5 Steps to Build a Highly Effective Email Marketing Strategy

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

According to a statistic compiled in 2019, email marketing remains one of the best marketing channels, delivering a high return on investment (ROI) for businesses. But with more and more companies investing in email marketing, making an impression and capturing customers' attention is harder than ever. Today, the key to a successful email marketing strategy lies in building trust with customers and thereby establishing a solid, long-lasting relationship with them.

Building an email marketing strategy is something the marketing department of any business must do before sending mass emails to customers. For your email marketing strategy to be effective — reaching the right potential customers and encouraging them to act on your CTAs (Call to Action — a strong call-to-action effect that creates appeal, draws customers' attention, and encourages them to make the purchase behavior you always want) — the strategy must be carefully invested in and prepared.

SimERP would like to share with you the concept, benefits, and how to build an effective email marketing strategy in the article below.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is the practice of using email to deliver marketing and sales information and product introductions to the group of potential customers a business is targeting. Unlike Spam Email (sending mass emails to any customer at all), which annoys customers and gets their mail rejected, email marketing targets specific customers who have been thoroughly researched beforehand.

Email marketing is a highly effective marketing strategy. Reports show that as many as 82% of marketers agree that it is an important strategy for improving lead generation and conversion rates. Beyond sending promotional and sales announcements and maintaining relationships with the target audience, email marketing also helps you send advertisements, calls to action (CTAs), or news via your blog.

Benefits of email marketing

Below are 5 great benefits of an email marketing strategy:

Low cost

First, compared with traditional forms of advertising such as designing banners and billboards, email marketing saves you printing and design costs, shipping costs, and venue rental fees.

The key to brand building

Email marketing is the key for a business to build its brand in customers' eyes, strengthen connections, and build trust with consumers.

When your customers genuinely love the content in your emails and want their family and friends to see that information too, they can forward the email to the people around them with just one click. Clearly, this is a huge advantage when running email marketing campaigns.

Easy to measure

With any campaign, measuring effectiveness plays an extremely important role. Using this marketing approach, you can compile detailed statistics on how many people open your emails, from which you can learn about customer needs, correctly identify their trends and tastes, and make suitable adjustments.

Simple to implement

You don't need to spend a lot of manpower to run an email marketing campaign. With the support of technology, you can even easily automate your marketing campaigns by scheduling customer-care emails on a specific weekly or monthly basis.

In addition, you can run a compelling email marketing campaign with eye-catching images, videos, logos, and so on. Nowadays, with the many tools available, just a few simple steps will produce incredibly attractive email templates.

Steps to build an effective email marketing campaign

A perfect start with Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is a magnet, not a sledgehammer. It is a form of marketing based on attractive content that "nurtures" potential customers into customers, rather than spamming and annoying them.

Inbound Marketing is value-based marketing. That means you win customers by attracting and "nurturing" potential customers with quality content, information, and customer service, rather than annoying them with email spam or intrusive advertising. Inbound Marketing attracts customers like a magnet, rather than hitting them over the head with a sledgehammer.

The cost of implementing Inbound Marketing strategies is considerably lower than traditional marketing strategies. The cost for businesses using an Inbound Marketing strategy is only 62% of that for businesses using other marketing strategies.

Think of your business's marketing and sales process as a funnel. Casual visitors sit at the top of the funnel and potential customers sit at the bottom. As a marketer, your goal is to maximize the number of visitors at the top of the funnel as well as the number of customers at the bottom. Inbound Marketing sets out 3 strategies to accomplish that:

• Getting found: Tactics such as blogging and search engine optimization (SEO) will attract high-quality visits to your website.

• Converting: Tactics such as building landing pages and "nurturing" leads with the aim of converting visitors into potential customers and customers.

• Analyzing: Tactics used to improve the effectiveness of the entire process — increasing the number of the right target customers at both the top and bottom of the funnel.

Segment your customers and manage your contact list sensibly

According to the DMA, 77% of email marketing ROI comes from segmented and targeted campaigns. Segmenting your email list lets you send the right message to the right customer at the right time. What's more, the more relevant your message, the more likely your customers are to engage with it.

Customer segmentation also helps you avoid sending the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time — which matters just as much for building trust with your customers, thereby increasing conversion rates and retaining your current customers.

However, at this stage, you may be tempted to "jump ahead" to the database analysis stage or to tweak your existing segments. But creating segments with the right messages requires you to proceed step by step, "slow but sure." Here are some tips for you:

• A "clean," organized database: Any valuable database must be divided into three key data areas: contacts, contact attributes, and companies.

• Collecting the right information will help you create customer segments suited to your email campaigns. There are two main types of information you need to collect: customers' personal information (occupation, workplace, and goals) and where they are in their buying journey.

• Make sure you can collect both explicit data and implicit data. Explicit data is the information customers have shared with you, such as contact details and personal preferences. Implicit data is information you gather from buyers' behavior, such as email interactions, browsing history, and conversion data. You will need both implicit and explicit data to be able to personalize your email marketing campaigns.

The customer segments you create serve two important purposes:

• Sending the right message to the right person at the right time

• Avoiding sending the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time

Businesses in different fields have different strategies, so you will need to adjust your customer segments to match your business's goals.

That said, there are three ways of segmenting customers that every business can apply to improve the effectiveness of its email marketing campaigns:

• Lifecycle segments: First, you need segments for subscribers, leads, and the business's customers. These lifecycle segments tell you where each audience member sits in the business funnel. Lifecycle segments are created not only to decide who should receive your emails but also to clarify who should not. For instance, if you run a promotional campaign to nurture leads that is intended only for your potential customers, you will want to exclude anyone outside this group.

• Customer persona segments to guide your email marketing strategy: You will create another set of segments by sketching out your customer personas. These are excellent foundational segments to build on. Every business has different goals and strategies, so you will need to build a number of specific lists. For example: if you work at a large enterprise, your marketing and sales teams may be divided by product type, location, store size, and so on.

• 'Database health' segments. Creating these segments helps you avoid sending emails to the wrong people. For example: you should segment out customers who have not subscribed, customers who cannot be reached, and customers who have not opened your emails in a year.

Always create emails with value

Studies show that for every dollar you spend on email, you get a return of up to $38. What's more, as many as 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of revenue.

But that return isn't easily earned just by drafting an email and pressing "send." Your customers need to see real value in the emails you send before they convert into customers, make purchases from you, or recommend your products and services to the people around them.

So how can your business always create emails that deliver value to customers? Here are some principles you should follow:

Set SMART goals

SMART, also known as the effective goal-setting framework, is an acronym for the 5 qualities a goal must have:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Time-bound

Identify the reason you are sending each email and set a goal for every send. Then make sure every element of the email supports that goal.

Send to the right person at the right time

When sending emails, make sure you are sending to the right person (targeted customers), at the right time (where customers are in their buying journey), and the right email (an email that delivers value to the recipient). Let's take a closer look at these 3 aspects:

• The right email: this means providing a contextually relevant message for your customers. Simply put, the content of the email needs to be meaningful to whoever is reading it.

• The right person: this relates to the targeted customer segmentation we covered earlier.

• The right time: different content appeals to different buyers at different stages of the buying process. So to send an email at the perfect moment, you will need to consider where your customers are in their buying journey and provide content suited to that stage.

Optimize your emails to raise conversion rates

Once you have set your goals, you will want to push conversion rates in the intended direction. There are two main areas to optimize: open rates and click-through rates. This relies mainly on your ability to design an appealing email that creates value and builds trust with your customers.

How to increase open rates: Writing an enticing subject line is a key part of getting people to open your email. First, focus on the value you are offering. And if possible, make use of personalization — such as names or locations — so customers feel cared for and valued.

How to increase click-through rates: Click baiting doesn't depend on the email's appearance alone. When customers open your email, they will want to see its value immediately. You can send a message, an appealing call to action (CTA), to encourage customers to click your link and carry out the requests in it.

Choose the right email templates for your campaigns

Your business will always want to send different types of emails serving different purposes to customers. Promoting products and services and announcing the latest updates on your blog will require different email formats. So identify the email templates your business needs to send, then build a set of templates corresponding to each campaign you are preparing to launch.

An effective email marketing strategy has a positive impact on growing your customer base. As your business grows, the number of potential customers and their needs will change too. Your email marketing strategy also needs to evolve alongside these changes.

The most effective way to do this is to engage with customers regularly and get their feedback to learn about new trends, experiment with new ideas, and then optimize your strategy to focus on what is working. While your email marketing strategy will never stop changing, one thing will always stay the same: building trust and nurturing lasting, sustainable relationships with customers — the key to success for any email marketing strategy.

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