Strategy and tactics are connected like Yin and Yang, their importance for effective Internet marketing is difficult to overestimate. And if at least one of these elements is not carefully thought out, for email success the email channel is unlikely to be profitable.
Detailed planning will help you avoid the complications associated with managing email newsletters and control performance indicators. Today we will talk about the role of strategy in email marketing and the key tactical aspects without which it is very difficult to get good results from the channel.
Email Marketing Isn’t Working? Here’s Why!
Before you take any action, you need to understand what goals they can help you achieve. Often, email marketers do not set clear goals, which negatively affects the profitability of the email channel. According to the colombia email list 4 million contact leads study , the lack of a strategy is one of the biggest problems preventing email marketing from being effective.
Your emails may seem well-written when you’ve spent hours designing and creating content, but if your campaign goals aren’t defined, they may just be shooting at sparrows with no clear way to measure their effectiveness.
A strategy helps simplify the execution of tasks
The goal of a strategy is to create a plan that will determine how to achieve the set goals, to whom and when to send different types of emails in order to get the most out of the email channel.
This doesn’t mean you can’t make adjustments and send out an unscheduled email if a newsworthy opportunity arises. But these unscheduled, hand-crafted emails should be a small part of your email marketing efforts.
The strategy helps create relevant offers for each subscriber. More than half of buyers say that they unsubscribe from newsletters because they receive irrelevant emails. The strategy allows you to think through different types for email success campaigns for different purposes and create newsletters that simultaneously solve the store’s marketing tasks and meet the needs of subscribers.
Planning an email campaign
Forming a strategy, just like laying a foundation when building a house, creates the basis for the effectiveness of the email channel. The first question you need to ask yourself is what you want to achieve with email marketing. For example, when an online store adds new products to its product range, marketers simply send out emails with new products to their entire subscriber base, hoping to “hook” as many potential customers as possible with bright images and CTA elements.
Remember that your subscribers are not just a list of email addresses in a database. They are emotional, they like to think that you care about them, they have interests and preferences, and they want to receive relevant offers from you. If a subscriber bought, for example, a down jacket in your online store a week ago for email success an email offering a new collection of down jackets is unlikely to encourage them to make a purchase. Rather, it will have the opposite effect.
Competitor Analysis
When starting to form any strategy, it is important to conduct research on competitors. Analyze how often your competitors send newsletters, what style of communication with subscribers they choose, what types of offers they use, how they design letters, what CTA elements they use in them. Study the types of email newsletters of your colleagues and competitors – those with whom you are competing for the attention of users: do they send welcome, service, reactivation letters, do they thank for purchases. It is also important to pay attention to what methods competitors use to convince visitors to subscribe to newsletters.
Competitor analysis will help you determine the value of your online store for subscribers, as well as build the right dialogue with them.
Audience segmentation
Segmenting subscribers allows you to offer them relevant offers and information based on their interests and preferences. When segmenting your audience, use knowledge of the psychological patterns of buyers – this increases the likelihood of a transition to the site.
Using surveys in email newsletters is a great way to segment subscribers and offer relevant products. For example, the Elc-Russia.ru online store, with the help of the Retail Rocket team, conducted an automated email campaign offering personalized recommendations based on subscriber interests and a survey on the age of children. This allowed the online store of children’s educational games not only to check the relevance of user data, segment the audience by age , but also to unobtrusively offer products that would be of maximum interest to each segment.
Email sending time
Test different sending times to determine the most effective intervals in which your subscribers want to receive emails. According to Retail Rocket analytics content marketing in 360 degrees show much greater efficiency than static ones, i.e. the same for everyone.
Dynamic sending time means determining the most favorable sending time for each specific subscriber. Using it, you will be able to deliver an email newsletter at the moment when the user is most likely interested in receiving an offer from the online store, i.e. maximizing the Open Rate coefficient.
Personalized approach
When writing content, developing designs and various graphic elements, forget about a uniform approach to all subscribers. However shopping data use a personalized approach that is focused on specific users and their interests in real time. Communicating with subscribers using personalized product recommendations allows you to create a sense of one-on-one communication. Feeling this attitude, the buyer makes a quicker decision about the purchase and is more loyal to the company.
If you haven’t tried mentioning the subscriber’s name in the subject or body of the email, it’s time to change that. Simply adding a name to an email helps users feel the attention of the online store.
Testing personalization by name in the email newsletter of the MrDom online store showed an increase in Open Rate by 9.4% and CTR by 10.3%, while the RPE (Revenue per Email) indicator increased by 134.7%.
Create a content plan
Think through your content plan in accordance with your strategy. Having clear deadlines and goals will help optimize the process of its creation. Separate types of content – this will allow you to fine-tune the email campaign as a whole. For example, you decided to send subscribers 3 emails weekly. To make the offered content useful and interesting for subscribers, try to diversify it: on one day of the week, send information about current discounts and promotions, on another – offers to the user of goods based on his preferences, on the third – new products and useful tips, etc.
Let’s sum it up
Set measurable goals. Key performance metrics (KPIs) allow you to get an objective picture of the current situation in the email channel based on specific data. There are quite a few metrics that can be used to analyze efficiency, but we will talk about them in more detail in the next article.
Don’t forget to evaluate the results at each stage. Comparing the indicators after a certain period of time will help you understand how effective the strategy is.