What is an Email Marketing Strategy?

An email marketing strategy is one tool in a complete digital marketing strategy. This tool’s goal includes sending emails to prospective and current customers at every stage of their buyer’s journey.

There are many different types of emails that you may choose to implement. You may also want to include a few different types of email marketing strategies depending on your industry.

Email Marketing Strategies

Welcome Emails

The welcome email is the email you send a subscriber within 24 hours after they opt into your list. You will take time to tell them a little about your company and thank them for subscribing. This is an opportunity to delight your new contact. Consider giving them a discount code or a free download they weren’t expecting.

Offer Email

Another way to delight or connect with a customer or potential customer is with an offer email. With the right Customer Relationship Management system, such as HubSpot, you can automate this email to trigger when a customer hasn’t completed a purchase in a while.

Newsletters

If you roll out new products or services on a steady basis or are a public speaker, you may want to consider a newsletter. Alerting your readers to the upcoming events before they hit your website is a great way to build customer loyalty.

Blog Post Reminders

If you publish blog posts frequently, you will want to make sure your readers don’t miss anything you post. You can reinforce this by reminding them once a week or once a month to check out your latest blog and video content.

The SOAP Sequence

The SOAP sequence is a series of email messages used to warm up new prospects, leads, and email subscribers. SOAP sequence emails focus on building a relationship with your new prospect, creating trust as well as an interest in your brand and/or product.

The Survey Email

Are you trying to figure out how to improve a product or service? Who better to ask than your current customer base! Send a survey email and ask for input. You will want to make sure you ask specific questions and keep the overall survey short to gather the most feedback.

The Free Gift Email

For certain industries, this is a great way to let your customers know you care about them and that you’re paying attention. Send them an email around their birthday.

Lead Nurturing Email

Lead nurturing emails target those who haven’t decided to purchase from your brand yet. The main goal of a lead nurturing campaign is to stay in touch with subscribers and inspire a purchase by continuing to educate them about the benefits of your goods or service.

You can provide valuable content and get the maximum ROI from your campaign. Match the content of each email with the recipient’s place in the buyer’s journey.

Email Marketing Strategy Best Practices

Regardless of the email marketing strategy you choose, you want to ensure you use best practices. It’s always best to use segmentation for your email lists. Segmentation enables you to send emails with relevant content to the right people at the right time. Emails written to a customer at the beginning of the buyer’s journey will be different than that of the later stages. Similarly, the product or service someone is interested in may determine how you communicate with them and the content you send to them.

General Email Marketing Best Practices Include:

1. Incorporating personalization into every email
2. Spending time creating subject lines that intrigue customers to open emails
3. Customizing emails with emojis, images, video when appropriate
4. Ensure that emails include working links, proper spelling, and correct grammar
5. Track emails with analytics to see open rates, popular days and times for reading, and unsubscribes

When you’re weighing where to spend your marketing efforts, there’s one more thing to consider with your email marketing strategy. You own your email marketing list, whereas social media is maintained and monitored by the platform owners.

The rules, algorithms, and features of social media change on a whim, and you have very little control as to who sees your posts. You have a much greater chance of ensuring the emails you send land in your email subscribers’ inboxes since they asked to receive emails.

Email marketing is an important and effective strategy every business should include in their digital marketing strategy. If you need help implementing an email marketing strategy get in touch with us. Our experts are happy to discuss a custom strategy for your business goals.