Newer online platforms have emerged, but few channels beat good old email in bringing in results. Email has become even more essential, now being used to access services like digital banking and shopping. And with 51 percent of consumers in the U.S. preferring to be reached by brands through this medium, it “continues to defy its predicted demise” (Statista, 2021).
Companies cannot ignore the power and potential of email in 2021. If you haven’t yet, it’s high time you build a holistic email marketing strategy plan.
Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that lets you connect directly with prospects and customers through email. Different types of email marketing campaigns can be employed to help you achieve your business objectives, chief of which is sales and conversions.
In this post, we explore everything you need to execute an email marketing strategy plan correctly:
• Why use email marketing and email marketing services?
• What are the building blocks of email marketing 2021?
• How to build an email campaign marketing list
• How to execute an automated email marketing strategy
• How to design email drip campaigns
Why Use Email Marketing?
Indeed, why use email marketing when you can focus on increasing your Facebook fans and Instagram followers? While social media marketing (SMM) provides brands with effective targeting, marketing emails accomplish several things at once.
Here are some of the reasons why email marketing plays a huge role in your overall marketing strategy:
• It yields the highest return on investment (ROI): The average email marketing ROI is around 4,400 percent, yielding $44 for every dollar spent (OptinMonster, 2019). Our comprehensive blog on email marketing 2021 statistics showed that email marketing campaigns are six times more effective in delivering ROI than tweets.
• It is direct and personal: In employing an email marketing template for raising awareness or engaging existing customers, wherever your consumers are in the sales funnel, you’re delivering your message to their intimate space. And so, leveraging email drip campaigns lets you forge close connections with your audience.
• It adheres to permission marketing principles: This type of marketing relies on people allowing you to send them newsletters, offers, promotions and the like. At its core, your email marketing campaign makes it to your customers’ or prospects’ inbox because they permit it.
• It is measurable: Across all industries, the average email open rate is 22.33 percent (Mailchimp). This piece of data, together with others like click-through rate (CTR) and email marketing conversion rate, is accessible in the analytics built into email marketing automation tools.
• It ties into lead generation, sales and customer retention: One critical reason why email marketing is important is that it complements other channels. It nurtures and retains customers and converts prospects driven by search engine optimization (SEO) and SMM to your website.
Email Marketing 2021 Fundamentals
Crafting an email marketing campaign strategy is a tedious task if you have zero experience or have not brushed up on email marketing trends. While it is only one channel, it has various components that fit together like in a puzzle. You can mess up emails for marketing if you have no idea how they work.
So, let’s study the basics:
How Does Email Marketing Work?
Put simply, email campaign marketing needs three things to take off: a means to get subscribers, a list of subscribers and an email service provider (ESP). You should develop solid content, too, but that’s a subtopic we can explore in the Email Marketing Campaign Strategy Building section.
Here’s a quick definition of email marketing plan terms:
• Opt-in methods: Any process you adopt to draw people’s attention and compel them to subscribe to your newsletter or email marketing campaign. Examples include inbound marketing materials and sign-up forms.
• Email list: Your list of subscribers, also known as the people who permitted you to send them emails for marketing purposes.
• ESP: These are the tools or software used for email blasts, with support functions and features like sign-up form embeds for sites, email list segmentation, email blast scheduling and analytics. You may consult an email marketing agency for a list of their go-to software and solutions.
Benefits of an Email Marketing Plan
Properly deployed marketing emails can do the following:
• Improve brand recognition: Your captive audience gets to learn about your brand through engaging content, building goodwill and brand equity over time. You’re top of mind once prospects are ready to buy your product or buy into your service.
• Strengthen customer relationships: Back in the day, exchanging mails brought people closer together. The personalized approach of emails for marketing enables subscribers to know more about your brand. At the same time, you also gain valuable insights into customer behavior.
• Save you time and money: Producing emails and email marketing landing page designs, deploying them, tracking them and monitoring them are not as expensive or time-consuming as creating a television advertisement or distributing direct mail.
• Give you a list you can own: Your email list is composed of individuals who enlisted to receive email marketing campaigns from you. That list is specific to your company, unlike other digital marketing channels that rely on consumer profiles (which work for certain goals).
• Help deliver desired results: It’s easy now to link user actions to business results, so you can link email marketing ROI to your email marketing open rate or email marketing conversion rate.
How To Build an Email Campaign Marketing List
Before or as you design an email marketing template, you must build a list of email subscribers that will receive direct communication from you.
Here are the key steps to collecting email addresses successfully:
1. Optimize Your Important Pages
The first of our email marketing tips entails collaboration with your website development team: maximize your homepage and About page. Place a sign-up box with a strong call-to-action (CTA) below the fold so as not to disrupt the flow of each page (show your visitors first what’s in it for them).
Then, email marketing firm experts suggest the use of the two-step opt-in method. That is, you provide a link for people to click, which leads to a pop-up form they can fill out. LeadPages reported that their newsletter subscriptions increased by 60 percent using this email marketing automation tactic.
2. Create Compelling Lead Magnets
When you’re building trust with prospects in the awareness and interest phase, begin by offering a lead magnet they can’t refuse to click.
Lead magnets are automated email marketing assets given freely to potential leads in exchange for their email address. Think of it as an incentive for opting in. They can range from free services and discounts to pieces of digital content.
Why use email marketing lead magnets?
• They add value to your target audience, such as solving their problem and hence setting the stage for optimizing your email marketing conversion rate.
• When produced well to engage consumers and fit their objectives, lead magnets convince them to subscribe and look forward to your marketing emails.
• They help you ease people into a product or service with steep pricing.
Most popular lead magnet examples:
• Case studies
• Comprehensive training videos
• Discount codes
• eBooks
• Free software/software trial
• PDF checklist
• White paper
3. Create a Form That Converts
Work out the ideal number of fields for the best conversion results. You may also try the two-step opt-in technique mentioned above. Once people have filled out the form, direct them to your email marketing landing page, which should be nice and easy to use. This allows them to do what they came for, such as download the free content.
How To Execute an Automated Email Marketing Strategy
After building an email list, it’s time to move your email marketing campaign strategy forward. In this section, we discuss the trends and techniques that you can incorporate into your strategy.
Follow through our email marketing tips for 2021:
1. Determine the Right Drip Marketing Sequence
Chances are you’ve come across email drip marketing even without you knowing what it means. The queen of email marketing services, drip marketing or email marketing automation refers to a series of automated emails sent out according to an action done by a prospect or customer.
User actions like signing up for a newsletter trigger the distribution of several emails designed to take your targets deeper into the experience. Following the newsletter example, you can send a Welcome or Thank you email after a person signs up – together with access to a lead magnet if any. If data tells you they opened your email and downloaded the lead magnet, you can send them a content link or summary of how they can apply the information shared in the lead magnet.
Some essential characteristics of email drip campaigns to remember:
• They are targeted emails, and this type yields 18 times more revenue than that of generic messaging.
• They educate and engage based on sales funnel stages: Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel and Bottom of the Funnel. Lead nurturing, onboarding, recommendations and cart abandonment are just a few of the drip email marketing campaign examples you can try.
• They’re pre-designed to allow automated distribution. Email marketing company favorite ESPs like Mailchimp and Autopilot make it so much easier to set up email marketing plan sequences.
2. Segment Your Targets
Related to the above – and an important factor to improving your email marketing open rate – is email list segmentation. If you’re in the business-to-business (B2B) industry, you might segment your list based on company size, position and previous email open rate data. Business-to-consumers (B2C) firms may use age, location, gender or income as a basis.
It usually falls on a trusted email marketing company to dig deeper, segmenting lists according to buying behavior, customer reviews and other user-related activities.
3. Produce Engaging Content
Copy for email marketing campaigns – and even your email marketing landing page – look and sound different from a blog post or a social media caption. It also aligns with the email marketing template you’re using. And you must tailor the content to individual target segments.
If this is something you can do yourself or with the help of an email marketing agency, don’t forget to apply split-testing or A/B testing to boost your email marketing open rate.
4. Apply Email Marketing Trends
An email marketing strategy plan is incomplete without including email marketing trends. They spice up your emails while enabling you to reach your goals. Of course, a highly responsible email marketing firm would not simply throw a hodgepodge of trends your way and call it a strategy. So you should also keep in mind to take advantage of those that integrate well with your approach.
Here are some trends for email marketing campaign examples:
• Animation
• Brand storytelling
• Bright colors
• Hyper-personalization
• Mobile optimization
• Reviews and testimonials
• Text-only emails (people might appreciate the change)
5. Refine Sending Frequency
Knowing the right cadence for your drip marketing is the key to enhancing your email open rate or email marketing ROI. It’s one of the things an expert email marketing company would pay attention to, especially that you need to comply with guidelines like the CAN-SPAM Act when sending commercial emails.
Design Email Marketing Tips
The best email marketing campaign examples share a common thread. They combine email marketing and design principles to pack a punch. Here are some quick tips for a good email design:
• Straightforward, both aesthetically and functionally
• Easy to scan, where the most important message is placed at the top
• Contains text that is evenly spaced out to prevent overwhelming readers
• Uses mobile-friendly fonts
• Ends with a relevant and compelling call to action
The Road to Tangible Results
After learning why email marketing is important to your overall digital marketing strategy, we hope you start making it a top priority for your business in 2021. However, it’s also vital to know that crafting an email marketing strategy can be intense. Having an email marketing agency guide you through the nitty-gritty of it all is an investment worth making. The expected email marketing ROI should cover the cost of hiring one.
For well-rounded email marketing services, partner with Thrive Internet Marketing Agency. We are an email marketing firm with over 15 years of experience assisting companies of all sizes and backgrounds to win in the digital realm.
Our track record includes optimizing an email marketing campaign, creating designs and preparing templates for future campaigns for a factoring company. As our email marketing team deployed AMP HTML email code for a dynamic email interface – complete with drop-down buttons and accordion menus – together with other design decisions, we helped improve this client’s lead generation efforts. Throughout the campaign, the business saw a 546.08 percent increase in its year-on-year conversion rate and added 2,970 leads.
Achieve the same outstanding results for your company. Call us at 866.434.4748 to get a quote or book your first consultation with our email marketing experts.
