If you’re considering jumping into email marketing for the first time, there are few questions we think all marketers should ask themselves first. Use these tips as a starting point to make sure you’re set up for success.
1.
Do you have the right resources? – You’ve determined email marketing is a priority in your overall marketing strategy—Hooray! Before you get started, you’ll want to first make sure you have all necessary resources.
- A reason: The first and most important resource you’ll want to have is a strategy and goals – why are you launching email and what do you hope it will bring to your customer experience?
- An email platform: You’ll need to choose an email service provider that will serve your initial needs and be able to support you as your marketing grows.
- A list: Before you can make and send an email, you’ll need a subscriber list of users who have opted in and expressed they want to hear from your company. See number 5 below, but you’ll also need a list-growth strategy to keep your lists fresh and flourishing.
- A team: You’ll need someone who understands the different audiences and overarching strategy for the email campaigns, content creators, people to review and understand analytics, and designers and developers to create the email templates, depending on the email platform you choose and how robust your template design is.
2.
How many audiences? – Sending out one email with the same content to your entire database may not be the best tactic, and this may be reflected in open rate and click-through rates that may not be where you want them. List segmentation (sending targeted emails to different groups of subscribers) is a great way to ensure your customers are receiving relevant, useful content they want to engage with. Consider how many audiences you want to reach and what you want to convey to each of them.
3.
What should go into creating email content? – Once you’ve established goals, the content for each email you send out is by far the most important part of the email, including the subject line. Your voice needs to be consistent, you need to have a call to action, and based on your audience segment, you need to know when and how to alter your content.
4.
What analytics should we be looking at? – List growth, open rate, click through rate, spam complaints, and unsubscribes: How do these stats fit with your goals? Your platform can track these stats, and you can take it from there and if your email efforts are well-integrated with the rest of your efforts, even use these to track sales and revenue.
5.
What happens next and how do we gain subscribers? – You’ll need to have a plan on how to grow your subscription list(s). You can have a simple email signup form on your website, but you can also take it one step further and have a more substantial subscription center on your website. This allows the user to opt-in to the segmented lists they want to be a part of and customize their email experience with your brand. You can also promote email signup on your social media channels.
Email marketing is an effective way to keep customers informed and can be inexpensive. You’ll have to do a lot of upfront work to kick it off correctly, it may not be an easy process but the payoff can be huge.
Need some help kickstarting your email marketing? Drop us a line and we would love to help!