Email Marketing Planning

One important aspect of customer relationship management is email marketing. It’s considered a permission-based marketing’s extension that can offer a very high return of investment (ROI) of the whole strategy. Email marketing uses electronic dives to directly market to customers. It’s one of the oldest methods in internet marketing, but it’s still successful. Its effectiveness comes from the following characteristics:

• Very targeted
• Very cost-effective because it has a low cost per recipient or contact
• 100% measurable
• Customizable despite the mass-production

Another strength of email marketing is that it uses the customer’s most important touchpoint with the internet. That is their inbox.  It is a tool to build relationships with existing and possible consumers. You’ll gain from their long-term utility and high resale value. This means a higher return on investment because of email marketing. You can also use it for acquisition, social media, and even mobile strategies. 

Step-By-Step Email Marketing Strategy

It is possible to achieve your marketing goals with an effective email marketing campaign if you follow these procedures.

Identify the Campaign’s Context

Prior to designing your strategy, consider both the internal and external context of the campaign. SWOT analysis is the sole tool available for performing this task. SWOT focuses on the following:

• Strengths: The marketing resources of the business that are competitive. Your brand’s design prowess serves as an example. It can also be your experience in driving high sales
• Weaknesses: What are the aspects in which your business doesn’t do great? The vulnerability will be revealed as the answer to this. You’ll also find out the areas that need improvement or must be avoided at all costs. One example may be your non-professional photographs of products. Or your logo doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing. Even the smallest factors can have a huge factor on your marketing strategy.
• Opportunities: Consider the current situations, resources, and trends inside and outside. Which of these things can help your goal? It could be a new product launch or a loyal subscriber base. It could also be the increasing demand for this product or recent press coverage.
• Threats: What are the situations, resources, and trends that can negatively affect your strategy? Is there a new competitor? The pandemic can also be a threat here. 

Defining Your Email Marketing Objectives

The second part of your email marketing campaign is the planning of goals. Since it’s a tool to achieve goals, align it with your overall business goals and strategy. Choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your strategy. These determine how well your email marketing strategy performs. 

Promotional emails, for example, have the following instant goals:

• Purchase of users
• Content download from users
• Further request of information from users.

On the other hand, the objectives of a newsletter are generally more long-term. Long-term relationships with readers are the purpose of this sort of writing. This means your KPIs are more vital here.

Some examples of KPIs for newsletters include:

• Clickthrough rate
• Amount of social shares
• Open rate
• ROI
• Amount of forwarded emails
• Growth of database
• Delivery or bounce rate
• Conversion rate (this refers to the email’s generation of activity on the site)

Email Service Provider

An email service provider, or ESP, is a third-party provider that can manage, design, and send emails at a large scale. It’s a great idea for huge organizations. It makes sense for them to purchase this software because they will be sending more than 50 emails at a time. These ESPs do not manage or strategize the campaign on their own. They are not do-it-yourself services but provide tools for you to manage them.

Here are some guide questions to consider when deciding on the best ESP:

• Is it easy to use on your own? 
• Is it self-service or managed?
• Will you be able to manage the email marketing campaign on your open?
• Is it possible to import and move a contact list?
• Is the reporting efficient and effective?
• What are the features of this ESP’s deliverability?
• Are they endorsed by Trust-E, ReturnPath, and other authorities?
• Do they follow good practices of direct marketing?
• Who owns the data?
• How is the data secured, processed, and stored?

4. Be Flexible

The next important step in the planning stage is to begin outlining your strategy. Knowing your audience, measuring, automating, and collecting data are the only ways to achieve this goal.

Get to know the demographic specifics on who will be reading your work. Find out their age range, gender, hometown, and more. It’s also a good idea to take into account their preferences and dislikes. This will help in retaining their loyalty since 43% of consumers are likely to unsubscribe. Learn the people whom you will target for the campaign so you can choose the right tactics.

This and other forms of research should be done continuously. Make sure you measure along the way so you can find trends and adjust your tactics according to them. For example, some objectives may become irrelevant after a few months. 

The right balance between a solid strategy and being flexible is important. Just don’t get too abstract that other marketers and customers will get confused. There should still be a clear goal, method, and purpose. 

Differentiating Between Strategy and Tactics

When talking about email marketing strategy, it’s worth noting that it’s not just a group of tactics. It has to be detailed with all your campaign plans. It has the objectives, analysis, methods, purposes, and success indicators. 

On the other hand, tactics refer to the specific methods and techniques you need to do to achieve your goal. A excellent idea is to include interactive elements in your email messages, such as games or quizzes. It’s not quite that straightforward, of course. You should also think about why you’re using this strategy. Your overall business goals will be affected by this.

What Happens After?

Once you’re done with the planning stage of your email marketing strategy, it’s time to design the whole campaign and grow your database. Find out how to track permissions per user, avoid spam, and deliver high-quality marketing messages. 

© Image credits to Luis Quintero