10 things to consider when crafting an effective Email Marketing Plan
Struggling to know where to even begin when it comes to understanding, planning and executing your email marketing strategy for your small business? You’re not alone!
Email marketing can feel like a minefield with so many areas to cover, metrics to understand and compliance to follow around managing customer data.
With an easy to follow framework and a bit of guidance, I believe that anyone can create effective email campaigns that drive sales and encourage customer retention and loyalty over time.
Here are 10 areas to consider when crafting your email marketing strategy.
1. Understand your audience
This is not only true for success in email marketing, but for all marketing activities for your small business. You should spend time understanding who your customer is – where they live, how they spend their time, what their disposable income is, what their pain points are, what their hobbies and interests are, their purchasing behaviour, how they like to shop (in person, online, markets, to name a few) and the type of content they like to consume.
There are many ways to evaluate this including reviewing your website and social media metrics, through surveys and polls, customer focus groups and reviews and interacting in person with your customers.
Your understanding will build over time as your small business grows, but in the beginning you should very clearly identify who it is you want to target using the data points above and work out where your ideal customer spends their time in order to tailor your marketing plan and reach them effectively.
2. Build a quality customer list
It’s vital to collect email addresses of your customers (and potential customers, also known as leads or prospects) from day one. At any time, you could be locked out of your social media accounts or those platforms could go down, and if that happens you can find yourself in a real pickle – with no customers to contact!
Luckily when you build an email list, you own it, providing you an effective way to communicate and connect with your customers.
There are many ways to grow your email list, including:
Creating enticing pop ups for your website offering something in exchange for the email address. This could be a discount, gift, free downloadable, or piece of valuable content. Different pop ups can be created for different purposes, and triggered at different times. For example, you can set up an exit-intent pop up to capture potential customers just as they are about to leave your website with a more enticing offer.
Including a marketing consent checkbox at checkout to capture emails of customers making a purchase with you. Given they like your products, it’s a great time to capture that interest more long-term!
Utilising social media organically through a link on your profile to sign up
Running paid lead generation ads through social media
Host a competition or giveaway and encourage sharing and tagging of the post
Collaborate with other brands or influencers to drive awareness and capture new customers
Capture customer details at point-of-sale in your bricks and mortar stores or pop up locations
3. Create compelling content
Once you understand who your customer is and their likes and interests, determine a range of content pillars and topics that are of interest and encourage interaction with your brand. The intention here is not only to drive sales, but to establish a long-term relationship with your customer and drive loyalty and retention.
What are some educational topics you can speak to around your product? Are there any tips or tricks to get the best out of your product? For example: how to care for or extend the life of your shoes, if you sell footwear.
You want to engage your audience in a relatable and entertaining way to build up their rapport with you and your brand and get them excited to hear from you.
4. Utilise segmentation and personalisation
The days of sending bulk emails to your full email marketing list on repeat are over. It is now essential to incorporate a strategy to segment and personalise your communications, tailoring it to your customers interests and behaviours.
At the very minimum, you’ll want to ensure you are mostly contacting your engaged subscribers and suppressing anyone who has unsubscribed or indicated that they no longer wish to receive your marketing. Treating your highest value customers (or VIPs) in a special way can be a great way to build long-term loyalty with your brand.
Additionally, aim to be more personalised with the emails you send by using data collected on your customer browsing and behaviour. Examples of this include up-selling and cross-selling on specific category interests and purchases such as up-selling a jacket that pairs perfectly with a dress purchased.
The options for segmentation and personalisation are limitless! Your strategy will be entirely dependent on your customer, the sales cycle of your product and your communication style and preferences.
Not sure where to begin with segmenting your email list? Book in a free 30 minute call and we can help you get started!
5. Design eye catching and accessible email templates
It’s fair to say that most inboxes are flooded these days, so competing for valuable attention can be a real challenge! You’ll need to have crafted a compelling subject line and preheader to get your email opened, followed by presenting an on-brand and captivating email template design.
You don’t need to go over the top, but ensure that your products are presented in a professional way that aligns with your brand guidelines and overall presence.
It is equally important to have your email template designed and built with accessibility in mind. This includes writing alt text for all images, ensuring a balance of image and rich-text throughout the email, using contrasting colours to ensure buttons and CTAs (call-to-actions) are clear and links are clickable.
Images should be resized and optimised to load quickly, and your email should be designed to be mobile-friendly first and foremost.
6. Optimise send times and frequency
Have you ever sent an email out at a particular time and day, only to hear crickets (metaphorically, in the form of clicks)? You’re not alone!
Ensuring that you send your email communications on the right day and at the right time, is crucial for conversion. Think about when your customer is most likely to be able to open an email and act on your message (whether that be to shop now or read now). Start sending at this time and optimise through A/B tests to find what works best for your customer.
As a general rule of thumb, we suggest emailing your customers 2-3 times a week, but this is entirely dependent on your product and sales cycle. Quality is generally more important than quantity, however in saying that you don’t want to ghost your email list only to reappear months later! This will hurt your deliverability and is likely to result in an influx of unsubscribes, or worse – spam complaints.
As with everything in marketing, consistency is key!
7. Analyse your metrics, test and learn
In order to execute effective email campaigns, it is incredibly important to make time to review performance - as without regularly reviewing the key metrics of each email campaign, you are operating blind!
One of the best ways to improve your email marketing performance over time is through A/B testing. You’ll want to test things such as subject lines, send times and days and content variations, to see what works best with your customer. This is something you build on over time, and the more you test, the more you learn about what works for your small business.
8. Automate your flows
Arguably one of the most effective ways to drive conversion through email marketing is to optimise your email automations, also known as email flows. These include your welcome or nurture sequence, abandoned cart and checkout sequence, customer winback campaigns, back in stock emails and many more.
Once set up, email flows will operate in the background for you, contacting your customers and driving sales. Does it get any better than that!?
This is where you get the opportunity to focus on personalisation and set up marketing communications based on behavioural and interest-based data, enabling you to connect with your customers on a more granular level, providing them with email communications that feel tailored specifically to them.
If you haven’t set up any email flows yet, this would be one of the first places I would start after reading this article! To help get you started, download our Free Guide to Build Your Email Welcome Series below:
9. Monitor deliverability
As of February 2024, Google and Yahoo announced stricter sender requirements to manage increasing levels of spam and to ensure your emails land in your customers inboxes. There are a range of requirements that must be done from a technical perspective, with more details to follow in a separate post.
In the meantime, if you’re not sure whether you are meeting all the requirements, or you are having trouble with your email deliverability, book in a free call with us and we can assist you in troubleshooting.
10. Adhere to compliance and regulations
With customer data management comes responsibility, and adherence to all compliance and regulations set out in your country is an essential part of your business operations. Every email must have a clear way for your customers to unsubscribe (with a link that works!) and you must honour that by suppressing them from all marketing emails going forwards.
Remember, unsubscribing from your email list means that the customer no longer wishes to receive marketing communications, but if they make a purchase they will still need to receive any transactional based emails.
There is so much that goes into crafting an effective email strategy, and with an easy-to-follow framework of the 10 areas above you’ll be on your way to achieving this in no time.
If you find yourself lacking the time or confidence to get started and need help with pulling it all together, feel free to reach out to us and book in for either a one off 60 minute strategy session here or enquire about our 4 week 1:1 email coaching program here.
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