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Email Marketing Strategy Tips

There are so many uncertainties when it comes to email marketing. What font should you use? Who should you campaign to? And everyone’s worst fear, will your emails be delivered as spam? Our experienced email team has compiled some tips and tricks to help kick-start your email marketing strategy.

Here are a few steps to follow when creating an email marketing campaign:

1. Determine the purpose.

There are three main purposes for any email: sales pitch, order summary, or invitation. Each purpose has a different way it must be structured, and these differences must be noted. From here, there are two subdivisions of email:

One-to-many

Typically a large list of recipients; branded design attributes and style

  1. “Read me” relies on typography and good writing (newsletters)
  2. “Buy me” relies on good images and easy use (ecommerce)
  3. “Join me” relies on clear info hierarchy and concise messaging (invitations)

One-to-one

Usually one recipient (receipts, confirmation emails, etc.); transactional; straight to the point with little design or distractions

  1. Focused
  2. Short but comprehensive
  3. Appropriate
  4. Practical

2. Get to Know Your List

As with any sort of marketing, it is imperative to know your audience. Knowing your audience can help you decide what kind of email to send: read me, buy me, join me, or transactional. Effective email campaigns require an understanding of who is on your list and how they ended up there. Information like job titles and roles and ideas of persona building are important to know in order to build emails that will resonate with the targets. It also helps to know how people typically interact with your business online. What kinds of pages do they visit? What technology do they use? How do they convert? All of these questions help to customize your campaign to fit the target, which helps the likelihood of conversion. If you are unsure of these answers or where to find them, a partner like Blayzer can help with that.

3. Design Your Emails

Knowing your audience helps with design aspects, as well. Design can be the difference that makes your email stand out from the others, but it should be kept simple. Complex designs have a tendency to break easily through rendering systems. For best viewing, emails should be kept to 600 pixels wide. Beyond technical requirements and aesthetics, there are many other considerations to take into account, such as UI/UX and psychological factors. Overall, it’s a complex process and professional help should be strongly considered. Here are some other important design aspects to consider:

Typography

Typography can make or break a campaign because it renders consistently across email providers. There are still limitations with font choices, so be aware of this and plan accordingly.

Images

Images are usually the main driver behind HTML emails, but they must be based in a website and coded in an absolute link. Image blockers are usually enabled, so don’t rely on images to tell your story and utilize alternate text.

Calls-to-Action

Calls-to-action (CTAs) may be email’s most important and/or sole purpose. They must be clear, persuasive and compelling, giving more description than a simple “click here”. Use command verbs to be clear about what the button will do. The content linked must be clear, too, and give a good reason have completed the CTA.

4. Build & Code Your Email Templates

The final step is to begin building and coding the emails. With building and coding, you used to be able to throw some tables together and call it a day. But with so many email programs being used (HTML 5 code, mobile, tablet, desktop responsiveness), better content filters, increased competition in the inbox, etc., the job has gotten more complicated and requires specialization. Despite what some companies want you to believe, it’s not as simple as just signing up, making a few choices, and pressing send. Having the tools alone isn’t enough to be an effective marketer.

5. Fill Your Campaigns With Content

On top of creating and having the right elements in your email marketing campaign, you also need to consider the content in each different email. This is a huge undertaking, but Blayzer can help you out with this. We specialize in email marketing campaigns and can work within the limitations to create a unique and effective campaign. Contact us to start building your email marketing campaign today.

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