Email has been around since the early days of the internet, making it one of the oldest digital marketing strategies in the book. Fast forward to today and email has retained its supremacy, becoming a vital tool for communication that people check very regularly.
As a digital marketing approach, email is still one of the best options around for reaching a targeted audience with personalized messages. Instead of getting lost in search results and social feeds, brands have the chance to reach their audience directly with an email. Businesses that develop sound email strategies are able to bolster their brand, create real loyalty, and generate more conversions.
However, despite all these efforts, many businesses still struggle with the basic strategies of email marketing. In this article, we’ll walk you through how to craft an email marketing strategy that works for your business.
Build Your Email Subscriber List
The email list, a collection of contacts, is the base of any email marketing strategy. The best way to create a successful email marketing campaign that converts is to start with a subscriber base that is engaged with your content and interested in what your brand is about. But how should you start?
Signup Form
The best way to build your list is to start with the people who are already visiting your website. By building an email signup form on your website, visitors can subscribe easily by submitting their email address. From there, it’s up to your digital marketing team to optimize the form and employ a creative strategy for attracting signups. Compelling headlines, hard-to-resist offers, and strategic placement of call-to-actions throughout the site can all be used to encourage action.
Leverage Social
Leveraging a social media following is a great way to encourage email subscribers as well, provided you have an audience that is engaged and interested in your content. If they aren’t, a contest or giveaway is a tried-and-true method to increase attention and excitement. If you want to expand your horizons, consider partnering with another brand with a similar kind of audience and cross-promoting each other.
Remain Compliant with Email Marketing Laws
There are a number of laws in place around the world that prevent businesses from spamming their subscribers and emailing without consent. Failure to comply could result in stiff penalties or fines. The easiest way to ensure you remain compliant is to build your own list – that means no purchasing email addresses from shady services. Buying email lists is strictly forbidden and will result in low-quality emails with very high unsubscribe rates that will flag your account and could cost you your entire email marketing program.
To stay compliant with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), you’ll need to get express or implied consent from your contacts. Get very familiar with these terms as they determine whether or not you are allowed to email your contacts, as Canada requires that people opt in to receive commercial electronic messages (CEM). The USA, on the other hand, allows for an opt-out system, which is why we see heaps of spam from the USA. Let’s quickly dig into the consent models.
- Express Consent: Express consent is when visitors proactively give permission to contact them by way of a contact form, or a checkbox on your email signup form that visitors must check to indicate they agree to subsequent emails. There is usually a follow-up email where the person must confirm that they did, in fact, request the email. This is called a double opt-in confirmation, as people can have their email addresses added to sign-up forms against their will, but are required to confirm the signup. The double opt-in protects against this sort of fraudulent signups.
- Implied Consent: Implied consent is a bit of a grey area, and it allows businesses to email CEM emails to non-express consent individuals under certain situations, such as where individuals have a pre-existing relationship with the business, or have emailed the business in the past. However, implied consent contacts must be migrated into an express consent status within six months of the initial contact or interaction. This timer resets at each contact point in time.
Read the exhaustive rules about express and implied consent here > https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/com500/guide.htm
To remain compliant with CASL, companies must also include an easy-to-read unsubscribe button or link somewhere within each email, providing subscribers an easy way to opt out.
There are a few other requirements that you’re obligated to provide to the visitor alongside your contact form. They include:
- You must make it clear who is sending emails – that means not impersonating another brand or trying to remain anonymous. This is done by using logos or business names around the contact or email marketing form.
- You must indicate how often you intend to send emails to this list and what the general topics will be.
- You must provide an email footer with your business information and logo in the email as well to reinforce your branding and transparency.
A great contact form (and landing page, see below) should very clearly create a level of trust with the content and provide a good argument why the person might want to be signed up. Ring the Pavlov bell!
Work on Your Landing Page
Every marketing email you send should be created with the goal of getting subscribers to take some sort of action. Usually, this action is a link back to the website where businesses have a better chance of converting the visitor.
A landing page is a special page designed to receive traffic from a specific campaign, like an email. This landing page typically won’t be visible to other website visitors – only the ones who have engaged with a particular campaign. The benefit of a landing page is the ability to cut out all of the fluff and focus on specific content that will be relevant only to the people who viewed that email.
Over the course of an email marketing campaign with multiple emails, you’ll probably want to consider multiple landing pages. However, if you are just starting out, consider one landing page that matches the content of your first email. Maybe it’s an introduction to your brand. Or maybe it’s a tantalizing offer or value proposition.
Create Compelling Content
Compelling content that people want to engage with is the foundation of a successful email marketing campaign. Think of all the emails that you skim through on a daily basis. What makes you stop, open, and read an email among the piles of email you discard? In smart emails, it’s a well-targeted offer of some sort of product or service that you can’t pass up.
Subject Line
Armed with drop-dead gorgeous content that’s ready to wow, there are two major elements that need attention. First is the subject line. Similar to jamming your foot into a closing elevator, your window is small, but there is a window. After landing in an email inbox, the subject line is the only part of your email that’s guaranteed to see the light of day. Don’t waste this opportunity – keep it short (7 words or less) and create urgency if possible. However, try to avoid signals that will raise your ‘spam score’ in systems like Gmail, Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange, etc. This includes avoiding punctuation like question marks and exclamation marks (never use exclamation marks!!).
Call-to-Actions
Second, you’ll need a clear call-to-action button. If you’ve enticed your subscribers to not only subscribe to your email but also open it, it’s now time to bring it home with a clear action. This is where you can put your landing page to use, linking it up to the call-to-action button.
Personalization and Segmentation
Another key aspect of creating compelling content is personalization. Marketing email platforms will allow you to use merge tags, which incorporate basic information about your subscribers, like their name. This is the most basic level of personalization.
To take things further, consider incorporating more data you’ve collected in your CRM by integrating it with your email marketing platform. Purchase behaviour, website activity, and other unique information can be used to personalize content. Within your email platform, you’ll be able to segment your subscriber list, adding tags to different contacts who have taken certain actions on the site, live in the same city, or share other characteristics. With data on your subscribers and a highly segmented list, you’ll be able to create more relevant content and send more personal emails.
Test & Optimize
With digital content, it’s hard to know in advance what will rake in the engagement and what will flop. Everyone thinks they have a good grasp until they’re surprised. The digital marketing mantra of Always be Testing (and improving), couldn’t be more important in your email marketing strategy.
A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing
A/B testing can be used in your email marketing campaign to identify the best content and optimize your email content. In an A/B test, you send two slightly different versions of your email to your list. Version A goes to 50% of your list, and Version B goes to the other 50%. That difference could be the subject line, the offer, the call-to-action, or something else. After a predetermined percentage of emails have been sent, a winner will be declared, with the remaining percentage receiving the winning email only. Or, you can let the test play out through the entire list. You also must indicate ‘what’ you are testing. This could be open percentage (testing a subject), the arrangement of content in the email, clicks on a particular colour of button, or even the text of the button.
Multivariate tests involve more than one difference across your emails and are generally best suited for large lists where you can run multiple email versions and still have a batch of emails to send the ‘winner’ to.
Optimizing for Opens & Clicks
Once the email has been sent, it’s up to you to determine how the email performed against your goals. If the open rates seem low, it could be due to an uninteresting or irrelevant subject line. Or maybe it’s because you sent it at a time when subscribers were too busy to read another email. If the click rates seem low, you either haven’t done a good job inspiring action inside your email, the offer was poor, or the content inside did not match the subject line.
We’re essentially just scratching the surface of what makes a really great email marketing campaign, but if you start with what you learned today, you are already miles ahead of how most businesses treat their email contacts.
If you’d like to learn more about incorporating email into your marketing strategy, contact us today: