Email marketing strategy and tips for successful campaigns

Email marketing helps drive sales. If you’re not collecting GDPR-approved email leads from your website and entering them into an email pipeline; you’re missing a trick. Today, we’ll share a basic email marketing strategy and tips for successful campaigns that you can launch in minutes.

Why send emails?

There are a lot of reasons to launch an email marketing strategy. Here are just a few:

1. Customers prefer to get updates from brands via email.
2. You can collect feedback to improve your service.
3. Emails influence client buying habits.
4. Emails create traffic to your website.
5. Comms help you court 2-way contact with your clients.
6. Emails are one of the cheapest forms of advertising.

Basic email marketing strategy

To create an email marketing strategy that will work for your business, first, you need a clean email list. This means you’ve removed anyone who doesn’t have updated consent, has unsubscribed in the past or is unsuitable for email marketing for any other reason. You can collect emails on your website, via social media, at the point of sale and in a number of other ways. Do not buy an email marketing list – it’s unlikely to provide good value for money and may violate the current GDPR legislation. Once you have a clean list, make sure to provide a way for contacts to instantly opt-out. If they don’t want to hear from you, you won’t want to be paying to talk to them. Also, consider enriching your data with information from your CRM like purchase habits, buyer profiles and more. Segmented emails earn even higher ROI than plain email blasts.

Now, once you have a good list, you’ll want to plan the following emails to start:

Emails to send to clients

• A welcome email – let them know what to expect from your company and comms strategy.
• Nurturing campaign – if they’ve just joined, create an automated walkthrough of the most critical info about your products or services.
• Announcement email – when something big happens at your company, have a way to share it fast!
• Feedback request – make sure you’re giving them a chance to tell you what’s good and what’s not working.
• Sales email – got a great offer on? Here’s your chance to shout about it.
• Newsletter – here you can educate and inform, share the weekly/monthly goings-on and keep your customers connected.
• Annual wrap-up – think ‘year in review’ here, how can you show your contacts where they’ve come from?
• Gift email – everyone loves to get a little something back. So, a birthday or free gift offer email will prove to be one of your most popular levers.

What email metrics to track

Once you send your emails, you don’t want to stop there. Make sure to track the core KPIs of email. These are clickthrough rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, shares/forwards, growth rate, ROI, open rate and unsubscribes. Use this to inform and refine your strategy around the core content that your audience wants to see.

And once they’re headed to your website, make sure it’s optimised to drive sales. We can help with that.