Email marketing isn’t just about messaging your customers whenever you please to reach them. It is about reaching them at a time when they are most receptive to your message, leveraging a channel they naturally consume consistently bringing thoughtful, intentional value back to them each time.
To ensure you create an awesome email marketing strategy, follow the below 10 guidelines:
1. Conduct an audience and content audit!
Conduct a 360 audit to understand your audience better, via customer service teams, conducting customer interviews and conversations with product development teams. This helps understand your audience better, understand your audience needs, pain points and challenges.
Once you have collected both quantitative and qualitative data try matching your messaging content and tonality to serve your audience. Dive into the below to ensure you conduct an audit meaningfully:
i. Email templates and design – Leverage use tools like Klaviyo’s email template library, Really Good Emails, or Mail Charts. Check email content being leveraged by competitors in your industry vertical.
ii. Email Marketing Benchmarks – how does your email performance stack up vs competition? It is important to consistently benchmark your email campaign performance vs your competitors based on key email metrics.
iii. Zero- and First-Party Data – ensure your subscribers and customers are happy when you interact with them. This is only possible via personalization leveraging zero- and first-party data.
iv. Clear messaging across Customer Journey – Build clear messaging for each stage of your customers decision journey
2. Set goals that align with your overall brand goals!
i. Email list growth: should be focused on growing your subscribers, this is an ongoing exercise and must never end. More subscribers means more engaged customers, more conversions, and hence more revenue. Land a subscriber target based on your list growth goals.
ii. Engagement: align zero- and first-party data for list segmentation.
iii. Revenue: Ascertain the revenue you would like to target based on a solid subscriber base and overall revenue target.
iv. Fewer cart abandonments: for when a lot of people are visiting your site and almost buying.
v. Increased customer lifetime value (CLTV): for when you’re starting to see more loyal customers.
3. Choose the right email marketing tools: Some of the best email marketing tools, will allow seamless integration with various marketing technologies, allow for micro-targeted email, SMS marketing campaigns, allow for paid ads re-targeting, collect, unify, store and aggregate customer zero party data, reviews, UGC, loyalty programs, order, shipping notifications, advanced segmentation and personalization functionality and competitive pricing.
Email Marketing trends have changed a lot over years. Just like the marketing landscape is dynamic and your business is not the same as others, similarly all ESPs are not the same, so take care to choose ESPs wisely as they have a huge impact on your email marketing, other retention marketing capabilities, retention marketing revenue overall.
One of the most powerful customer data platforms is Klaviyo which powers more than 300+ pre-built technologies that help connect your customer data seamlessly to drive powerful results for your store.
Klaviyo’s data foundation allows you to drive business results faster and make smarter business decisions.
Other ESPs that are popular are Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Listrak, MailChimp and SendLane.
We will share another post on how to evaluate which ESP works best for your business soon!
Learn more on how to seize the retention opportunity post BFCM for your store here.
4. Sharpen your audience profile: Its important to sharpen the profile of your audience. The more precise your understanding of your customer, the better and more targeted your messaging and the better your results. Personalization of your emails is a powerful tool to connect, engage and build trust with your audience. Keep building on aggregating zero-party data based on your most accurate version of your audience profile to build a powerful revenue stream with email retention marketing.
5. Build an email list: Email marketing is alive and well because it’s where your brand gets attention after getting permission. Your email list is one of your marketing team’s most valuable assets because you own it – and no algorithm switch-up can take that away from you.
Encourage people to opt into your email list with sign-up forms by offering incentives like coupon codes, free shipping, or access to gated content in exchange for email addresses.
Learn more on how to build email lists for ecommerce stores here
Learn more about Smarte Digital email marketing services here
6. Design your emails and determine send frequency: Standing out in a barrage of emails received in an inbox is both an art and science. Your email design – format, fonts, colors, and text sizes determine how customers spend a good amount of time on basic email design best practices.
7. AB Testing of all email elements: consistently testing all email elements is a critical lever to maximize revenue. Testing subject lines, call to actions (CTAs) and frequency of sends. By constantly testing send frequency and tracking unsubscribe rates, we will be able to hit the best engagement rates.
8. Track and monitor performance: what does it mean to monitor email performance? Here are some of the key metrics one must track and monitor to ensure consistent email optimization for results.
a) Click Rate
b) Website and landing page visits
c) Conversion Rate
d) Revenue per recipient
e) Deliverability Rates
f) Unsubscribe Rate
g) List growth Rate
h) Return on investment (ROI)
9. Launching Segmentation & List Hygiene: Segmenting emails based on demographics, geography, purchase intent, buyer behavior and past purchase behavior is key to keeping your subscribers engaged with relevant email content and personalization. Without email messaging relevance subscribers will be quick to unsubscribe, lose interest and churn resulting in poor retention revenue and conversions overall.
Besides segmentation, list hygiene by means of regular list cleaning periodically is also key. List cleaning helps keep your subscriber list updated and relevant vs batch and blast and ensures your emails reach the right audience all the time.
Learn more on email marketing strategy examples here.
Develop an email marketing strategy plan by conducting an audit, getting to know your audiences, setting engagement and revenue goals, and spending a fair amount of time on email copy and design that fit your buyer personas and brand. Then focus on testing and optimization of your emails besides launching regular segmentation, list hygiene and continuous AB testing and optimization to ensure email retention marketing success.
Smarte Digital Inc. is an ecommerce retention marketing partner for modern DTC brands. We offer exclusive pricing offers for our ecommerce strategy consulting services and our lifecycle marketing services such as email marketing, SMS marketing services for Q1 2024.
We are also offering a free martech stack audit for Q1 2024. To identify gaps in your tech stack and optimize your martech stack, lets chat. Strengthen your foundational retention strategy now for growth, book a free 30 min discovery call with us at https://smartedigital/contact-us.
