As a small or medium business owner, freelancer or solopreneur, it can be overwhelming to think about creating an entire email marketing strategy from scratch. However, email marketing does not have to be complicated. One of the things that makes it a powerful tool is that it’s scalable and does not cost a lot of money to start or relative to other types of digital marketing.
“The basis of email marketing is sending the right message at the right time to the right person,” Dana Carr, Director of Email Marketing at Optimove, shared. Below, you’ll find a few best practices that cover these principles more in-depth.
Create a Welcome Series
Regardless of the type of business you have, anytime a customer subscribes to an email newsletter, a welcome series is a good way to get customers acquainted with your brand and what you offer.
Welcome emails are an important way to make an impact on your audience when they first become acquainted with your company.
For companies just getting started, Carr suggested, “Creating a single touch welcome message for anyone who has subscribed to your emails and including a variant of that message to anyone that has made their first purchase welcoming them and thanking them for their first purchase.”
If you want to get more specific, Carr added that welcome emails can be segmented by the following categories:
- The type of user, such as a customer or non-customer
- For non-customers: You can create a nurturing program intended to convert a new subscriber into a first-time purchaser
- For customers: You can create a re-engagement program intended to keep subscribers and purchasers back in an engagement state
- Personalized abandonment campaigns: You can also create campaigns for cart or browse abandonment, which can be sent in real time to capture your users when their attention is still on your product or service
Keep Your Marketing Plan Consistent
Consistency is important when it comes to building brand awareness and trust through email marketing. Customers need to see that you deliver on what you say you will deliver. If your website promises a $10 coupon when you sign up with your email (a common offer that many companies implement to acquire emails), it’s essential to actually deliver on that coupon. While that might seem obvious, consistent interaction is equally important. For example, if you send an email every Friday, you’ll want to make sure it’s consistent. Customers who’ve become accustomed to receiving weekly updates will notice when they don’t hear from you and inconsistency can impact brand trust.
Consider Email Cadence
Given the importance of consistency with email marketing, you’ll want to think of a cadence that is reasonable and realistic but also meets the needs of your customers.
The number of emails you send will depend on your business goals as well as your customers. “The frequency and cadence at which you email your customers should be fluid and based on individual target groups and the email engagement activity of your subscribers,” Carr said.
If you’ve ever found yourself receiving the same promotional email from a company every day, then you know that frequency and timing are essential components of getting email marketing right.
“There’s a fine line between capturing attention and being relegated to the spam folder,” Weiner shared. “For most SMBs, about three emails per month can be a nice ballpark number to be effective without overbearing. This could include one newsletter per month to foster loyalty and keep your brand top of mind, one promotional email (such as special offers and launches, and this is a great time for retargeting campaigns) and one that is more educational or thought-leadership-driven.”
Powers added that the right amount of emails you send will vary a lot depending on what is happening in your business at the time. “A direct-to-consumer brand launching a new product will likely send a lot more emails in that particular time than any other, whereas a brand using email for thought leadership might choose to choose to send a smart, innovative piece of content once a week or every other week versus lots of fluff,” Powers said.
Diversify the Types of Emails You Create and Send
It’s important to have a balance of different types of emails you’re sharing with your audience, so you are not only sharing promotions, or not only sharing one type of content that can get repetitive and alienate customers and potential customers. “Marketers who lack a healthy balance between promotional and non-promotional, or educational/content-driven messages, might overwhelm and oversaturate their targeted audiences and start to see downtrends in both engagement and conversion over time,” Carr said. “This could result in negative impacts on deliverability due to increases in spam complaints and negative engagement factors due to a lack of segmentation.”
Sending a diverse range of emails, such as educational campaigns, promotional campaigns and general newsletters, can also help you get to know your audience better and better tailor future messages. “By utilizing several formats, SMBs can not only focus on diversifying email campaigns to suit different audience segments and stages of the sales funnel but also provide crucial analytics to understand what formats work best across differing audience segments for future campaigns,” Weiner said.
