If you’re reading this, I assume you’re already convinced that email marketing is important for your business. You’ve probably already taken the leap and started incorporating emails into your marketing strategy. Perhaps you’ve even implemented a full-blown email marketing program and are wondering what’s next.
Email marketing is a crucial tool in any business, but especially for those seeking to grow their brands online. Since businesses and brands must utilize the internet to gain ground and capture new audience members, it only makes sense to develop an effective strategy for engaging users via email.
To ensure your emails are not only engaging, but effective as well, you need to set a plan and execute it carefully. What is your email marketing renewal strategy?
Step one: Set a benchmark and measure your progress.
The first and most important step in the process is setting a benchmark and measuring your progress. Before you start incorporating email marketing into your strategy, you must have a clear idea of what results to expect. It is impossible to set a benchmark and measure your progress without a clear idea of what success looks like.
The best benchmark to use when measuring the success of your email marketing strategy is the standard for which you’ll be judged: your ROI (return on investment). Your ROI is the amount of money you spend on email marketing divided by the amount of profit you generate from your email marketing efforts. For example, if you spent £20 on mailers and you generated £50 of profit, your ROI would be 50/20, or 2.5.
Your ROI will differ based on numerous factors, but it is a good benchmark to use because it is objective and does not rely on subjective measures. When you set this benchmark and track your progress toward it, you will be able to determine how effective your strategy is and if your efforts are paying off. The clearer your benchmark and the better you are able to track your progress, the better your chance of achieving your desired results. Without a clear idea of what success looks like, it’s difficult to set a benchmark and track your progress toward that goal. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to easily track the results of your email marketing efforts and determine the ROI of your strategy. For more information, check out this blog post from the Lead Engagement Team at HubSpot:
Tying Email Marketing to the Bottom Line.
“To determine the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign, you need to look at both the incoming and the outgoing links in that campaign. For example, when you set up an email to promote a product or service, you might get a small number of people who click on the link and make a purchase. However, you might also end up sending that email to someone who already purchased the product or service you were promoting. In this case, your link caused them to leave the site and make a purchase, but it also meant they were never going to come back to your site. A purchase at Nordstrom does not mean the person who made the purchase is also going to visit your website. The key is to look at the results of all the past campaigns so you can identify patterns and accurately predict how future campaigns will perform. If you keep good records of your email marketing, you’ll be able to see the full picture of how each campaign turned out and whether or not it was successful.”
Step two: Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.
Once you’ve set your benchmark and started measuring your results, it’s time to identify your target audience and create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a theoretical representation of a person or group of people who are most likely to buy your product or service. It is important to identify these individuals and understand what drives them to purchase what you’re promoting. From this, you can craft a cohesive strategy to engage this audience and encourage them to take action.
To create buyer personas, you must first identify the segment of the population that is most likely to purchase your product or service. The better you are at identifying this audience, the better you are able to target your efforts and the more likely you are to succeed. There are three main ways you can identify your target audience: through demographics, psychographics, and digital behavior.
Demographics
The first step to identifying your target audience is to review the demographics of your existing customers. If you have not yet started collecting this information, it’s time to create a database of your customers. You can use tools like Google Analytics to collect data on your website visitors and build a snapshot of your demographic. Remember to protect your customer’s privacy, as this is incredibly important. You should not share this information with any third parties, nor should you sell or give away your customer’s information to any individuals or companies.
Psychographics
The second step to identifying your target audience is to look at the personality types and interests of your customers. Since we already established the importance of privacy, it is important to keep this in mind when collecting information about your customers. You can use tools like AudienceLab to segment your target audience by interest. Remember that a good chunk of your customers are very likely to be already engaged with your brand or business, so it’s important to focus on retaining these individuals by entertaining them with valuable content and offering them relevant products.
Digital behavior
The final step to identifying your target audience is to look at the behavior of your customers when they are online. Since your customers are more likely to be online than they are offline, this is the best place to identify and engage your audience. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track the behavior of your website visitors and customers. For example, you can use the data to identify which products your customers have visited and which products they continue to visit even after the campaign ends. This information can help you determine what products your customers are interested in and what products you should create in the future. Remember to protect your customer’s privacy, as this is incredibly important. You should not share this information with any third parties, nor should you sell or give away your customer’s information to any individuals or companies.
Once you’ve collected this information and created a clear picture of who your target audience is, it’s time to put into practice what you learned. Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience’s needs and interests, you can craft valuable content that will engage and delight your audience. Don’t worry too much about coming up with unique, one-of-a-kind content. Instead, simply aim to create high-quality content that is valuable and useful to your target audience. Moreover, ensure your content is backed up by facts and data to strengthen your argument.
Step three: Plan your strategy and create a marketing message.
The final step in the process is to plan your strategy and create a marketing message. Now that you have a clear picture of your target audience and have developed some understanding of their interests and behaviors, it’s time to put this knowledge to practice. This is where you formulate a plan and create a concise message designed to engage your audience and encourage them to take action. You can use a tool like HubSpot’s Marketing Essie to easily plan and distribute your email marketing messages to be more effective.
A message designed for digital marketing purposes is often concise, easy to understand, and to the point. Your email marketing strategy should always be striving to achieve these three goals:
- Concise
- Easy to understand
- To the point
If you can keep your message concise, easy to understand, and straight to the point, you will be able to engage with your audience and encourage them to take action. Do not get side-tracked by creating complex messages that make no sense to your customers. The simpler the better!
Every business, even the largest ones, usually start out simple then as they grow they realize they need to up their game. But by then it’s usually too late and they’ve already begun to lose touch with their initial audience.
Take the time now to develop a simple, concise, and effective message for your next email campaign. To do this, you must first define what success means to you. Do you want to see more website traffic? More leads generated from the website traffic? More sales? More customers? Whatever your answer is, you must first define what it means to you. Once you have this, you can craft a concise, easy to understand, and effective message for your next email campaign.