Email Marketing Strategy and Tips for Successful Campaigns

Whether you’re promoting a new product, sharing news about your business, or simply keeping in touch with customers and clients, email marketing allows you to maintain a direct line of communication with a large number of people at once. Additionally, email marketing makes it easy to segment your audience and send highly targeted messages, which can help you increase your conversion rates significantly.

As a way to build a bond with your own target group and maintain contact with customers in the long term, email marketing benefits are obvious. The cost of contact with the customer remains the lowest among the digital marketing channels. The success of correctly executed email marketing campaigns can be easily measured. An email marketing campaign can be easily implemented and customized to any occasion.

Due to the low costs and the quick implementation of communication and advertising measures, email marketing has become indispensable for businesses big and small, as well as online stores and non-profit organizations. 

Our top email marketing tips and strategy walkthrough for high-performance and convincing messaging will help you make the most of your email marketing. Also, you can learn more about our digital marketing services.

Email marketing strategies help businesses to promote their products and services through electronic mail. This type of marketing is generally targeted at specific groups of people who are interested in the products or services that the business offers.

However, everyone knows that newsletters are immediately deleted or canceled because they only contain advertising and no helpful information. That’s why it’s crucial to pay attention to a few points when creating marketing emails so that you don’t end up in the trash. As always with inbound marketing, the focus here is on helpful content, not your company or products.

What are the Benefits of Email Marketing? 

As one of the most cost-efficient and effective forms of digital marketing, emails are primarily used in the area of customer loyalty. As one of the typical email marketing examples, campaigns can be sent to encourage repeat purchases. To better understand why you need this type of digital marketing, let’s find out email marketing benefits and disadvantages. 

Advantages

Efficiency

Due to relatively low costs, efficient communication with customers and interested parties can be established, and the time required can be reduced using marketing automation.

High Measurability

Metrics and KPIs can be evaluated in detail.

High Relevance

If structured correctly, customers and interested parties only receive relevant content.

Scalability

The effort involved in writing and designing newsletters and mailings does not depend on the size of the distribution list. These email marketing measures can thus be scaled without restrictions—the larger the mailing list, the more efficient the measures.

Disadvantages

Opt-in as a Premise

Each recipient must clearly consent to receive advertising.

Legal Risks

For example, these can be related to data protection.

Challenge to Create a Universal Email Design

Numerous email clients and different end devices make it difficult to design emails.

Growing Email Volume

More and more companies are using email marketing—how can your own email marketing campaign still attract attention in the inbox?

Technical Complexity

For example, a connection to an automation system is required in many cases.

Email marketing technology vendors provide systems with which email marketing campaigns are created, sent, and evaluated. In addition, these systems make it possible to set up automated campaigns (marketing automation) and manage email addresses and other subscriber data.

The most notable benefits of email marketing are affordability, customization, and the potential for automation. This allows you to get the following benefits of email marketing:

• Customer retention
• Product sales
• Service improvement
• Market research
• Distribution
• Cost reduction
• Branding
• Fundraising

Before you take steps to achieve these goals, the first thing you should accomplish is having a clear idea of who is the perfect addressee of your marketing emails.

Importance of Segmentation in Email Marketing

The importance of email marketing lies in the recipient’s interest in your mailing content. Numerous emails land in our inboxes every day. That’s why, due to lack of time or disinterest, we move many of them straight to the trash without even opening them.

But what are the reasons for losing interest in advertising emails after a certain period?

• Email subjects are often too repetitive, lack innovative or creative features, and give the impression that the emails will not tell us anything new. 
• A mailing may also end up in our inbox at an inopportune moment, leaving us no time to read the email. 
• It also happens that we read the email, but we are disappointed or bored with the content, so we will not open future mailings from the sender. 

In short, there are numerous possible reasons for the newsletter’s importance. Luckily, you can counteract this by following a few basic email marketing tips.

In most cases, the dwindling interest is due to email marketers not devoting any effort to learning more about their newsletter subscribers, understanding their—often different—needs, and creating content that excites them.

But all this is about direct marketing importance. Instead of seeing your newsletter subscribers as a homogeneous mass and sending out impersonal mass emails, you should adapt your email marketing to the different heterogeneous subgroups of your target group.

To create relevant newsletter content, it is therefore advisable to assign these subgroups to so-called “segments.”

How to Define Segments?

In a nutshell, a segment is a group of customers with the same place of living/same buyer behavior/same sex/etc. When defining your segments to maximize the results of your email marketing campaign, you should also ask yourself the following questions:

• For which customers is my offer relevant?
• Which characteristics, interests, living conditions, economic characteristics, and needs characterize the persona?
• What criteria must be met for a particular customer to decide on my product or offer?

You’ll find that it’s much easier to create relevant newsletter content when you have in mind real people who have lives, likes, interests, and specific skills, rather than just the homogenous mass of “all recipients.”

In this way, you can more easily put yourself in the position of your subscribers and assess your email from their point of view as you create it: with this, you know what your readers hope for, what they expect, and what they are happy about. 

By segmenting your recipient list for your email marketing or tagging contacts with different tags based on their associated persona, you can send different content per customer that is tailored to specific needs.

Quick Email Marketing Tip

It makes sense to offer your website visitors several topics when registering, which will simplify segmented shipping depending on their individual interests. 

Another important benefit of narrowing down your target group is that you reduce the costs of your email marketing: by only sending the mailing to the recipients for whom the content is relevant, you will pay for this decreased number of contacts.

How to Build Email Marketing Strategy

Do you want to attract new customers or win over existing customers? If so, you need to apply some email marketing best practices. 

With ecommerce businesses, around 10-20% of the monthly turnover can be traced back to email marketing campaigns. Implementing a good email marketing strategy can lead to such results. On the other hand, immature marketing strategies will hardly achieve the desired ROI. A good email marketing plan nurtures leads, paving the way for brands to reach their target audience.

A successful email strategy consists of three main components:

• Traffic (visitor) generation
• Email funnel
• Lead conversion

Whether you want to communicate information about your products and services or sell products, email marketing is one of the best methods. Below are some best practices to help create a successful email marketing strategy:

#1: Determine Your Goals

First thing’s first: it is vital to set the goals of your email marketing campaign from the start. What are your expectations of email marketing, and what do you expect from this form of advertising? Being clear about your goals will help you better target your email messages, images, and template design.

In some email marketing examples, if you want to generate more clicks on your website, you can:

• Сhange the content of your email or its UI/UX design
• Increase conversion rates at the previous stage (email opening)
• Select better-targeted audience for your newsletter

However, for established brand communities and fan bases, you can choose a format that lends itself to long stories or supports video embedding.

#2: Find a Suited Email Content Management System

Since many platforms specialize in email marketing, it’s essential to find the correct one. The reason is: Different platforms produce different results. That’s why you should choose the right email automation platform for your marketing goals and technical levels.

For example, if you’re looking for an out-of-the-box solution that requires minimal technical effort, Mailchimp is a popular choice. If you’re looking for a platform with extensive customization options, a platform like Klaviyo might be your best bet.

#3: Design Your Emails to Increase Engagement

A good email marketing strategy is only complete with an attractive email design. Sending a simple text email works fine, but an email designed with HTML has more potential to get the customer to click the call-to-action (CTA) button or link.

When designing your emails, you first determine the most critical elements that the email should contain. This includes the subject line, body, graphics, CTA, and footer.

You don’t want to be too out of the ordinary when designing an email template. Use a legible font so subscribers can read the information as quickly as possible. Fonts should be standard (as the other ones can be unsupported by the recipient’s email client) and as simple as possible. Make use of email marketing software that offers a library of custom templates instead of creating an email template from scratch.

#4: Segment Your Email List

Since your subscribers’ willingness to convert varies, you should categorize them according to their interests, unique characteristics, etc., to ensure that the right content is delivered to the right audience. 

Also, determine your core target groups and address them with relevant campaigns. For example, send special promotional emails to your existing customers to entice them back to your store.

#5: Create Engaging Content

Not all newsletters are the same. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve—whether it’s driving traffic, educating your audience, or building a community—some brands thrive with short copy, others with very long copy.

The most important thing is that your content provides value to the reader, no matter what it looks like. You can build strong brand awareness and loyalty by knowing who you’re reaching out to and what your readers’ expectations are.

#6: Personalize Your Content

Personalization with email marketing allows you to target your campaigns based on the last product you bought, your customers’ demographics, or specific audiences, for example.

Tailor your content to your customer’s needs and make them offers that take their interests into account. In this way, you can build relationships with your target group and maintain them, thus increasing your turnover and sales.

Try these methods of email personalization for your campaigns:

• Address your subscribers by name, making your audience feel special and using their name in the greeting or subject line
• Offer content that is relevant to your target audience’s current buying stage
• New subscribers should receive a welcome message, and existing customers should receive upsell offers
• Send subscribers birthday and holiday greetings in your campaigns, personalizing your campaigns with content about user-related and seasonal events

#7: Generate Eye-catching Subject Lines

The right subject line can make the difference between a user opening your email and not, which is directly linked to a positive KPI. A strong, memorable subject line encourages readers to click and focus on what matters most (your content). It is advisable to keep subject lines short and concise, under 50 characters in length.

If you don’t know where to begin, try different subject lines in an A/B test. With some email management platforms, you can easily do this in the settings or manually segment your distribution lists and track the results. This leads us to the following email marketing strategy step.

#8: Identify and Track Key Success Metrics 

The purpose of your newsletter is to achieve your marketing goals. But how do you know what works and what doesn’t?

To be able to draw clear conclusions about whether you are actually achieving your marketing goals, you should track some essential KPIs:

• ROI: the return of your investments in email marketing
• Open rate: this metric shows how many people opened your email
• Click-through rate: the percentage of people who visited the links in your emails
• Unsubscribe rate: a measure of how many people unsubscribed from your email list
• Bounce rate: this shows how many emails didn’t get through
• Email list size and growth: how many subscribers have you amassed? (Ideally, you should be tracking this growth month-to-month)

Split-testing Your Emails

Make it a habit to only send emails that incorporate split tests. You need to verify that the email design you create actually works. Almost all email marketing systems have built-in A/B testing capabilities. This allows you to test landing pages and emails against each other optimally.

Also, consider where you can centralize the learnings from your campaign A/B tests. Over time, elements, headlines, designs, etc., will emerge as winners. Make sure you record these in a document or a spreadsheet so you can better design future campaigns. If you implement such a system, your campaigns should only improve over time.

Good Email Marketing Example: Bulletproof Newsletter 

The legal basis for email marketing campaigns is the clear consent of the recipient: In contrast to most other forms of marketing, the recipient explicitly requests the messages (the double opt-in procedure is usually used) and receives relevant information instead of annoying advertising.

At the same time, the recipient can revoke their consent at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link (opt-out).

The principle of so-called permission marketing (marketing with consent) thus forms the foundation for high-response and legally-compliant email campaigns.

#9: Optimize for Mobile Devices

According to statistics, 42.3% of all users delete emails that are not mobile-friendly, missing necessary conversion and sales opportunities. Make your email campaigns mobile-friendly to give subscribers an excellent user experience and increase important KPIs such as engagement. Optimize your email for mobile devices with the following tips:

• Be brief. Write a concise email body, subject line, and headline. Use a larger font so readers can easily see your content, even on small displays.
• Use responsive design. Work with email campaign programs that have features to create mobile-friendly emails.
• Test your call to action. Avoid unnecessary email graphics that distract focus from your CTA or make it difficult to read or tap on a mobile screen.
• Test which CTA color, text, content, and other elements lead to more conversions.

#10: Focus on the Best Time to Send Emails

How effective is an email sent to people who are sleeping in your target audience location? It’s essential to focus on the optimal time.

Choose the best time to send emails to improve open and click-through rates and other important KPIs. Customer loyalty to your brand increases when you reach them at the right time.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday lead among the best days for email campaigns. But for a specific email marketing campaign, it’s better to conduct A/B testing. Don’t want to worry about the calendar? That’s why over 50% of companies use automation tools to automate email campaigns.

Deliver exceptional content straight to your audience’s inbox with these examples of email marketing campaigns! If you follow theseBest examples of an email marketing campaign tips when creating your next email marketing campaign, your campaign will have a good chance of being successful.

Conclusion: Success Factors in Email Marketing

Now that you have understood the importance of email marketing and email marketing best practices, make sure to ask yourself the following questions:

• Strategic quality: Have clear goals and the relevant key figures been defined? Has it been ensured that the campaign’s success can be evaluated in detail? Is email marketing networked with other marketing channels in the sense of cross-channel marketing?
• Operational excellence: Are standard email marketing best practices being followed? Is a professional automation infrastructure (email marketing provider) used?
• Are you paying attention to cross-channel optimization? Key figures should not only be collected but also used operationally to continuously optimize email campaigns, but also the upstream and downstream processes (opt-in/email address acquisition, landing pages, and ordering process.

FAQ

01/

How can I avoid being marked as spam?

Here are several proven ways to avoid it:

1. Correctly configure the primary authentication protocols SPF DKIM and DMARC
2. Send emails only after the recipient’s consent (single/double opt-in)
3. Make it easy for recipients to manage their preferences or unsubscribe from a particular email newsletter

02/

What other marketing methods can I combine with email marketing?

There are many examples of email marketing campaigns. When it’s part of content marketing, you can send your potential customers relevant blog posts or other helpful content. When it’s combined with lead generation, you can offer your subscribers interesting content offers in exchange for their contact information.

03/

How important is the email subject line?

The subject line of an email is often more important than many people think. In fact, 47% of recipients base their decision on whether to open an email on the subject line alone. That’s why it’s so important to choose subject lines that pique the recipient’s curiosity. Among email marketing tips, this one can be implemented most easily.

04/

What is email automation?

Basically, the term is self-explanatory: It’s about emails that are sent automatically. An email is sent automatically if a certain trigger occurs that you have defined in advance. The benefits of email marketing of this type are straightforward: everything is handled for you.