Did you know that email marketing has a 4400% ROI (return on investment) and is relatively inexpensive to do? It also helps build customer relationships with your brand.
Having an email marketing strategy is essential and relevant for any business in 2021. Not convinced? Here are some very convincing email marketing statistics.
Welcome Emails have an 82% open rate. (GetResponse)
Personalization increases engagement. (ExperianMarketing)
3 abandoned cart emails get 69% more orders. (Omnisend)
60% of consumers subscribe to get promotions. (MarketingSherpa)
And there are plenty others not covered here.
So, if you are ready to create an email marketing strategy, where do you start?
Steps of Email Marketing
Firstly, if you are a new business and have set up a website with a subscribe form, you need to start there. Ideally, you set up your email automation before you go live. Here's a list of things to do before you go live with your e-commerce, blog or service-related website.
You will need to use a email marketing automation tool for your business to make email marketing easy. All of these have a different features from pretty simple (Constant Contact) to very robust (HubSpot) and varying monthly subscription rates.
Some of my recommendations are;
Familiarize yourself with email compliance (CASL or CAN-SPAM) laws before you launch your website to ensure you are being compliant. They vary based on country and can require some record keeping. You may have an opt-in disclaimer with a checkbox to show express consent. Set up a double opt-in process that ensures new subscribers receive a confirmation email with a link they need to click in order to confirm their subscription. Most email platforms already automate this for you.
Create a Welcome Email that new subscribers receive after they confirm their subscription. This email should tell them what they will receive from you in the future and it's a great way to include some CTAs (Call-To-Actions) to great things on your site (a blog, tutorials, freebies). This email is not for selling or to promote product/services.
Set up a series of emails, a customer journey, that provides your subscribers with consistent and valuable information (Educational, Entertaining, Promotional, Inspirational). You can spread them out based on days or by actions like clicks on certain CTAs.
Try doing A/B testing on your email subject lines or emails themselves. This means setting up two separate emails, sending them both out to two separate segments of your subscriber base and seeing which performs better.
You can also segment your subscribers by certain behaviors, like clicks, opens etc. or identifiers like age, geography etc., and you can set up additional automations based on those segments.
When you set up these emails, include personalization (Name) to increase engagement.
Add 1-2 clear CTAs (Call To Actions) and try to use the 80-20 rule, give 80% valuable content with 20% selling (unless you are a retailer for example, that typically only send promotional emails.)
Make sure you're checking your analytics monthly and modifying as needed.
The best part about Email Marketing is that you control the message, and it is delivered right to your audience's inbox, and it is something they asked for.
There are a lot of great resources on Email Marketing Strategy online. Some of my favorite links are below. Good luck!
MailChimp Resources