Email marketing is the king of digital marketing, and email marketing strategy should be at the top of your digital marketing strategy list. Email marketing is how digital marketing all began in the ancient days of AOL and Lycos. You probably have some email lists that you’re using already, but not all email lists are the same—your focus should be on creating high quality lists of people who are genuinely interested in the content you can provide them.
However, you can’t just go about this blindly. Every list is different, every customer is different, and they all need to be marketed to differently. You can start this process by creating a buyer persona (read our blog post on buyer personas and download our free template), but once you have that persona and you know who you’re targeting, what’s your next move? That’s where your email marketing strategy needs to come into play.
Email marketing, like any form of marketing, needs to be planned out. You have to ask yourself a few questions:
- How many different lists do I have?
- What types of lists do I have (response lists, compiled lists, customer lists)?
- How should each list be treated differently?
- Should any of my lists be treated the same?
- How often do I want to email each list?
- What products or services are each list interested in?
- What products or services have my customer lists already purchased?
- What additional products or services might be a good fit for my customer lists?
Use these questions to begin planning any email marketing strategy you want to implement. Your main goal should be to clearly define your different audiences and then target content specifically for them and their needs.
If you haven’t already guessed, part of your email marketing strategy needs to include targeted content—content that only goes to certain lists.
Your Email Marketing Strategy Should Have Content Written Specifically for Each Audience
Let’s get this out of the way—you can’t just have one newsletter that you send to everyone. I know it’s easy. I know it’s fast. But we both know it’s not effective.
If you are sending the same content to everyone, you’re not targeting anyone, and you’re losing opportunities.
What’s worse is that you might actually be driving potential customers (or worse, existing customers) away from your business. When you send a customer content that isn’t relevant to them (for instance, emailing them about a new product when they already have that product), they might get annoyed. Do it long enough, and you might not hear from them again.
My number one piece of advice for you is to target your content, which means setting up multiple email templates and creating content that only certain lists see. It’s a lot more work, but it can pay off in the end. When your customers see that you really know who they are, and further that you care enough to send them content that is specific to them, their view of your customer service goes up a notch. And nothing differentiates a business from the rest of the competition quite like amazing customer service.
If you’re struggling to come up with a good email marketing strategy or writing content is just not your thing, give us a shout—we’ll take a look at your business and see what we can do to help you grow through awesome and email marketing strategy.
