What is an Email Marketing Strategy?

In email marketing, it’s important to clearly identify your goals and then build a path to execute on them. This is known as an email marketing strategy.

Email marketing remains a highly effective method for engaging with your customer base at a low cost, but it’s important to map out a clear cut email marketing strategy for every customer segment. Sending “batch and blast” messages is likely to result in disengagement, as your customers will get frustrated by irrelevant messaging that doesn’t meet their needs. This could lead them to unsubscribe from your emails or, even worse, mark your campaigns as spam.

To develop a truly effective email marketing strategy that helps you generate customer loyalty and increase revenue, it’s important to follow these best practices.

Build Your List Ethically

You should avoid purchasing contact information from third parties—you’ll risk your IP address getting blocklisted as soon as customers’ spam reports start coming in. To build an engaged and relevant contact list, you need to build a list of dedicated, opted-in subscribers. Focus on using third-party advertising platforms and social media channels to begin building your audience. Through these channels you can then encourage your followers to download your app or subscribe to your mailing list for a promotional discount.

It’s likely you’ll use multiple avenues for growing your list. You might run targeted ads to users who meet specific criteria, offering them a free item for subscribing. You can also encourage your existing subscribers to promote your brand to their friends for rewards points or an additional discount. The specifics will vary based on your brand and budget, but whatever methods you use, make sure that your subscribers have knowingly consented to share their contact information and receive your marketing messages.

Segment Your Customer Base

You may have thousands of customers, but they don’t all have the same experiences or needs. So, you should avoid sending them all the same email marketing campaigns.

Instead, you can segment your customers based on numerous criteria, including age, identified gender, location, household size, income, and other demographic details. Beyond that, you can leverage purchase and behavioral data to track their interactions with your brand and understand where they are in the customer lifecycle at any given time, using real-time actions as behavioral triggers for launching or modifying your marketing campaigns.

With a best-in-class cross-channel marketing platform like Iterable, you can segment your customers down to an individual level. Iterable can draw in customer data from all of your marketing technology solutions, including your CRM, e-commerce solution, website and app analytics, and more.

By building a 360-degree customer view, you can draw insights about your customers to dynamically generate personalized product recommendations based on products they’ve purchased or viewed. You’ll be able to build a deeper level of engagement with your customers by providing more relevant content that meets their exact needs and preferences.

Use A/B Testing

To deliver the most effective email marketing campaigns, it’s important to continually test various elements of your campaigns to understand which ones are most effective. You might try A/B testing an email subject line, graphic design, or CTA to see which one is the best performer.

Once you have an adequate sample size, you can shift over all of your remaining recipients to the winning variant, and then test a new element of your campaign. By constantly tweaking your campaigns and optimizing for the best-performing variants, you should be able to demonstrate a sizable lift in your campaign results over time.

Incorporate Cross-Channel Integration

Today’s customers interact with brands through many different marketing channels, including email, SMS, in-app messages, push notifications, direct mail, and social media. To deliver a unified marketing experience, it’s important to develop an email marketing strategy that reaches beyond email alone and incorporates it as one element of a broader marketing mix.

Your cross-channel marketing plan should include dynamic workflows that incorporate a mix of channels with sequenced messaging based on your customer’s response at each stage. For example, your campaign might begin with an email marketing promotion, then, if the customer hasn’t clicked on the email link, you can follow up several hours later with a push notification. The goal is to optimize your campaign performance for the channels that perform best on a user-by-user basis, encouraging your customers to use the channels they prefer to interact with your brand.

The Benefits of a Strong Email Marketing Strategy

By building an email marketing strategy that’s part of a unified approach to cross-channel marketing, you’ll be able to maximize the ROI of your email marketing efforts. Rather than send out generic messages that won’t engage your customer base, you can use all of your cross-channel data to dynamically build highly personalized marketing campaigns that will resonate with each user based on their unique interests and behaviors.

You’ll also be able to track the success of each campaign and automatically optimize your emails to achieve the best results on a segment by segment basis. And, by aligning your email marketing strategy with a unified cross-channel strategy, you can develop cohesive messaging across each channel that meets your customers exactly where they are, with the content that’s most likely to appeal to them.