Analysing Email Marketing Strategy For Marketers
An email marketing strategy helps you market your products and services to customers taking into consideration who your target customers are, what they are looking for, and when is the best time to provide information to them. For an email strategy to be effective you need to take the following principles into consideration:
- Segmentation: grouping similar users together and providing them with relevant information, as opposed to sending the same email to everyone
2. Personalization: tailor your message to each user, such as including there name and providing recommendations that are individual to them
3. Timing: making sure your email arrives at the best time to suit the user
4. Engagement: optimizing your email campaigns to keep your subscribers interested
5. Analytics: reviewing past campaigns to see how they performed and use learnings for future campaigns
Let’s look at the first principle for building an effective email marketing strategy, segmentation. Segmentation is grouping similar users together and sending them relevant content. Segmenting your email lists will help you get better open rates, click rates and conversions. By sending messages to targeted segments within your lists, your recipients will find your campaigns more relevant. For example, a car dealership could segment there email list by users who are interested in similar cars, such as all users who are interested in BMWs and sending them information specifically about BMWs. The more information you collect about your email recipients, the more effectively you can segment your audience and tailor your campaigns.
There are various ways you can segment your email lists and it’s important to tailor your messages to the relevant audience. The more information you collect about your email recipients, the more opportunities you have to send emails with content that is relevant and engaging for the recipient.
Here are just a few ways you can segment your email recipients:
- Demographics – Gender, Age, Geography, Education
- Job role/industry/company type
- Purchase history
- Web traffic
- Interest groups
- Clicks/Opens/Content format
- Change in engagement/behaviour
Now, let’s take a look at each one in more detail.
Personalization as part of an email marketing strategy
The next principle we will discuss is personalization and the impact it has on running an effective email strategy. By personalizing your emails you give the user a unique experience, which will help drive opens, clicks and conversions.
Here is an example of an email from Amazon, tailored specifically to the user:
A.Recommendation for the customer: the email clearly states “We have a recommendation for you” letting the user know that this email is tailored to there interests
B. Addresses the customer by name: using a customers’ first name makes the email seem more personal
C. Display a product based on the customers viewing history: by using data on a customer viewing history you can compose an email the user will immediately recognize and increase the chance of conversion.
It is important to be strategic about the timing of your email to ensure it delivers the right message at the right time in order to drive open rates. For the majority of email campaigns, one single send time will not suit all recipients. Here are some tips for improving the timing of your email send:
- Test your audience: there is no specific day and time that will suit all organizations. Utilize A/B testing to find the optimal send time for your audience.
- Optimal days: from the majority of studies Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days to send email campaigns but as mentioned above, always test this with your audience.
- Optimal send times: the best sends times in a day include: 10 a.m., 8 p.m.-midnight, 2 p.m, and 6 a.m.
Engagement as part of email marketing strategy
Building an email list is one thing, keeping those subscribers interested through a strong email engagement strategy is another. Here are some actions that can be taken to ensure that your emails draw your readers and recipients in and keep them engaged:
- Start your email communications off on the right foot by welcoming all new subscribers.
- Tell your subscribers how often you will be emailing them. This will set expectations early for the recipients and they will become familiar with how often you email them.
- Set expectations about what your emails are focused on. Let your subscribers know what types of emails they will be receiving and allow them to set preferences for what emails they would prefer to receive.
- Simplify your email messaging. By reducing the amount of different CTAs and text in your email, you can focus the subscribers attention and concentrate on a single goal.
- Create targeted segments around individual experiences. As we saw in segmentation, there are many ways to group users and by doing so you will see better results.
- Always test your audience. The best way to see what works for your subscriber is to continuously test and optimize your emails accordingly.
After every email campaign, it’s important to perform a data-driven analysis and apply the learnings to optimize future campaigns. By applying the learnings of past campaigns you can increase the opens, clicks and conversions from your emails and thus drive business growth.
Note: make sure to take into account customers in different timezones.
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