Establishing an E-mail Marketing Strategy
It is no secret that e-mail marketing is an excellent means of directly reaching your target audience. If e-mails are created, segmented and deployed properly, your company can obtain conversions, while generating a high ROI. What many don’t know is how to establish an e-mail marketing strategy that will ensure your efforts are successful. By consistently deploying branded e-mail campaigns to your target audience—be it your internal list of contacts, a third party list or both—you have the opportunity to enhance your customer and/or partner relationships, build your brand and increase leads and revenue.
At Rise, we believe that developing the proper strategy for the following areas is critical to your e-mail marketing success:
-Design
-Content
-List Building
-Segmentation
-Deployment
-Analytics
Design Strategy
The design of an e-mail is an extremely important factor in leading recipients down a path to conversion. The look and feel of your e-mail must closely reflect your brand’s identity, creating a seamless experience for the user. Additionally, be sure the e-mail’s table of contents, section headers and calls-to-action are designed and placed in a way that command the reader’s attention. This process could include adding design elements to text including larger fonts, bolding, using different colors, highlighting text, etc. If these items stand out from the rest of the content, you increase the chances of your audience reading and engaging in your e-mail.
Content Strategy
Though the design of an e-mail is very important, it is ultimately the content that will drive traffic to your site and increase conversions. It is important that you deliver compelling content whether it is an offer they can’t’ refuse, something newsworthy or it just makes them laugh. If the information provided in your e-mail does not peak the reader’s interest and instead essentially wastes their time, the chances of them opening your company’s e-mail the next time you deploy has just been severely diminished.
One of the largest challenges in this marketing channel is getting recipients to open the e-mail in the first place. Therefore, the most important item of content you provide may very well be the subject line. Some best practices include keeping the subject under 50 characters, avoiding spam-identifying words like “free” and adding localized words such as city names. Many more tips are available from Mail Chimp, one of the leaders in e-mail marketing.
List Building Strategy
Having a list of pre-qualified recipients and industry contacts that have opted in to receive your targeted messaging is indispensible. This list can be built out by including all of the contacts you meet at trade shows and/or networking events as well as adding current and prospective customers and partners. Also, adding links to your newsletter sign up (which should be on your website) to your e-mail signatures and your social media pages will help to build out the list.
Although it is not ideal, many companies (e.g. airfare sites) will choose to buy third-party lists in order to expand their reach. If you have to use this method it is important to check the legal status of the list, making sure you will not break any laws when you deploy. There are many other best practices that should be considered when marketing to a third-party list that are detailed on Charlwood’s website.
Segmentation Strategy
Segmenting your list allows you to divide it into sub-lists based on like interests, demographics and so on. This enables you to deliver the most targeted and relevant messages to each member in your directory. An effective segmentation strategy will therefore reduce deployment cost, increase conversion rate and improve ROI. If your company has multiple products or services that appeal to different demographics, you should make sure that you do not send unqualified segments of your base e-mails about offerings that they are not interested in. For example, if you are a nationwide sporting goods store – when you run a promotion on downhill ski equipment, you probably shouldn’t include your customer’s who live in Florida. On the flip, your customer base in Iowa probably isn’t too interested in Deep Sea fishing gear.
Deployment Strategy
The effective deployment of e-mails is an often overlooked, yet extremely important, variable towards the success of an e-mail marketing campaign. The day sent, time of day and frequency of deployments weigh heavily on what open rates will be. Though there is no time that is officially recognized as the best time of the week to blast e-mails, most agree that the middle of the week is ideal, avoiding Mondays and Fridays as many are out of the office. To that point, make sure you do not swamp your mailing list with e-mails, deploying only when you have relevant content to communicate. Also, identify your company as the sender and include a compelling subject line to grab your audience’s attention and increase your open rate.
Analytics Strategy
Effective analytics, reporting and analysis are the crux to any Internet marketing campaign. Each e-mail campaign manager should be sure to have the proper tags in place and reports available in your analytics package so that you can determine open rates, what links within the e-mail are most attractive and how the user is behaving once they are on your site. This data can then be used to optimize future e-mails and better funnel those who click through to your site towards conversion.
If you successfully carry out each of these six campaign elements, over time you will see an increase in Web traffic, conversions and ROI. Beyond that, your e-mails will deliver value to your current and potential customers, positioning you as an industry leader and valued resource and/or business partner.
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