How to create an effective email marketing strategy

How to create an effective email marketing strategy

It’s a great choice to invest in email marketing! You won’t regret it. It’s even better that you want to start at the right end by developing a well-thought-out email strategy. With a well-planned strategy, it will be much easier to get the job done and be successful with your email marketing and newsletters.

The thought and care you put into your strategy will convert into results.

Where should you start to create your email strategy? Don’t you worry, we got you! To help you develop a well-thought-out email marketing strategy for your email outreach, we have created an infographic that goes through all the elements your email strategy should contain.

Further down, you’ll find in-depth sections for each element with guiding questions from each part the infographic contains.

Email strategy - Getting the right message out, to the right person, at the right time, with the right frequency.

Table of contents
How to create an effective email marketing strategy

9 Elements Your Email Marketing Strategy Should Include

1. Market goals

What do you want to achieve with your email marketing? What do you want the impact of your emails to be? When you know what you want to achieve, it becomes much easier to design your emails. If you have a clear purpose, it is also easier to measure the impact of what you are doing.

For example, your goal might be to increase sales by a certain percentage, increase the number of visitors to your website, make better contact with your customers or collect user feedback. After six months to a year, you can check whether you have achieved your goals or not.

If you are not reaching your desired goals, it might be a good idea to switch up your strategy or how your emails look.

2. Target audience

Before you start developing the content of your emails, you need to know who your recipients are.

Who are you targeting with your emails? Is it your current customers, potential new customers, or both? Who are your present customers? Who do you hope to attract? What kind of content do they appreciate? What questions and problems do you have that you might be able to answer and solve?

Feel free to develop personas for those you think will read your emails and keep them in mind as you continue to structure your email marketing.

3. Message

What is unique about what you are offering? What is your company’s USP (Unique Selling Point)? If you’re already doing marketing other than email marketing, you probably already have this in mind.

What sets you apart from your competitors that you want to emphasize when shaping the messages in your emails? What should be the USP of your emails? Why should someone choose to subscribe to your particular newsletters?

Your message and focus should be rooted in what is unique about you and what you can offer.

4. Type of email

What types of emails should your email marketing contain? Your decisions should base on your marketing goals, target audience, and what you want to highlight with your product/service (your USP).

Remember that you will be most successful with email marketing if you make sure you have a good balance between giving something and asking for something.

Should you develop a newsletter, sales email with offers, emails with product releases, or a mix? Should you share relevant articles linked to your products and services? Do you need to set up welcome emails, emails to celebrate your customers’ birthdays, or other automated emails?

Structure the types of emails you must have, should have, want to have, and start with the ones you need to have in the first stage.

5. Schedule

How often do you want to send emails? How much time can you spend creating newsletters per month? A clear schedule will make it easier to structure when, where, and how you create your email newsletters. Your recipients will also know how often they expect to hear from you.

Keep in mind, that a schedule is only relevant if you believe you will have something of value to share on an ongoing basis. It’s important not to push out a newsletter just for the sake of it.

If you don’t have any relevant information to share, your subscribers won’t appreciate what you’ve sent. Instead, break the schedule and send it when you have something valuable to say.

6. Layout

Create an outline of how you want your emails to look. Is there any content that should be recurring? Do you want an introduction and conclusion?

When it comes to the layout of your emails, it’s a good idea to keep them super simple, airy, easy to read, and in your brand colors.

Feel free to write short and interesting summaries and then link on for more information. Also, make it clear that you are the sender of the mailing. If your subscribers can’t see straight away that it’s coming from you, it may reduce the chances of them reading what you sent.

7. Content

When choosing the content for your emails, always base it on your business objectives, message, and USP. Most importantly, always keep the recipient’s perspective in mind. What will your subscribers get out of the content you choose? Why is the article, blog post, or video relevant to them?

Do you have knowledge, experience, data, or anything else of value to customers that you can share exclusively via email? Don’t be afraid to share what you know. Sharing your knowledge builds trust and creates long-term relationships.

Also, consider whether you want a specific theme for each email. There is no right or wrong here. The most important thing is that you have a strategy. An overall theme will give your emails a good structure, while mixed news gives you more flexibility in creating them.

We recommend having 3-5 topics in each newsletter. That way the newsletters won’t contain too much information and won’t be too long. Create an information bank where you can collect relevant content for your emails.

8. Text

When it comes to the text itself, it’s best practice if the content is perceived as personal and addressed directly to the reader and not to a whole group. You don’t read a newsletter in the same way as you read a newspaper or a book. 40% of the time when you read a newsletter, you focus on the headlines. That’s why it’s crucial to spend time writing good headlines.

For example, write brief but interesting summaries that link to a blog post. This way you can see what your readers find of interest and develop your emails based on your subscribers’ interests.

Writing ‘salesy’ newsletters is all about engaging and persuading the reader. You don’t change a person’s mind by persuading them, nor do people like to be persuaded. Rather the opposite, it can create a sense of discomfort.

Instead of trying to persuade, tone down the differences between your and your subscribers’ opinions. Highlight what is new, and attractive while presenting a solution and show the benefits that will make the reader choose you.

9. Routines

Make things easier for yourself by having a routine for creating emails. What can you do to make the process easier and more efficient for yourself?

Should you be the one responsible, or should several people be responsible? Should there be a planning meeting where future email outputs are planned? When should you set time aside to design and write your emails? Do you have somewhere you can write down news or topics to include in the upcoming newsletters? Do you have a folder to collect relevant images to include?

These are some things that might be useful to have a routine around.

10. Sender

Finally, think about the sender you want for your emails. It may seem like a small detail, but it’s necessary to choose a sender carefully. Firstly, we recommended not to use a no-reply address. It’s good to have access to an email address with a custom domain, as it gives a professional impression.

In addition, there is a risk that Gmail will react to mass mailings from a Gmail address outside their servers.

Over to you

Now it’s time for you to start sketching out your email strategy!

Haven’t you signed up for your free account at Get a Newsletter yet? Don’t miss out on using email marketing to your advantage!

Don’t miss the next part of the guide. In it, we’ll walk you through how to get started with your email list.

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