downloading whitepaper offers, and subs.