Email marketing has become one of the best marketing tools for businesses. On average email marketing return on investment is around 42%, meaning that for every dollar spent on email marketing brings $42 in return.
In order to take advantage of these great returns you need to have a solid email marketing strategy. When creating your email marketing strategy there are multiple things you need to consider. This article will go over some areas you need to think about when you’re creating your email marketing strategy.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the process of building an email list and then sending out promotion or sales emails on a continuing basis to grow your business. Email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment out of almost every marketing tactic.
Connect to the right audience.
For any successful email marketing strategy the most important thing you need is your email list. When you organically grow your email list you will ensure that you are connecting with the right audience. You know that those you are reaching out to are interested in your business because they gave you permission to email them by trusting you with their email address in the first place.
In order to create a successful email list you will need to create a successful funnel that ends with your customer giving you their email address. The best way to do this is to give something of value to your customer in exchange for their email. This can be done multiple ways, through offering free information or exclusive offers and savings.
Once you have built up your list you can start sending emails promoting your products or services to those that are interested in what you have to offer. You can also go a step further by segmenting your email list into narrower lists that will allow you to personalize your emails even more.
Segmentation is the process of breaking down your email list into smaller segments that allow you to target a specific group in order to personalize the emails even further. Segmentation has proven to be one of the most effective strategies for email marketing. Marketers who personalize their emails show a 600% increase in their transaction rate.
Getting your email list built up and segmenting to further personalize your message should be your number one priority when you are starting an email marketing campaign. You may need to experiment with different elements of your website to create a successful email funnel, but once you get that figured out you will be amazed with the results of a successful email campaign.
Create goals and set expectations.
Before you send any emails you need to look at your current position and create some goals. You want to understand what you are wanting to accomplish with your email marketing campaign so you can have a solid direction and plan.
This can be anything from increasing revenue, transactions, customer retention, and much more. Whatever your goal may be, you need to be precise and start deciding how you can use email marketing to achieve your goals. You also need to revisit your goals on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
Once you know what you want to achieve you need to set some expectations for what is ahead of you. You will want to sign up for your competition’s email lists and try and see what they are doing and see if you can find any stats available for your competition or industry so you know what the market looks like.
Setting realistic expectations can help you from getting discouraged when you run into any obstacles down the road. If you know what is ahead of you, you can use these obstacles to find gaps in the market that you can fill and achieve the goals that you set for your business.
Create a schedule and stick to it.
Consistency is where many people fail. You have to create an email schedule and stick to it. While email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools available, it will take multiple emails to get a customer to click through. Not every email you send will be successful 100% of the time. Sending a set number of emails each week is where you will find success with email marketing.
Sending emails on a consistent basis also allows you to test different variables to see what works the best. For example, if you want to see if adding emojis in your subject line increases click through rates you need to have a base to compare your data to. If you were not sending a set number of emails without emojis in the subject line and then started sending a set number of emails each week with emojis in the subject line then you wouldn’t know if the emojis or the increased number of emails increased or decreased your click through rates.
The best way to stick to a schedule is to try and get a month or two ahead. Have each email you are going to send for the next month or so planned out. This way sending the emails on time will be the easy part.
Consistency will lead to results, as you grow your email list and continue to improve your emails sending the same amount of emails each and every week will lead to a successful email campaign.
Automate emails when it makes sense.
Automation tools can make email marketing easier and free up some of your time for you to focus on other important tasks. Automation tools are a set it and forget it kind of tool that will automatically send emails when an email on your email list meets certain criteria.
Automation tools are great for when people just sign up and you want to welcome them, when someone hasn’t clicked through an email in a certain amount of time, someone abandoned their cart, or when someone has or has not recently purchased a product.
Using automation can help you retain customers and increase sales. A survey showed that three automated abandoned cart emails increase sales by 69% on average. Setting up automated emails is a great addition to any email marketing strategy, and should be considered when the right conditions are met.
Track your results and be flexible
To create a successful email marketing strategy you need to use tracking your results by looking at the data. You need to know which emails are a success and which ones are not, this will allow you to hone in on what is working for your business and what is not. With this information you can test variables, figure out if your email marketing budget is too low or too high, and grow your business.
When you are using data tracking to guide your email marketing strategy you need to be flexible. If an email that you have scheduled does not bring the results you were expecting you need to be willing to change the schedule or email in order to get the results you are striving for.
Conclusion
Email marketing will help you grow your business when done correctly. Setting up a successful email marketing strategy is just the beginning. Here at Astoria Advertising Company we have helped countless businesses create email marketing strategies, write successful email campaigns,send them out to your email list, and track your results. If you need a professional marketing agency to help you with your email marketing you can reach out to us for a consultation.
