Email marketing strategy: development guide + checklist

You can send mail irregularly, each time you sell on the forehead, test the headers and forms at random – there will be clicks and even some sales. However, without a clear strategy, one should not rely on a stable growth of business indicators.

An email marketing strategy is a document that describes:

• The goals that you need – and most importantly to achieve through email marketing.
• The specific actions are necessary to achieve these very goals.

Ready to start creating an email marketing strategy – keep a step-by-step instruction with a checklist.

Step 1: Setting Goals

It is with setting goals that email marketing (and any other marketing) is worth starting.

Most of the content strategist identifies three standard areas:

1. Targeted traffic to the site and receiving quality leads from the newsletter.
2. Expert status – the formation of the potential customer knows that company N is the best versed in this.
3. Brand recognition and audience loyalty (increase in mentions, increase in brand advocates, etc.).

At this step, it’s worth thinking about intermediate goals: indicators of the effectiveness of email marketing.

Suppose a conversion from a mailing list reader to a buyer is known (at least the industry average). Then, using the average check and the unsubscribe rate, you can immediately calculate how many new addresses you need to collect in the database every month.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

To build a long-term trusting relationship with an audience, you need to know it well. Namely:

• Own data on age, geography, and approximate income level.
• Understand the fears, pains, needs, selection criteria.
• To have an idea of ​​the customer’s path (how he makes a purchasing decision, how often he buys, how many contact points are needed to order, etc.).

There are many options for collecting this information:

• To study the data of subscribers in social networks.
• Interview company owners, executives, and sales managers.
• Conduct in-depth interviews with 10-15 existing clients.
• Get industry research and insider competitors.

Portraits of CA are useful at other stages of composing an email strategy, as well as in the development of UTP, landing pages, advertisements, etc.

Step 3: competitor analysis

The target audience is clearly defined – now you need to find out what competitors are offering it. To do this, you must subscribe to their newsletters, get acquainted with sites and pages on social networks. Then write out all the essential data in the comparison table.

What to include there:

Examples of headers, descriptions, and CTAs from newsletter subscription forms.

• Information about how competitors guarantee data privacy.
• A description of what happens after the form is submitted successfully, and the subscription is confirmed.
• Data on the frequency of sending letters and types of mailings (which triggers use, what they write in digests, etc.).

Design evaluation and a list of email marketing tools are optional.

Step 4: Determining how to attract subscribers

At this stage, we decide where to get traffic from and how to attract subscribers. Here the results of the analysis of competitors are just useful: you need to do better than theirs.

There are many ways to invite subscribers – for example:

• The promise in the form of a subscription super-useful book, checklist or free online course.
• To tell what awaits future readers is to publish examples of letters along with feedback from grateful subscribers on the landing page.
• Set up pop-ups for “insulated” visitors: for example, those who read 70% of a long read on a blog.
• To seduce fans of promotions and discounts: write in social networks that every new subscriber will receive a profitable coupon.

If you have a budget and a separate subscription page, then it’s worth a try and paid methods of promotion: targeted and contextual advertising. And it is essential to remember the main rules for working with the database:

1. No ready-made bases. If you want to do email marketing, not spam.
2. Do not regret – delete the address if it is incorrect or the owner complained/does not react in any way (for a long time).

Step 5: Decide on Future Content

We know who our CA is, what competitors are and how to work with the base. Based on this information and product knowledge, you can decide on the content. You can also get the idea to create content from content marketing Inbound marketing books written by top marketers.

Step 6: Develop Communication

Now that everything has cleared up with Central Asia, competitors, the base and types of newsletters, it’s time to compose a chain of letters. Recall their varieties:

• Greetings or welcome letters.
• Trigger (respond to a specific event/action of the subscriber).
• Transactional (sent with a paid subscription, purchase of goods or services).
• Promotional, commercial or promotional letters (contain information about discounts, promotions, sales).
• Informational (these letters are the basis of regular mass mailing).
• Announcements (sent before events).

In chains – no details: only algorithms. Preparation of text and design is optional: not everyone orders content along with a strategy.

When developing email communication, you need to rely on audience data, take the best from competitors and, of course, build your hypotheses: the tests will show whether they are right or not. The main components of success: personalization and segmentation.

For those who do not know where to start, sharing a standard set of triggers that continuously come to him by email:

• You put the goods in the basket and forgot.
• The last copy was left in stock. Hurry up to buy!
• You have 100 bonus points in your account. Hurry up to take advantage.
• Twenty-four hours are left until the end of the “Title” promotion!
• Hurry up to buy goods from the basket / pending goods at a discount.
• The product you want to buy is again in stock.
• New reviews of the user you are following.
• You bought these items. Leave feedback on them!