What I’ve Learned About Email Strategy

Establishing, maintaining, and advancing an email strategy for your company is no easy feat. It can be tough, but it’s not impossible when you have the right skill set, a calculated plan, and a willingness to make adjustments. The following are four things I’ve learned about email strategy that I think you can keep in mind while developing or maintaining your email strategy. 

Don’t Wing It

Sure, it’s not too tough to send an email here and there. But sending a personal email from your Gmail account is a little bit different than having a full-blown email strategy to support your company. Whether you’re using a customizable top-of-the-line email automation tool or an out-of-the-box email blast tool, you still need an email strategy in place to use email as an effective communications tool. It’s best to start by having someone on your team (or a trusted agency) to dedicate at least a large portion of their job to email strategy. Hopefully it’s someone who has worked in email automation or content development, but at the very least, someone who can dedicate time to being trained on the ins and outs of the tool and keep up with the ever-changing email marketing landscape. Having that email expert (or experts if you’re lucky!) on your team will help you develop a strategic email content calendar. They should guide you on what email benchmarks are important to email marketing, or to your specific industry. They’ll have analysis based insight on when emails should be sent, how they should be structured, and what types of calls to action are most appropriate for your audience. A calendar for all of your content is another great way to support your overall content strategy, but with email in particular, having a calculated, strategic plan to guide your email communications will help you assign resources, build appropriate content, and keep your sales team informed of when you might need their expertise as well.

There is No One Size Fits All Strategy

Every email strategy should be unique to the company that’s applying it. That doesn’t mean you have to re-invent the wheel or anything like that, but when you’re doing your initial assessments and planning for your email content, you should be learning things about your audience. Through a combination of expert insight, research, and a little bit of trial and error, you should figure out how often you should email your audience and what days seem to work better. You should also try to identify the different types of people, or personas, that make up your audience. The CEO may get different email content than your end-user. And an end-user in the technology industry might have different email needs/wants than an end-user in retail. Identify those needs and create campaigns accordingly. For example, something more technical in nature or a brand-new product or service will likely require some education spread over time, while a 20% discount will be easier to understand and probably doesn’t require as much text or total emails in the campaign. In general, my advice to people developing an email strategy or updating their existing strategy is to start with a strategy you admire and adjust it according to your business needs. That way, you’re not starting from scratch, but are also building out an email strategy that’s unique to your business’s needs and goals.

Email Shouldn’t Stand Alone

Is sending customer emails a magic cure all for boosting sales? I hate to say it, but no… Can it play a vital role in impacting your sales? If it’s done right, YES! Simply said, email alone is not enough. You’ve got to have some other content in circulation to support your email efforts if you want to be successful. If blasting people with emails was enough to convert them into buyers, we’d all be billionaires. But since that’s not the case for most people, a more realistic and holistic approach is having other content, like social media posts, blogs, brochures, videos, whitepapers, etc. to support your email efforts and vice versa. Have some related content to the subject of your email so recipients of the email can keep their research going. Have some related tweets or LinkedIn posts going out in conjunction with your emails so you’re hitting your potential customers from multiple mediums. It seems like extra work, but your email strategy can’t stop at email alone if you plan to use it as a selling tool. 

Your Strategy Will Have to Change

Even the best laid plans will need changes. There are very few perfect email strategies in circulation today, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you probably aren’t one of them (Congrats if you are—let’s chat about what’s been working for you!) You have to be prepared to ebb and flow with your customers to keep providing them with communication that is relevant to them. As a part of your email strategy, you should be doing detailed and frequent analysis of how your emails are performing and identifying areas for improvement. Your strategy should change over time as a result of your observed analysis. Don’t go overboard and swap out everything as soon as you have one email that performs poorly, but do be cognizant of trends that are occurring on a regular basis. Your email strategy is a living, breathing part of your marketing organization. Don’t be afraid to let it grow and change. When we don’t make adjustments, it’s incredibly easy to fall behind and become more noise in someone’s inbox. Make changes, “hear” what your customers/prospects are “saying” with their interactions with your communications, and adjust your strategy when your analysis points to changing needs and behaviors.

Hopefully some of the things that I’ve learned about email strategy will help you out. If you take away anything from what I’ve learned, I’d say the most important thing is being prepared to help your strategy change and grow. It’s incredibly easy to fall behind in your marketing efforts, and even easier to become noise for your customers and prospects. Take what I’ve learned and apply any piece of it to your email strategy. And feel free to share with all of us about what you’ve learned about successful email strategies too!

If you have Eloqua and you need support with email strategy or building emails, please contact us! We love helping companies transform their marketing automation.