The Basics of an Awesome Email Marketing Strategy

You need to add three important core pillars to your email marketing strategy arsenal. As you implement your email marketing strategy keep these three core pillars in mind. Keep these at the forefront of your mind, because these are the context and lens through which you should learn about email marketing.

 

3 Effective Tools for an Awesome Inbound Email Marketing Strategy

  1. The Significance of Segmentation
  2. The Power of Personalization
  3. The Impact of a Data-Driven Analysis

 

Let us talk a little more about each of these for a moment. After all, email still remains at the center of all successful marketing, sales, and customer efforts. Not to mention all the competition in the inbox has never been more challenging to get noticed.

 

1. Significance of Segmentation

Segmentation seems simple and is very important. Segmentation is the process of helping send the right customer the right message at the right time. When creating an inbound email experience and conversation, this means focusing as much on the context of your message as it is the content you deliver.

According to the DMA (Data Marketing Association), 77% of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.

When you bringing context and content together, it will help you create awesome emails. Plus, you need to make sure that they (emails) connect with your audience and don’t waste your audience time or yours.

At its core, segmentation brings two inbound concepts together. These two key concepts are buyer personas and the buyer’s journey. Knowing who your target customer is and where they are in the buyer’s journey allows you to send the right email at the right time to the right person.

buyer persona

a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data about your existing customers or market research, meaning educated speculation about your targeted costumer’s behavior, demographics, motivations, patterns, and Goals

buyer’s journey

Is the active research a buyer goes through before making a purchase. There are three stages of the buyer’s journey:

  1. The Awareness Stage
  2. The Consideration Stage
  3. The Decision Stage

 

The experiences your potential customer goes through represent each stage in that order. Now by using the information you have on your customer in one of these stages, you are able to create segments of people who want similar types of content.

Segmentation is the division of email subscribers into smaller segments based on set criteria. Typically, segmentation is used as a personalization tactic to deliver more relevant email marketing to subscribers based on their geographic location, interests, purchase history, and much more.

Segmentation shows us that context is just as valuable as content in your email marketing strategy.

 

2. The Power of Personalization

 

The next way you can add context to your email marketing campaigns is with some personalization.

Here is what Alex Williams, the Creative Director at Trendline Interactive, stated about personalization.

“New Machine Learning and data science-based features and platforms will give email marketers the ability to harness their content and data to prophesize relevant information to mass audiences in a personal way.”

With that, you now have the information you needed to have an awesome highly personalized conversation with your contacts. In order to effectively build trust with your contacts, the people on the other side of your emails, you must create a personalized conversation that engages with content your contacts are interested in.

Personalization is way more than just adding the name of your recipient in your email. You will want to create a contextualized and individual experience email.

Yes, there are a bunch of channels that will allow you to do this.

Email, however, is a channel that repeatedly continues to offer the ability to offer more creativity, experimentation, and the ability to develop a highly personalized experience at the correct time. Plus, if you are connecting your emails with the contact database, you are able to learn more about your contacts and how to personalize even more.

This kind of email is called a behavioral type of email.

Behavioral email

Is the practice of sending automated, targeted emails to the contacts in your database based on their interactions with your company across multiple channels: social media, email, your website, and beyond.

When you send a behavioral email, you are able to create an awesome personal experience for your contacts.

Now last but not least, the last of our three core pillars.

3. Impact of a Data-Driven Analysis

 

The analysis is the most important core pillar you have as an inbound email professional.

In a world of change, your customers are always changing how they live and work. The analysis will help you change with them and not leave you high and dry, left behind.

Your customers will always want a frictionless experience. By consistently analyzing your emails and having email as one of your core parts of your inbound strategy, you are able to give your customers what they need and want to continue the conversation.

With all of the information you have at your fingertips, like the behaviors of your contacts, and from all the previous interactions, you are leaving some money on the table, if you don’t consistently analyze your data.

Keep this framework in mind when implementing email marketing data-driven analysis.

Data-Driven Analysis Framework

  • Track the Metrics that Matter
  • Learn What Those Matrices Indicate About Success
  • Apply What You Have Learned to Optimize And Improve

 

You will want to track the metrics that matter first. This will be different for you than what might matter to my business, all business are different.

The second thing you will want to understand is, what exactly those metrics indicate in a successful email, to you and your business. What is moving and improving versus what’s not or slowing down?

Thirdly, always apply what you have learned so that you are optimizing and improving each email sent.

Conclusion

Use these three core pillars to help drive your email marketing strategy.

The awesome power of segmentation, the awesome power of personalization, plus the awesome impact of data-driven analysis.

Always keep these in mind as you create and develop your email marketing strategy.