How to Create the Email Marketing Strategy of your Dreams

Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic but a little hyperbole never hurt anyone. The point is, most companies need to be running an email marketing campaign. It has been proven ridiculously effective not only in getting new customers, but in maximising profit, and retaining established client bases.

Maybe you have some email marketing set up already. Maybe you’re happy with it, maybe you’re not. At Traffic Radius, we believe there’s always room for improvement, so regardless of how satisfied you are (or aren’t) with your email strategy, read on to find some information that might help you just push your email marketing to the next level, or you can call us on 1300 870 901 and we can do it for you!

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No? Okay then read on.

How to Start

The first thing to do is to set yourself some reasonable goals over a period of time. What do you want to achieve with this email marketing campaign? Do you want to expand your client base or capitalise on your existing one? Do you want to increase conversions or sell a particular product?

Once you have a firm, attainable goal you can start going about organising your email marketing strategy plan. This plan should provide a timeline of your email campaign, including what audience you’re targeting and any information that you have on that audience. Once you have a rough plan of who you’re targeting and how, you can start your email strategy in earnest by researching email platforms.

Email Platforms

Depending on how much you know about marketing, you may think that when we say “email platform” we mean something like Outlook or Gmail, in actuality, we mean tools like Mail Chimp, AWeber, or Constant Contact and others. These software platforms allows users to arrange a mailing list, segment it based on pretty much any feature they might want, and then send out targeted email blasts to the people on the mailing lists.

There are quite a few different mailing software, but all effective email marketing strategies use them as they’re the most efficient way to collate, organise, manage, and send out marketing emails all from the same platform.

Choosing a Platform

With the vast multitude of email platforms out there, how do you know which is best for your email marketing strategies? Fortunately, there are several clear criteria to follow when researching and considering email marketing platforms.

List Management

Managing an email list is a central feature of email marketing campaigns. List management allows you to make sure that your lists are filled with quality contacts, as well as ensure that your messages get to them and that you can track leads through the funnel, as well as more. See what your platform offers in terms of list management and it should open up some options.

Templates and Customisation

Aesthetics makes a big deal for anything to do with marketing. Most email platforms offer a range of attractive templates for use but some also feature powerful customisation options allowing you to create custom email templates.

Mobile Friendliness

Most people tend to use their mobiles for simple internet interactions. For anything you do that requires the internet, mobile should always be the first consideration. Whatever platform you use you must make sure that it is accessible for mobile use.

Analytics

Reading analytics is an incredibly important part of running any kind of marketing campaign, as it shows how well your content is being received. Any email marketing platform that doesn’t offer analytics isn’t worth using.

Testing Options

A/B Testing is a vital component of most marketing campaigns, as the content created is based on projections of your audience’s taste gained from data. Testing allows you to verify the accuracy of your data, and also to get a final projection of what your audience likes.

Automation

Most email platforms should be run so that you can set-and-forget. You should have the ability to craft your emails, schedule them for sending, and trust that your email marketing tool will send the emails to the appropriate addresses according to your schedule. This allows you to craft the necessary emails and get them to the right recipients ahead of time, freeing up more time for you to be focusing on your business.

Building and Organising a Subscriber List

This is the vital second stage of your email marketing campaign. Once you have set up your email platform you then need to start acquiring emails. We’ve seen a lot of impressive things but we’re yet to see any of the successful email marketing strategies work without actual email addresses to contact.

This begs the question how do you acquire these email addresses? There are many email acquisition strategies available, but the most common methods are:

• Create a dedicated landing page offering a special in exchange for emails and use SEO to get it ranking highly in the SERPs.
• Offering a special in exchange for emails on your store page.
• Giving a customer the chance to sign up for a mailing list at the checkout.

Create Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns refer to email marketing campaigns that utilise multiple pre-written emails that send automatically with certain actions taken by your customers. For example, if a customer signs up for your service, the beginning of a drip campaign could be a simple welcome email. This would be considered the first “drips”. Perhaps a week after that initial email has been sent you may have another email scheduled to send, offering customers a great look at your products and possibly even offering some incentive for them to come back to your website and purchase something.

Then perhaps a month after signing up, you have another email set up to send automatically, this time promoting specific items or bigger specials at your store. The point is that drip campaigns keep your customers connected and in the loop, and if you can target these campaigns to specific members of your audience, then it’s even better. Being targeted with your marketing is always better than being general. Which brings us to our next point.

Personalise Content

Email marketing is a great tool for spreading your content to your audience, but you need to make sure that your content is relevant to the audience members you’re sending it to. This is why it’s important to segment your mailing list according to certain factors such as age, sex, location, etc. Once you segment your mailing list properly, you will be able to send coordinated email blasts with your content making sure it’s going to the right people.

Send Reminder Emails

Sometimes people abandon carts because they just wanted to check the price of shipping on their desired items. Sometimes they made it to the cart while they were multi-tasking and simply forgot to checkout. Either way, there’s no harm in setting up an email that sends to the email accounts of people that have abandoned their carts to remind them to checkout. Maybe throw a sneaky 5% off as an incentive to follow through along with it?

Test and Improve

Once your emails are organised and actioned the only thing to do is to continuously build on and improve them. Check your analytics regularly, and improve your methods based on the data gained.

Or you could have trained and experienced experts like Traffic Radius do it for you.

We realise that segue might have been a bit blatant but we’re marketers, it’s what we do. Besides, email marketing (as you’ve seen) is a lot of work. It takes time to manage and expertise to manage effectively. Traffic Radius has been in the marketing industry since some of the internet’s earliest days. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses make their goals a reality, and we love working with companies like yours, priding ourselves on professional service and unbeatable expertise.

Traffic Radius can be contacted here, or through the number mentioned above, 1300 870 901.