Why Does an Email Marketing Strategy Matter?
Email marketing may not be as trendy as social media or video marketing, but email marketing efforts reach a large audience and can earn serious money for e-commerce brands.
Email marketing also opens the door to unlimited personalization opportunities where you can customize your messages with special offers and recommendations.
Finally, email marketing is popular among marketers, with two out of three marketers using email to engage their target audience in 2022. To stay competitive in e-commerce, you must have an effective email marketing strategy.
How To Get Started With Email Marketing
When mapping an email marketing strategy, planning is crucial. With a plan, your team is better equipped to distribute messages that appeal to and convert subscribers into customers.
When creating an email marketing strategy, consider these factors:
- Start with your goals. What do you want to achieve with email marketing? This could include increasing sales, earning more website traffic, or building brand awareness.
- Build your send list. You can build your list using sign-up forms or social media campaigns. Consider offering incentives for people to subscribe.
- Segment your list. Your subscribers are unique. Segment them appropriately based on demographics, interests, and behavior, and your email is more likely to drive engagement.
Once you have a basic email marketing strategy in place, it’s time to craft your message and prepare it for sending.
As excited as you may be to put your first email out into the world, don’t hit “send” until you’ve double-checked that your email includes timely, relevant content.
Personalization increases email open rates and click-through rates. Use your subscriber’s name, past purchase history, and other data to create personalized messages, email subject lines, and calls to action.
Emails with highly relevant content will grab your subscribers’ attention. Make sure every email you send is engaging and informative. Keep your subscribers engaged by sending them a mix of email content, including special promotions and product tutorials.
Test Everything
Once you’ve sent your email, there’s one more thing left to do: Test the results of your efforts.
Continuously testing your email marketing campaigns involves comparing different subject lines, calls to action, and email formats. Until you know what’s working and what’s not across your email messages, you can’t take the steps needed to improve your marketing strategy (and reap untapped revenue).
Ultimately, the key performance indicators (KPIs) you decide to track are up to you, and should be determined based on your intended goals. Here are a few that remain popular with email marketers:
- Active audience trends to track your audience’s engagement levels
- Delivery rates to see how many emails are getting delivered to inboxes
- Hard and soft bounce rates can clue you into deliverability issues
- Open rates reflect how often your subscribers open your emails
Strategies To Improve Your Email Marketing
In order to maximize your email marketing efforts, you need to focus on key strategies designed to boost your email marketing performance. Here are a few of our favorite strategies:
Boost Your Email Deliverability
Marketing teams put a lot of thought into their email messages, but not a lot of thought is typically given to email deliverability, or how many of your emails are reaching the inbox.
An estimated 347 billion emails are sent every day. Yet, not all of those emails are actually being delivered. That means millions, if not billions, of additional revenue is falling victim to spam filters or unsubscribes. After all, if your email never reaches your customer’s inbox, it can never result in a conversion.
Here are a few tips to help you ensure email deliverability to your subscribers’ inboxes:
- Regularly clean your send lists. Practicing good email list hygiene prevents spam complaints and ensures that your email messages are going to those who want them.
- Use segmentation to ensure that you’re honoring subscribers’ preferences when emailing them. You don’t want to send daily emails to someone who’s specified that they only want to hear from you once a week.
- Deploy personalized content and subject lines. Personalization makes your messages more relevant, so customers are likely to open them. This signals to email service providers that they want your emails in their inboxes.
- Leading jewelry manufacturer L’azurde found success in optimizing for deliverability. By reaching a 99% deliverability rate, the brand now reaches 20x more customers. With Bloomreach Engagement and Voxwise, L’azurde earns an estimated 1€ million more per year.
Personalize Your Emails in Real Time
Are you guilty of using outdated data to inform your email marketing efforts? Real-time personalization can resuscitate your email marketing strategy and breathe new, revenue-generating insights into your message.
When used for email marketing, real-time personalization involves adjusting email content to fit the customer’s real-time behavior, like their recent purchase history, browsing activity, or location. Real-time personalization helps e-commerce brands deliver relevant messages to customers, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Savvy email marketers use a mix of zero-party and first-party data to send email messaging that strikes a chord and results in conversions:
- Zero-party data is any data that a customer intentionally shares with your company. It could include feedback from the customer when asked about a shopping experience. If a new subscriber tells you how often to contact them, that’s another example of zero-party data.
- First-party data is data collected by your company website, social media channels, and so on. Because you collect this data yourself, first-party data is exempt from any questions about who owns this intel.
