EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY
The bombardment of emails in your inbox from brands regarding different promotions and follow-ups, which you ignore usually until and unless it includes your favorite brand is email marketing.
The strategy consists of a few steps that are followed by the marketer, who then further works on email advertising to accomplish the marketing goals. Why is this done? It seems annoying at the customer’s end, but if you see it from the brand’s perspective then it’s a direct way of communicating what the brand is up to and what they are offering currently.
Is it necessary to have an email marketing strategy?
Undeniably yes! Not only is this approach required, but also important for many reasons like
- The procedure allows marketers to design their email advertising process ahead of time. Successively, other business stakeholders can know what they need to do every time, thus ensuring synchronicity while implementing an email campaign.
A company can plan when to send time-based promotions or non-promotional emails. Time-based promotions are emails containing time-sensitive messages like “Only 2 days are left to avail this opportunity,’ ‘Hurry up, just 10 hours are left to enter in this lucky draw,’ or ‘get 15% early bird discount on hitting the registration button for your favorite course before midnight!’’ which should increase curiosity in your desired target audience and compel them to take action. For such tactics, the marketer should also plan how to send these emails consisting of the major announcement (preferably 2 weeks in advance), reminder (1 week before the main event), and the last chance (1-2 days before) within the time frame.
On the other hand, non-promotional emails are sales-driven and not “limited-time offers,’’ because the focus here is to initiate promising relations with your customers to tell them that how their existence is valuable to their company. E.g: New branch opening “Hey there! We have opened another branch in your area, so come over and celebrate our growth with us.” Similar emails help the marketing in charge to know the interests of the customers too and these can also be followed by more personalized messages which tend to catch more attention. The results can be specifically seen; therefore a company needs to have marketing objectives in advance to give it a sense of direction when executing an email campaign. Other than that, email marketing strategies enable marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns.
- Pick the best tactics which are tips and tricks that a marketer uses to push their strategy and thus achieve the set goals. E.g: “To start a cost-effective cart.”
We are guessing that you have understood why companies send you emails so now it’s time to guide you that how to come up with effective email marketing strategies!
- Set Marketing Goals:
Marketing emails serve to fulfill the following motives:
Increase customer engagement
Raise loyalty
Maximize ROI
Maintain relationships with your clients
A marketer must keep these factors in mind to create strategies.
- Find the right marketing tools:
Choosing the correct marketing tools is the foremost step while constructing out the strategy.
A marketer needs an Email Service Provider (ESP) with an automation tool, among other useful features.
Some of the best email tools are
- MailChimp
(Best Overall)
It has the features that most businesses need, without being overly complicated or confusing. Businesses can schedule campaigns, A/B test copy, and get reports that include open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and more. Plus, it has the most generous free-forever plans of the software we tested.
The disappointing parts are that it’s pricey for larger contact lists (more than 150k subscribers), has very limited phone support, and is not designed for advanced marketing teams.
- ActiveCampaign
(Best for Automation)
The best email marketing software for automation is because it has hundreds of pre-built automation that help you personalize campaigns for each subscriber. Designed to manage contacts and the sales process, it offers more than 900 integrations. There are help guides throughout your journey on the platform as you’re getting things set up, plus their customer support is fast and friendly. The features give it an edge in this category.
The cons that AC has are that its learning curve can be a challenge; the Lite plan is very limited (and includes ActiveCampaign branding) and plans quickly jump in price with the number of contacts.
- MailerLite
(Easiest to Use)
The easiest email marketing software to use because it has a drag-and-drop interface that makes it amusing and innate to create the design you want. The software has a clean and streamlined look; therefore it becomes simpler to use this software. They provide a free plan for up to 1,000 contacts; have email support and lots of email templates to choose from. Without taking up a lot of space with advanced features their system comes forward with all the main elements to give a user-friendly experience.
The sad parts are that CRM functionalities are not included (Though it allows for integration), have limited integrations, and need to provide a lot of company information to get an account set up.
- Hubspot
(Best all-in-one marketing suite)
Why is Hubspot claimed as all-in-one? The suite because it has great tools and reporting for all of your marketing campaigns across various channels like website, email, social and more. The good part is that you can store all contact information with Hubspot’s CRM to engage the audience through live chat, lead forms, and online ads. The email health tab helps keep deliverability rates on track; you only pay for the contacts you are marketing to, track leads throughout their buying journey, and make the most out of helpful online training resources.
The platform has a vigorous training platform too that not only reviews how to use the system but even guides as to what are the best practices to come up with record-breaking campaigns.
Coming to the negative traits that this space has been that the space does not have a free-forever plan or a low-cost plan, not for businesses specifically looking for email marketing tools, has difficulty integrating a separate CRM, abrupt learning curve to fully exposing the marketing tendency.
- Moosend
(Best affordable option)
If the company is tight on budget then Moosend has come to the rescue. Their paid plans are much more reasonable than the majority available in the market as here you can pay depending on the number of subscribers or by the number of emails sent so pick the one which suits you more.
Then its tools are very user-friendly further aiding to send timely emails.
We can see that you are happy reading about this pocket-friendly substitute, but everything is not perfect either because emails cannot be sent via Gmail or Hotmail address, less-sophisticated user interface, and limited alliance.
- Drip
(Best for E-commerce)
Drip’s refined working and up-to-date segmentation list has made the lives of marketers in e-commerce conducive. The features allow reaching subscribers through personalized emails noticed by their shopping style on your website and receiving follow-up messages from time to time.
The ‘letting you down’ parts are that Drip does not have the required important integrations, no drag and drop for designing templates, and very finite compatibility options.
- Know Your Target Audience:
Every company has a different set target audience.
E.g: A company that sells office furniture’s audience would be corporate industries.
A brand that sells school stationeries their target would be school children and mothers.
This is a must for marketers to know which products will interest what people; therefore the email list should be sketched out accordingly.
- Subscribe to stay in touch:
The best way to know who and from where the person approached you is through embedding a subscription form on your website so you are easily able to identify the demographics.
What does a marketing email look like?
The typical marketing email will have the following structure
- The Subject Line:
The subject line acts as the clickbait in the customer’s inbox.
Marketo says the subject line having 41 characters or seven-word long is considered to be ideal.
The Greeting Line:
You can customize the greeting in the form of an attractive visual or a neutral message which can be sent to all the customers. A quick example would be that if the emails are about a company’s announcement a common message would be preferred. If you want higher conversion rates, then add a personal touch to personalizing the message.
- The Content:
Play around with texts and images, add charts and GIFs, and even embed videos as there is no specific strategy to be followed.
- The Call-To-Action (CTA):
The Call to Action directly links your marketing email to generate more revenues.
E.g: An old customer to revisit their shopping cart, a new leader could be asked to subscribe, and a customer could be informed about the latest offers and products after dropping off.
- I want to unsubscribe:
In the beginning, the customer must have subscribed to receive the latest offers and messages, but can easily unsubscribe if it’s no more use for them so companies should keep this option as to let go the clients instead of forcing them to stay!
The most common types of email marketing types are
Welcome emails
Email newsletters
Dedicated emails
Lead nurturing emails
Sponsorship emails
Transactional emails
Re-engagement emails
Brand story emails
Video emails
Review request emails
Let’s move on to reply to email management marketing cloud
According to Help.salesfore.com reply management marketing clouds automatically manages replies, even the ones from auto-responders, and leave or unsubscribe requests received in response to your emails.
Arrange your account in a way to use a special Reply-To address in your emails. When a subscriber manually replies to the address or when the subscriber’s account automatically replies, the email message goes to the Reply-To address you created.
When the Reply-To address receives an email, RMM applies a series of emphasizing rules. These rules identify which email is an out-of-office reply, auto-reply, or unsubscribe request. This feature acts on the message according to how you set up the feature.
RMM also handles these functions:
Forward an email to different users depending on different circumstances.
Conditionally auto-reply and control the content of that auto-reply message.
RMM addresses automated replies produced by nearly all email software in use today. However, due to the use of non-standard protocols by a few mail clients, RMM can’t address 100 percent of auto-replies. In most situations, RMM handles more than 90 percent of auto-replies.
When you configure RMM in Marketing Cloud, specify the Reply-To information used:
- Email Display Name:
The reply name appears in the ‘From’ field of the subscriber email client, such as Microsoft Outlook, when the subscriber replies to your email. Do not use an email address as the Email Reply Name. Use an individual’s name representing your company to motivate interaction from your subscribers. Like a person from your customer service department.
- Reply Subdomain:
The subdomain is the portion of your URL that points to Marketing Cloud email reply rules.
A company with an email address structure of name@example.com creates a subdomain of reply. That company then adds it to the box provided onscreen to create reply.example.com.
- Email Reply Address:
The reply address appears in the ‘From’ name of your subscriber’s email client when the subscriber replies to your email. While this information appears in the format of an email message, it is not a valid email address on its own. The address directs the reply to RMM for processing. Define this address in the Reply Mail Management feature or via a sender profile. If you use a sender profile to define the email reply address, you can enable the email message to use a multitude of email reply addresses.
- DNS Record Redirect Complete:
Complete the domain name system (DNS) record redirect to Marketing Cloud before activating this feature. Your ISP helps you with this process. To enable your DNS record redirect, contact your Marketing Cloud account representative.
We hope that this blog gave you detailed knowledge about email marketing strategy and the marketing cloud and now you are confident enough to do the same in your company to attract customers.