Developing an email marketing strategy that works

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Brian Morris
Jun 06 | 10 min read
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. In fact, email averages a 122 percent return on every dollar invested — and it’s one of the most affordable weapons in your marketing arsenal. Successful marketers know it takes careful planning to stand out in a sea of spam and convert customers. Here’s how to develop an email marketing strategy that works.

What is an email marketing strategy?
Your email marketing strategy is a defined process you’ll follow to leverage email for business growth. Its steps include:

How you’ll earn email subscribers
How subscribers will be segmented
The types of emails you’ll send
How you’ll weave emails into campaigns
How you will produce email content
How you’ll measure responses as well as test and analyze results
Which software you’ll use to manage your email lists and campaigns
Your email marketing strategy details every aspect of the process, so you can develop a winning system that reliably attracts subscribers and converts them into customers.

How to develop an email marketing strategy
We’ll walk through each step of the process to develop an email marketing strategy that works for your business.

1. Earn email subscribers
Determine how you will convince your audience to subscribe to your email list. investor database Ideas include:

Sign-up forms on your website (headers, footers, sidebars and pop-ups)
Gated content (you offer an informative white paper, tool, coupon or other incentive in return for an email address)
Social media links and forms
Contests and sweepstakes (both online and off)
Existing customers (add customers to your email list when they make a purchase, online or off)
Loyalty/rewards card members
2. Segment subscribers
You also need to consider segmenting subscribers into different lists. This makes it easy to send highly targeted emails relevant to specific customers, which in turn yields better response rates.

For example, you might send one email to existing customers and another to subscribers who have not yet bought from you. That way you can promote complementary products to existing customers and continue to market your primary products to your other subscribers.

ACTION STEP: Make a list of different ways you can attract subscribers. What benefit can you offer in return for their email addresses? What will motivate your target audience to subscribe and trust you? Then, make a list of different subscriber segments you might have. To segment your list, consider where customers are in the buying cycle as well as different customer interests.