Email marketing is one of the most efficient and cost-effective tools for engaging your clients and customers, nurturing leads, and driving conversions. However, some businesses are more ready to utilize email marketing than others.
Many businesses fall into the trap of jumping into email marketing without knowing if they’re ready for it. Like a person heading into battle with a feather duster, some people just don’t have the resources available to succeed. The good news is that there are steps you can take to see if your business is set up for email marketing glory.
- Identify the role email will play within your larger digital marketing landscape.
- Establish the necessary foundations for email marketing.
Ready to ensure that your email won’t fail? Let’s explore the crucial role that email marketing can play in your digital marketing strategy and what you’ll need for success.
Understanding the Role Email Will Play in Your Digital Marketing Plan
Before diving into email marketing, it’s essential to understand and define the role it will play in your overall digital marketing strategy. Email marketing can serve various purposes for your business.
- Nurturing Leads: Use email to build relationships with potential customers by providing valuable content and information that guides them through the buyer’s journey. Nurturing leads through email is an extremely important, and yet sometimes overlooked, strategy. Without consistent follow-up and nurturing, the work you’ve done to acquire a new lead, prospect, or customer could go to waste. Regularly sending relevant content can help keep leads engaged and move them closer to a purchasing decision.
- Driving Conversions: Target specific segments of your audience with tailored offers and calls to action that encourage them to make a purchase or take another desired action. If you offer services or products, think of ways to implement cross-selling strategies to increase ROI. Promote relevant content that’s deeper in the marketing funnel via email to continue working your prospects and current customers down the funnel. This content could include special promotions, limited-time offers, and personalized product recommendations based on past behavior or preferences.
- Building Brand Awareness: Regular communication helps keep your brand top-of-mind for your audience, reinforcing your brand identity and values. Sending regular newsletters that keep your contact lists up to date with what’s happening in your company is a great way to build brand awareness. Share company news, behind-the-scenes looks, industry insights, and other content that highlights your brand’s personality and expertise.
- Customer Retention: Engage existing customers with personalized content, special offers, and updates to foster loyalty and repeat business. Personalized emails can include loyalty program updates, exclusive discounts, birthday or anniversary offers, and invitations to special events. By acknowledging and rewarding your customers’ loyalty, you can increase customer satisfaction and encourage repeat purchases.
- Sales Nurturing: Email can play a huge role in supporting your sales efforts, automating some processes and alleviating your sales team’s workload. By sending targeted, automated follow-ups and nurturing emails, you can keep potential customers engaged and move them through the sales funnel more efficiently. Automated email sequences can be set up to follow up with leads after initial contact, provide additional information, answer common questions, and offer trial periods or demos.
Make a list of all the ways you think email could help support and enhance your current marketing and communication efforts. Consider the various purposes listed above and how they align with your business objectives, especially if you have any SMART goals that they can support.
Build a Foundation for Email Marketing
Even if you understand exactly how email marketing can benefit you, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a foundation to use it to your advantage. There are several foundational elements that you need to effectively execute an email marketing strategy.
Content Backlog/Future Content
Creating valuable content is the backbone of any successful email marketing campaign. Having a content process in place allows you to establish a consistent and engaging email marketing strategy that keeps your audience informed and interested.
While content creation can be resource-intensive and time-consuming, it doesn't have to be stressful. Here are a few things to consider and how to prepare.
- Different Types of Content: There are many different types of content that you can use in your email marketing strategy to cater to audience preferences and different stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Relevant Blog Posts: Share blog posts that position you as a thought leader in your industry.
- eBooks and Helpful Guides: Offer in-depth guides and eBooks that provide value and insight into specific topics.
- Whitepapers and Case Studies: Provide comprehensive reports that offer detailed information and analysis on particular subjects or previous work, showcasing your expertise.
- Live or Evergreen Webinars: Host live webinars or provide recordings of past webinars to educate your audience in real-time or on-demand.
- Free Trials, Demos, and Product Highlights: Promote trials, demos, and product features to attract potential customers.
- Repurposing Content: Finding different ways to use existing content allows you to maximize your resources and extend the reach of your content. For example, you can break up an eBook covering all aspects of email marketing into shorter blog posts for your website. These posts can then be shared individually via email and across other platforms.
- Content Backlog: It’s hard to fully take advantage of email without content. Build a repository of high-quality content that you can draw from for your email campaigns. Having a content backlog ensures you always have valuable content ready to share with your audience.
- Future Content Planning: Develop a content calendar that outlines what content you’ll create and when it will be distributed. This calendar allows you to plan ahead and ensure that a steady stream of fresh, relevant content is ready to share with your audience.
Email Lists
A quality, well-maintained email list is essential for effective email marketing. A well-segmented and clean list ensures your messages reach the right people and achieve the desired results. Whether you’re starting with an existing high-quality list or from scratch, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Building Your List: Use various methods to grow your email list, such as offering lead magnets, hosting live or evergreen webinars, and using signup forms on your website and social media channels.
- Segmenting Your List: If you’re just starting out, implement a list segmentation strategy right away. Simple segmentation, such as separating prospects and clients, can significantly impact your email marketing effectiveness. A segmented list allows you to send more targeted and relevant content, resulting in better engagement and outcomes.
- Maintaining List Quality: Regularly clean your email list by removing inactive subscribers and ensuring that your list complies with relevant regulations (GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act). Additionally, segment your lists into engaged and unengaged contacts to ensure you’re only contacting people who want to hear from you. This practice will help you maintain a healthy deliverability rate.
Email Schedule
Consistency is key in email marketing because it helps build anticipation, trust, and engagement with your audience. Here’s how to stay consistent.
- Determine Your Cadence: Plan a regular email schedule that your audience can expect. Whether it’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, consistency helps build anticipation and engagement. Your audience will come to expect your emails and look forward to the valuable content you provide.
- Timing and Frequency: Experiment with different days and times to send your emails and adjust based on engagement metrics to find what works best for your audience. Analyzing open rates, click-through rates, and other engagement metrics can help you optimize your sending schedule.
Email Marketing Infrastructure
To support your email marketing efforts, you need the right tools and infrastructure in place before getting started. A well-structured infrastructure ensures that your email marketing efforts are efficient, effective, and measurable, setting the stage for successful campaigns. Here’s what you need to get started.
- Choose Your MAP: A Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is crucial for managing and automating your email marketing campaigns. It helps streamline the process of creating, sending, and analyzing emails. Your MAP can also assist with list segmentation, personalized content delivery, and email automation.
- Utilize Essential Tools: Equip yourself with tools for designing and testing your email campaigns to ensure they are visually appealing and effective.
- Stripo: A drag-and-drop email template builder that integrates with numerous email marketing automation platforms. It simplifies the process of creating professional email templates without needing coding skills.
- Visual Creation Tools: Tools like Canva, Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Spark are excellent for creating visuals to add to your templates. These tools help you design graphics that enhance your email content.
- Google Analytics: Don’t forget to integrate your MAP with Google Analytics to ensure you have proper tracking in place. This tool helps you see what’s happening on your website because of your email campaigns, providing valuable insights into user behavior and campaign effectiveness.
- Create a Plan: One of the most important steps you can take is to develop a comprehensive email marketing plan. This plan should outline your objectives, target audience, content strategy, and schedule. It should include key performance indicators (KPIs) such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to measure success.
Set Your Business Up for Email Marketing Success
Implementing email marketing into your digital marketing strategy is more than just sending emails – it's about creating meaningful connections with your audience. By understanding the critical role of email marketing and building a solid foundation with valuable content, targeted lists, and consistent communication, you can transform your email campaigns into powerful tools for engagement and conversion.
All these elements allow your team to elevate your digital marketing efforts, build deeper relationships with customers, and drive your business toward greater success. Of course, those efforts can take a lot of time and expertise. Need some support with email and other marketing endeavors? Contact us today to talk about how we can support your digital marketing team.
