How to craft an effective email marketing strategy plan

In a hyper-digitalized world, B2C communication looks a whole lot different than it did 10 years ago. Omnichannel conversational experiences are all the rave, and with good reason.  

Although the communication landscape of today has changed, email marketing remains the bread and butter of customer communication that can boost engagement. It’s a familiar channel that still drives results for brands.  

But like with any form of communication with customers, you need a strong, foolproof strategy to have an impact on your goals and outcomes.  

So, let’s go back to our communication roots and outline how to build an effective email marketing strategy. 

An email marketing strategy is designed to help marketing and sales teams boost engagement, conversions, and retention with a specific target audience.  

Building a strategy plan consists of coordinating different processes with relevant data to drive marketing results.  

Email marketing is useful across different industries, and depending on your desired outcome, can help brands build awareness, promote products and services, and increase loyalty through well-thought-out email campaigns. 

In short, yes.  

Email marketing still helps brands reach the results they’re looking for. No matter what a brand’s communication strategy looks like, email is more than likely part of the channel stack. Email is universal, reliable and accessible to most of your customers – giving you a great opportunity to build an effective marketing strategy.  

With the right strategy in place, email can help you achieve your marketing goals and drive growth for your business. 

According to Statista, in 2020 there were approximately four billion email users worldwide. This number is expected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025. What does this mean for your email campaigns? You can engage with customers globally and reach their inboxes no matter where they reside.   

Email is an ideal channel for executing marketing campaigns for small to medium businesses. Currently, 81% of SMBs rely on email to acquire new customers, and 80% use email for retention purposes. You can craft an email strategy plan to fit the needs of your SMB and drive better engagement results.  

Email marketing offers businesses the opportunity to personalize their communications with customers and increase their overall performance. 

The average open rate for welcome emails is 68.8%, but emails with a personalized subject line get a 50% higher open rate.  

What’s more, the average ROI for email is approximately $40 per $1 spent on marketing emails. 

Email has remained a popular and effective channel of choice for many of our customers. Take a look at how email performed on our platform in 2022:  

If done right, email marketing will help build trust, loyalty and awareness over time. By sending relevant and timely emails based on the customer’s specific wants and needs, you can initiate a personal connection with each individual person. 

Define what content is applicable to each stage of the customer journey. Based on a customer’s profile and interactions with your brand, you can orchestrate your email marketing strategy to send valuable content tailored to each customer at the right time. Keep them engaged and stay top-of mind with helpful tips, branch openings, industry news, exclusive offers, and much more. 

Email marketing can help you reach a wider audience and increase brand visibility. By including interactive, shareable content, and social media links in your emails, you can encourage your subscribers to share your content.  

Include special referral offers in your emails for customers who recommend your brand to their friends and family, increasing the reach of your brand even further. 

Email marketing provides a powerful platform for promoting your products and services to your audience. By segmenting your email list to audiences that have previously shown interest in particular products or categories, you can effectively target your awareness campaigns and promotions to increase the likelihood of conversions. You can even recommend products based on the past behaviors of customers to personalize the emails further.  

Email marketing can help you re-engage inactive subscribers who haven’t interacted with your brand in a while. By triggering targeted messages after a specific period of inactivity, you can remind them of your products and services and encourage them to return to your website and make a purchase. 

The first step in building an effective email marketing strategy is to define your goals. Defining measurable goals and objectives will help you create targeted and relevant content that resonates with your audience. 

Questions you want to address can include: 

You’ll need an email service provider to help you execute your marketing plan and send, track, and measure your campaign results.  

Ideally, you’ll use a combination of a customer data platform, like People CDP and a customer engagement solution, like Moments.  

People CDP is a powerful tool that allows you to create hyper-personalized and targeted emails by gathering and activating customer data including:  

In Moments, you can then use this data to trigger emails to be sent at the most relevant time in the customer journey. Build an email campaign with custom templates, set up email flows and streamline engagement on one dashboard. 

Check out how Moments and People CDP work together to help you build effective marketing campaigns:  

Identifying your target audience will help you create personalized and relevant content that speaks directly to their needs and interests. On People CDP, you can categorize customers based on their characteristics or behavior, such as how they interact with your app or website and use this data to send them relevant and engaging emails. 

Some questions you want to address when segmenting include: 

Use Moments to create interactive and visually appealing email campaign templates. Image carousels, animations, videos, and other interactive features can help elevate your emails and entice customers to complete the desired action.

The best part is you can do it yourself without having to call IT. Drag-and-drop options make building email templates simple and fast. 

Testing and optimizing your emails is an ongoing process that helps you improve the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. You can test different elements such as subject lines, call-to-actions, and email templates to see what works best for your audience.  

To optimize your emails for maximum effectiveness, use analytics and metrics such as: 

Personalization is a staple for any marketing strategy – same goes for your email campaigns. Although most brands use the “first name” trick in the subject line or body, customers are expecting better tailored communications that go beyond their first name.  

You can use Moments to send personalized and relevant emails to your audience based on their behaviors and actions. For example, you can send welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, or win-back campaigns to re-engage inactive subscribers and reduce unsubscribe rates with personalized emails. 

Take it a step further with AI content recommendations. AI tracks your customers’ behaviors and pulls relevant content for each customer to help you build engaging emails that drive conversions.  

Automating your email campaigns can save you time and improve the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. Set up automated emails to be sent to customers after they have completed, or not completed an action.  

For instance, send welcome emails after registration. After a purchase or customer service call, follow up with a feedback survey or with a tailored email suggesting other products and service they might like.  

Abandoned cart emails are also an excellent way to include automation in your email marketing strategy to boost ROI and website traffic.  

You’ve already ensured that your emails have a clear goal, so make sure your customers also understand the target of your email.

Creating a compelling subject line is crucial- it’s the first thing your customers see from your campaign. Keep it concise and clear and don’t use any misleading or click-bate language- you don’t want customers and their email server to think your emails are spam. Use action-oriented language, try asking a question or offer an intriguing solution to your subject lines.

Ensure you include one clear call-to-action within the email and align it with the goal of the email. If your goal is to boost conversions, send them to your web shop or their abandoned cart. If you want to increase engagement, encourage them to share content or socials through the email campaign.

Let’s face it, no-reply emails look spammy and untrustworthy. Your email marketing strategy should include an email or contact that customers can engage with if need be.  

Using a no-reply email can hurt engagement rates since customers can’t interact with you which reduces satisfaction and can prevent you from collecting valuable feedback from customers.  

Always give customers an easy way to get in touch with you straight from the marketing emails you send.  

Creating custom email templates allows you to incorporate your brand elements into every interaction. This helps boost the validity of your emails and eliminates any doubt around spam messages.  

Make your email campaigns go farther by being specific, and not over-populating your emails with different elements and CTAs. Keep everything to the point, short, sweet and sleek.  

Analytics are an important part of seeing your email marketing strategy evolve and improve. Use A/B testing to run the same campaigns using different designs, CTAs or content and see how they perform up against each other.  

This will help you narrow in on what works, what doesn’t and how you can adjust future campaigns to drive better results.