How to set an email marketing strategy?
Marketing is undeniably one of the main aspects to grow any business and make it achieve greater heights. There are numerous ways by which you can market your business by targeting the relative audience.
However, Email Marketing is one of the best ways to target your desired audience directly without any medium. Just like any other marketing campaigning, Email Marketing also needs a proper plan or strategy that can be executed for getting desired results. Here we are showcasing you essential steps you must take to set up an effective email marketing strategy and grow your business in this highly competitive market. Check of the following steps given below to set up an email marketing strategy:
Define your goals
This is the first step where you need to define your goals as it is highly important before you start working upon the making strategies. Defining your goals simply means that you have to determine what you want to achieve at the end of this email marketing campaigning.
Choose right tools
The second step in the process is selecting appropriate tools for your email marketing campaigning. There are numerous tools available in the market that can help you in this process, however, finding the best one for your business remains a pain in the head. You can choose from some of the best email marketing tools including MailChimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and Campaign Monitor. Apart from this, you can also take some help from marketing automation tools like Autopilot, HubSpot, Pardot, Userfox, and Marketo.
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Generate an organic email list
Generating an organic email list is a crucial yet essential step to make your email marketing appropriate as per your expectations. You can also choose to buy email lists, however, the chance of failure increase drastically if you do so. To craft a highly effective email marketing strategy, you need to target an interested audience, not the people who are not interested in your services. The best way to make an organic email list is to embed a “subscribe” button at the service page of your website. By doing this, you will get an email list of interested people for your services.
Make segments for your email list
After getting the list of emails, you need to segment them based on different and desired parameters. Segmenting your email list can make your campaign even more effective as you can divide them based upon life cycle stages of users, Demographics (i.e. location, gender, age, job title), user behaviour, and purchasing frequency. Segmentation can help you in providing a personalization touch in your emails and is the core of a successful email marketing campaign.
Filter your email list
The biggest and most reliable source of your email marketing strategy is your subscriber list. However, people will unsubscribe your emails if they are no longer interested in your products or services. Hence, you need to check your email list and remove the people who have unsubscribed from your emails. Many of the email marketing tools come with an option to make this task done so you don’t need to spend hours removing unsubscribed people.
Craft delightful subject lines
Email subject lines keep great importance for your successful email campaigning. An email subject line is the first thing anyone sees when he/she will receive your email. We all are aware of the fact that the first impression is the last one, hence, your subject line must be highly compelling as per your targeted audience. There is no fixed formula for making an eye-catching subject line, however, you can keep some basic things in mind such as include the recipient’s name, avoid using phrases like ‘free’ and ‘earn money’, and keep it short.
Get the right tone and timing
Apart from creating delightful subject lines, you must make high-quality email content so that it may resonate with your audience without facing any hurdle. As we all know very well that content is the core of any marketing strategy, you need to put your brand’s voice clearly in front of your audience. Moreover, keeping a CTA button can prove to be beneficial for your campaign.
Select attractive design or template
Selecting and using an attractive design can drive heavy conversions for your business. It is a factor that can garnish your campaign to attract more leads. There are various factors that can make your design look highly compelling like a vertical layout, short sentences, short paragraphs, CTA button, avoid too many images, social media sharing buttons, your complete details in the footer.
A/B test your emails
A/B testing can prove to be a boosting element for your email marketing campaigns. You might not get the desired results in your first shot, hence, you can simply try 2-3 templates along with subject lines, design, and content. By doing this, you can simply analyze which one of the templates is performing better. You can even do this experiment with font sizes, colors, and other small things. Analyzing this can help you a lot in making your email marketing campaigns effective.
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Schedule your emails
For successful email marketing, it is necessary to be connected with your target audience regularly. However, sending too many emails can annoy your audience and they might unsubscribe you without wasting a second. Hence, it is important to finalize the frequency of your emails and make a schedule for your entire campaign before sending the first email based on your objectives.
Optimize emails for mobile devices
You must keep in mind that most of your emails will get opened on mobile phones. According to a litmus survey mobile is the most popular platform for checking emails. Hence, you need to optimize your emails and make them appropriate as per mobile platforms. Moreover, you should also check our designed email on a mobile phone whether it is working properly or not.
Make it easy to unsubscribe
It may seem a bit weird to put this point in the list, but it is also important to present you as a brand and not ending up in spam. There might be some people who do not want to get the emails for your services anymore, hence you must provide an easy way to get them out of this campaign without any hustle.
Conclusion
Email marketing can lead you toward a highly productive path in your business if it is implemented wisely. It can be a reason for a better relationship for you with your customers. You must have a deep understanding of your target audience and then the above-given steps can help you in doing the rest of the work. We have showcased all the important steps you must take for effective email marketing as per the best of our knowledge. All the very best for your upcoming campaigning.
Thirumalesh Prasad C G (Thiru) is an entrepreneur, Founder, and CEO of Inboundsys. He has over 22 years of experience working for various multinational IT products and services companies in India and abroad. He was a significant member and worked as a user interface architect, designing the user interface for many web applications and products. In addition to running Inboundsys, he is an advisory board member in various other design studios and digital marketing agencies. He is a passionate blogger who loves writing on digital marketing, inbound marketing, lifestyle, philosophy, positive thinking, and motivation.